Creating content for your website takes time and effort, and you want to make sure that you always receive the best outcome. In the pursuit of seeking innovative lead generation ideas, you may have come across the term “gated content.” So, what exactly is gated content? Should you gate your content or make it freely accessible for everyone? Is it beneficial to implement this in your content marketing strategy?
In 2024, gated content remains a powerful tool for lead generation, with gated B2B content seeing a 14.3% increase, as per a report by Netline. It can be confusing to know when and what content is appropriate to be gated. So, hiring content creation services can help you build gated content that generates leads for your company.
What Is Gated Content?
To attract high traffic to your website, you have to always ensure that your content is of high-quality and provides value to your audience. However, it is not always easy to know what the audience finds useful. One such way to gauge the effectiveness of your content is to create gated content.
Gated content refers to any type of online material that is locked away within a lead capture form. In other words, for the users to gain access to the restricted resource, they have to be willing to provide basic personal information. These user forms may typically request visitor information such as name, email address, or job title. Upon entering the requested data, they gain access to the content. It is also important that you do not mistake gated content for pay walls, as they are completely free once the form is submitted.
Gated content can generate leads only if the content you offer is helpful and useful to the readers. For example, if you advertise a free trial for your service, you can measure its success by tracking the number of trial-to-paid users. Gated content helps in this scenario by generating first-party user data. As cataloging gated content for your content marketing tactics might be tricky, you can rely on content writing services to do this work for you.
Examples of Gated Content
- eBooks – Probably the most popular type of gated content, eBooks have become a standard aspect of digital marketing strategy. The accessibility, convenience, and reasonable price of eBooks are the reasons why they are valuable in gated content strategies. They are a resourceful tool, so you can use eBooks to create brand awareness. You can offer the first few pages for free, before requesting a lead capture form. This fosters trust and credibility in your service.
- Whitepapers – Whitepapers are educational, authoritative, and technical documents usually written by industry experts on a specific topic. The goal of a whitepaper is to educate and inform, and they contain data-driven insights. By offering whitepaper reports in your gated content strategy, you position yourself as a trusted expert in your field.
- Courses – To differentiate your brand from competitors, you can provide detailed, comprehensive resources such as courses or workshops. When you create free online courses for your brand, it has great potential to attract a new audience. Incorporating videos, quizzes, and other practical training sessions helps you place yourself as an experienced mentor.
- Free trials – Free trials or demos are an extremely widespread practice for many industries as they provide high lead generation. When used effectively and with caution, free trials are a terrific way to showcase the features of your service firsthand. A hands-on experience of your service should solve the pain points of your audience, so they are convinced to buy your product.
- Webinars – Webinars are a remarkable gated content strategy as they deliver interactive learning experiences for participants. The main advantage of a webinar is that you can estimate how many users to target at once and have conversions with them in real time. Webinars establish brand identity, foster personal connection and are lucrative for driving new leads.
Tips for Implementing Best Gated Content Practices in 2024
You can create effective gated content that produces the desired results by implementing the below strategic framework for your content marketing:
- Define your target group – Is your target customer model B2B or B2C? Do you have specific demographics, such as age, location, or profession, in mind? Design your buyer persona based on your business goals to create your targeted audience. By gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience, you can create gated content material judiciously for the right audience.
- Choose content and format wisely – The type, quality, and value of your content along with how it is presented to your audience play a crucial role in determining the efficacy of your gated content. The gated content format should be introduced in alignment with the buyer’s journey stage. Your gated content can be of various types, such as surveys, videos, or reports, so users are presented with the choice. User-friendly gated content of substantive value can help facilitate purchase decisions.
- Offer strong incentives – To convince your audience of your gated content’s value, you can offer user-attractive incentives such as discounts, limited offers or early access. This is useful as it captures audience attention to explore your service, and helps to build customer trust.
- Keep the form simple – As gated content may elicit user frustration by nature, you should mitigate it by keeping the lead capture form simple. The aim should be to make the user journey as easy as possible with minimal details such as name and email. You can also utilize progressive profiling to enhance your audience profile and avoid a bothersome user experience at the same time.
- Create an eye-catching landing page – The first impression is the best impression, and this is certainly true in the case of website visitors, with the average website visit time being 15 seconds. So, ensure that your website’s landing page, opt-in form, and CTAs are simple and striking with visually appealing designs.
- Conduct an A/B test – Always conduct an A/B test for your gated assets to measure the performance metrics and select the version that generates the best leads. This test helps you make informed decisions about gated content strategy and optimize your gated content webpage.
- Build a lead nurturing strategy – To assist in finalizing the user decision and thereby transform your leads into customers, set up a lead nurturing strategy. You may employ various tactics, such as personalized emails, engaging in social media marketing, sharing educational resources, or conducting webinars.
- Track your performance – No digital marketing technique is complete without analysis and the same goes for gated content as well. To determine the success of your content marketing, you have to constantly analyze and measure KPIs pertaining to gated content. Some metrics you can utilize include webpage traffic, bounce rate, form submission and abandonment rate, and conversion rate.
Establishing a brand identity and driving sales are the two main business goals for every organization. To draw your target audience’s attention and direct them through the sales funnel, you require an effective marketing strategy. Integrating gated content into your content marketing strategy can be an excellent way to increase brand visibility and generate leads. Strike the right balance between securing customer data and furnishing valuable information to solve customer pain points. This mutually beneficial transaction between your customer and company is key to building a high conversion rate and increased revenue for your business. Outsourcing to affordable digital marketing services helps to create a successful content marketing strategy for your business.
