By Braveen Kumar

EditingHana Abaza

Writing & Research Braveen Kumar

Graphic DesignQuentin Zancanaro

TABLE OFCONTENTS

Understanding “Gate Hate”

The Pros

The Cons

What is “Premium Content”

The Gatekeeper

“Gating” the Most Out of Content

Conclusion

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Gating your premium content is frowned upon in some content marketing circles and celebrated in others. It’s a controversial content strategy with strong opinions voiced on either sides.

You need to exercise good judgement to avoid falling victim to “Gate Hate”, frustrating your audience by raising their expectations only to slap them with a form before hitting them with disappointing content.

Done right, however, you can strategically catapult your lead gen rate by leveraging your premium content. But first we need to understand what premium content is.

UNDERSTANDING“GATE HATE”

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Most content is produced with the intention of nurturing interest in your brand until members of your audience subscribe to your lead nurturing messages and eventually convert into paying customers.

But not all content is created equal. Some of your best content—your Premium Content—can be used to boost your lead generation rate and secure new contacts for your funnel when you put it behind a gate.

WHAT IS “PREMIUM” CONTENT?

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Content formats that are commonly gated include:

eBooks: Visual eBooks containing valuable how-to knowledge (in a well-designed package) can help you generate top-of-the-funnel leads.

Whitepapers: Research-based Whitepapers have a reputation for being informative and offering exclusive information, which makes them compelling pieces to gate.

Webinars: It might seem counter-intuitive to gate a case study, since they pertain to a specific company or instance, but case studies reveal the intent and existing problems of those who visit them, providing more telling insight into the leads that convert on them. You can also use a gate to protect sensitive information that you might not want to be publicly available.

Content with value: Gate content that has irresistible value to your audience. If it can (actually) help them solve a problem that they’re having, or if it provides information in a manner that other sources don’t, you can potentially gate it.

“ YouTility is marketing that is so useful that people would pay for it.

-Jay Baer,Marketing speaker & Coach

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The obvious benefit of gating content is a better lead gen rate because your audience is required to give you their information before they can consume your content instead of the other way around.

But other benefits include:

Better insights: When a lead is willing to “pay” for a piece of content, you can accurately assume that they have a vested interest in that specific topic or issue. Greater perceived value: We naturally assume that gated content is more valuable than its public counterpart.

Pre-qualified leads: Gated content lets you build better lists, since opt-in forms acts as a filter for bad leads. Exclusivity: If your content communicates unique information or provides specific details about your company, you can gate your content to prevent that information from being scraped or stolen.

Adaptability: You can measure the performance and adjust the headline, copy, offer, CTAs, and more accordingly to achieve better results.

THE PROS

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When you’re looking to grow your database of contacts, ‘charging’ for content is the best way to get started at lead scoring. It also allows you to understand what kind of resources each lead is interested in.

The content purists will tell you not to gate any top of the funnel content. I say gate content if it has value.

-Francois Mathieu, Inbound Marketing Manager at Uberflip

-Jason Miller,Sr. Manager of Content at Linkedin

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THE CONS

Gating your content will inevitably sacrifice brand awareness in favor of lead generation.

But on top of that, you’ll want to consider the following pitfalls:

Fewer impressions: Your content will receive less traffic behind a gate.

Higher expectations: Greater perceived value means that you will lose your audience’s trust if you underdeliver.

Weakened virality: Audiences are less inclined to share gated content. It does happen, but public content has a greater chance of going viral. SEO often suffers too.

Potentially offensive: Many people feel uncomfortable giving out their information (because they risk being bombarded with spam emails), and gating content runs the risk of turning these people off.

Requires existing trust: Without pre-existing authority, which you build by publishing free ungated content, you won’t be able to leverage gated content to its full potential.

Needs a significant audience: Since fewer people will see your content, you need to compensate by bringing a larger volume of traffic to your content.

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“ Would you rather have 2,000 potential customers read your content or 20,000?

-Joe Pulizzi,Founder of Content Marketing Institute

A white paper or eBook will be downloaded 20 times and up to 50 times more without a gate in front of it

-David Meerman Scott, Online Marketing Strategist and Speaker

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When you gate a piece of content, not only must the content have value, the gate itself needs to make a compelling first impression that communicates that value without overwhelming your visitors.

In most cases, the gatekeeper is a Landing Page or a CTA Overlay Form. However, both use different means to generate leads.

THE GATEKEEPER

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TRADITIONAL LANDING PAGE CTA OVERLAY

Generates appeal with compelling headline and persuasive copy

More visual and can feature a variety of elements

Effective when all elements contribute to a specific conversion goal outlined in the CTA

Can be tested, optimized, and improved

Teases your audience with content that’s “just within reach”

Can be set to strategically pop up when visitors are already invested in your content

Skips the automated email between filling out the form and accessing the content

LANDING PAGE

OVERLAY FORM

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Whichever Gatekeeper you choose, you need to consider the form fields you’re going to provide your audience—in other words, the information you’re going to ask for. Every form field adds another obstacle for your audience to become a lead, so only ask for what you need.

At the very least, ask for a First Name, Last Name, and Email. But details like their Company, Job Title, Company Size, or the Software/Services they use (depending on how you plan to nurture these leads), can give your Sales team and email marketing more insights to work with.

One way to get the best of both worlds with gated content is to use a multi-content campaign or the Content Pillar approach. You can treat your premium content as the cornerstone of a campaign, creating publicly available spin-off content that can increase brand awareness and generate leads by directing traffic to your gated content.

By creating several smaller pieces of content from your premium content, you can essentially close one gate and open a few more.

“GATING” THE MOST OUT OF CONTENT

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Create quality content about a topic that qualifies your audience.e.g. We host a webinar about business blogging because we want to

generate leads who are invested in content marketing.

Apply a landing page or overlay CTA to gate the Premium Content.e.g. We use a landing page to generate registrants for our webinar.

Promote the premium content to reach a large and relevant audience.e.g. We use email, social media, and sometimes paid promotion to

drive traffic and increase the number of registrants for our webinar.

Create spin-off content from your premium offer.e.g. Aside from promotional tweets and emails, we often write a blog

post to promote the webinar. After the event, we post the webinar

slides on SlideShare with a CTA to check out the on-demand version

of the webinar. This webinar is then gated with an Overlay CTA.

Here’s how we do it here at Uberflip, using our webinar Blogging in the Age of Modern Marketing as an example:

STEP 1

STEP 2

STEP 3

STEP 4

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By approaching content gating like this, not only do we reap the lead generation benefits of gated premium content, but we can also serve our brand awareness goals with smaller pieces of publicly available content.

CONCLUSION

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DO gate content if it’s high quality, your online presence is well-established and your audience trusts your brand (or at least compensate for a small audience with a killer gatekeeper and by putting extra effort into promotion).

DON’T gate content if your audience is small, your content isn’t significant enough, and especially if you don’t have a lead nurturing strategy in place to make use of those leads (but this should go without saying).

At the end of the day, always test to see what works for your content and your business. The same strategies won’t work for everyone.

Generosity is the foundation of content marketing; content marketers need to give away content in order to serve their long-term content marketing goals. But it’s smart to leverage your premium content once in a while to speed up the results. After all, when content gating is done right, it’s merely an exchange of information between you and your audience.

You just need to ensure you provide them with the kind of value that makes it a worthwhile trade.

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