Content is a significant part of digital marketing that helps to boost your sales.
You can have fantastic writing skills and come up with great content.
But, if you don’t know the marketing techniques to promote or utilize the content, all your efforts will go down the drain.
To gate or not gate your content is one of the primary marketing decisions you have to make before publishing it.
Ok. But, what is gated content? Why does gating the content matter? If you’re new to marketing, you’ll probably have these questions in your mind.
In this blog, you’ll find an answer to your questions.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents:
What Is Gated Content?
Gated content is a type of premium digital content that requires users to provide information, such as their email address or other contact details, to access it.
Marketers and businesses use gated content to build their email lists and increase engagement with their target audience.
While gated content may seem like a valuable marketing strategy, it has some potential drawbacks to consider.
When you ask users to submit personal information, their trust and satisfaction may reduce, especially if they feel that you’re violating their privacy.
Additionally, gated content may not always be the most effective way to engage your target audience.
If you want to engage with your target audience, you should consider using organic methods to distribute your content and build a relationship with potential customers.
However, at the end of the day, the decision of whether or not to use gated content will come down to your specific business goals and objectives.
If you feel that gating your content will help you achieve your marketing goals, you should do so. However, if you’re unsure about the benefits of gating your content or think it can potentially damage your relationship with your target audience, it’s better to avoid using this approach.
Below, I have listed a few examples of gated content.
- A webinar that requires registration.
- A case study that users can access after subscribing to your email list.
- A product demo that requires providing contact information.
- A white paper that users can download after filling out a form.
Pros and Cons of Gated Content
Gated content is a fantastic marketing strategy. But, like everything, it has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Let’s first take a look at its pros.
- More qualified leads: When you gate your content, there’s a high chance that only interested people view the content.
- Improve your marketing efforts: With gated content, you can collect data from potential customers, which you can use to improve your marketing strategies.
- Helps in audience segmentation: Gating your content can let you know the audience group that is more interested in your products. This can help to improve your marketing efforts.
Having seen the pros of gated content, let’s now take a look at its cons.
- Limit the number of leads: Though gated content can bring more qualified leads since you’re asking for personal information, sometimes there’s a chance that you can lose potential leads.
- Users can feel frustrated at times: Many users will like to access content without going through hoops. So, this set of users can feel frustrated when you gate your content. Also, some users may leave fake personal details.
- Time-consuming: If you ask users to leave their personal information to access your content, you should ensure that it’s of exceptional quality. Creating high-quality content can be time-consuming, especially if you produce large volumes of gated content on a regular basis.
Overall, gating content can be a great way to grow your audience and generate leads — but it’s not without drawbacks. Weigh the pros and cons carefully before deciding if gating content is right for your business.
Why Do Marketers Use Gated Content?
There are many reasons why marketers use gated content. One reason is to generate leads. By requiring visitors to provide their contact information in order to access gated content, marketers can build their leads database.
Another reason for using gated content is to increase the perceived value of the content. Since visitors have to make an effort to obtain gated content, they often perceive it as being more valuable than ungated content.
Finally, you can use gated content to segment audiences. For example, if a marketer has different types of gated content for different buyer personas, they can use this information to improve their targeting.
Regardless of the specific reasons for using gated content, it’s clear that this type of content can be an effective tool for marketers looking to boost their marketing results. Let it be for lead generation, increasing conversions, or segmenting audiences — gated content has many benefits thatmake it a valuable
Should You Gate Your Content?
At first glance, gated content may seem like an unnecessary extra step in the content creation process. However, there are a number of important factors to consider when deciding whether gating your content is the right choice for your business.
One of the most important things to consider when gating your content is how it will impact your readers. Gated content can feel intrusive or off-putting to some users. So, you need to make sure that you balance this negative with any potential benefits.
Another factor to consider when gating your content is the target audience. Gating content can be a great way to reach and engage with your ideal customers. But, if you create content that’s not directly relevant or valuable to them, gating content may not be worth the effort.
Ultimately, whether or not gated content is right for your business will depend on various factors, including your goals for creating content in the first place and the needs and preferences of your audience.
Gated Content Strategies to Generate Leads
Gated content is becoming an increasingly popular way for businesses to engage with their audiences and generate leads.
There are a few different ways to gate your content, so you’ll need to decide which makes the most sense for your business.
One option is to gate all of your content, requiring visitors to fill out a form to access any of it. This can be effective. But, it can also be frustrating for visitors if they’re only interested in one piece of content and have to fill out a form to get it.
Another option is to gate only certain pieces of content, such as ebooks or whitepapers. This allows visitors to easily access other content without having to fill out a form while still enabling you to capture leads for the gated content that might be more valuable or relevant to your business.
Regardless of whether you use gated content to share valuable information, build brand awareness, or drive traffic to your website, there are a number of strategies that you can use.
1. Identify the Right Kind of Gated Content for Your Business
If you want to generate more leads, you should identify the right kind of gated content for your business. This can include ebooks, whitepapers, research reports, webinars, infographics, guides, or other types of resources that are relevant and valuable to your target audience.
Also, ensure that the design and layout of your gated content match your other brand elements.
For instance, the color and font you use in your gated content should match your website and other platforms.
2. Offer Demos
If you run a SaaS or other similar businesses, you can gate your software by offering demos. If users want to try your software, they should enter their email addresses.
Once users do so, you can let them try your software with limited features.
When you use this strategy, you get the email addresses from users, which you can use to promote the paid version of your product.
3. Conduct Webinars
Many people like the approach of webinars as it’s possible for them to directly connect with you.
Many marketers make use of this opportunity and use webinars as their gated content strategy. With webinars, you can capture the lead information from people who want to attend them.
4. Ebooks and Guides
Ebooks and guides are a good-old strategy to capture leads that still works pretty well.
You can create a high-quality ebook or guide as your gated content. If your content is of great quality, there’s a good chance for people to provide their information and download your ebook.
Conclusion
If you want to make the most of gated content and achieve real results for your business, it’s crucial to be strategic in your approach and consistently evaluate your performance.
If you put in the time and effort to implement gated content correctly, it can help to engage with your audience and drive results for your business.
If you want to generate leads using gated content, you need to ensure that your content is high-quality. Also, you should consider creating an effective lead generation strategy that includes multiple touchpoints, including email marketing and social media outreach.
With the right gated content strategies in place, you can start generating more leads and growing your business today!
