Stop pouncing on your visitors on the first date!
By way of an explanation, the widespread marketing practice of “gating” digital content is to request that people submit their contact details before making it available to them. The idea is that can follow up with prospects later and hopefully create a new lead for your product or service. It is usually a basic form with your name, company, and email on it (though I have seen others, such as event registration that go into many pages long) that when you complete you are granted access to the content you are requesting.
There are a number of key challenges with this approach:
1. Invariably, you collect a LOT of false information being entered into your form, just so the person can get to read your article/white paper/report. Let’s face it, we have all done it in the past. Yes, [email protected] – I mean you.
2. If you try it too early in the nurturing process the same thing happens on a first date. They leave without giving you their phone number. Timing is everything so don’t simply gate every marketing asset you have on the web! Lead the prospect in with free information and snippets on the subject and then gate the main goodie such as a white paper or industry insight. This will get much better results – not in numbers, but where it counts = quality.
3. You can’t measure it. Nobody knows for sure how many people go to your landing page and then immediately leave without entering their personal information – a look at Google Analytics will certainly help, especially if you set the register here button up as a goal/event.
In conclusion, don’t let marketing experts tell you that gating content is a great way to gain leads. Many people leave a web page as soon as they sniff a registration form. So nobody knows for sure how effective this tactic really is.
Tip: My take is that you will get much better results if you introduce gating further down the journey having previously hooked the prospect into the topic and convinced them you are a credible source of information. And most importantly – keep the registration form SHORT! Too many compulsory fields to complete turns people off.
Q: What’s your take on using content gating? Is it working for you as a marketing tactic?
