Yesterday, in this very space, my friend Ruth Stevens made the case for “gating content”–placing your best stuff behind a registration or contact form so that you mine your Web visitors for those precious e-mail addresses and hand them off to your CRM system so they can be worked as “leads.” Ruth agrees that intelligent people can disagree on this one, so I am glad that she holds out the possibility that I might be intelligent, because I definitely disagree.
It’s not that I disagree with Ruth on principle, because I honestly think this is the first time I have ever disagreed with something she’s written. No, this is just an issue that I have a history with, going all the way back to my IBM days and with several clients since.
First off, I didn’t even know this was called “gating” content, which might immediately make you think that Ruth knows more about this than I do. But it seems like a good enough name. The idea is that a B2B marketer should offer up the juiciest content only to those that “pay” for it with some contact information. So, that white paper or that case study that customers are dying to see? Show us some ID first.
When I was at IBM, some made the wrongheaded assertion that we needed to challenge people so that our competitors wouldn’t see that valuable content, but that never works because your competitors are always much more dilligent about seeing your “secrets” than your customers are. Your customers actually give up rather easily, which is the first problem with gating content. Yes, it qualifies prospects, but maybe not according to their propensity to buy–more on how much irritation and loss of privacy they will put up with to see your crown jewel content.
I have a few problems with gates:
- Your content doesn’t get found. When it is behind a gate, that content can’t be indexed by the search spiders and will never be shown in the search results. If the content is as good as you think it is, then why hide it from all that search traffic.
- Your content doesn’t get shared. Most people won’t link to content behind a gate, because it is an annoying user experience that they won’t subject their readers to. And it likewise won’t be shared in social. These are too more big sources of traffic that you are missing out on. If you miss out on enough extra traffic, you’d need to get a very high conversion rate on those leads for gating to work out to more conversions.
- Your sales force gets a lot of bum leads to run down. The most common e-mail address that was submitted on the IBM contact form was bill@microsoft.com–and he bought a lot fewer IBM products than you might think. People routinely made up an e-mail address just to get past the gate and then some schmuck in sales had to follow up and follow up until finally declaring the lead dead–a complete waste of time. The alternative, of taking down the gate and putting up a contact form for those who really want to be contacted, results in a solid set of leads that are a pleasure to pursue, and convert at much higher rates. Less time for the sales force and higher conversions–seems like a good idea.
But don’t listen to me (or Ruth). We have each given you our opinions. But opinions are like necks–everybody has one. Instead, you can easily answer this question because it is testable. If you’ve got all your content behind these gates, take a little bit of it down and watch your conversion rate. If it goes up, then take ’em all down. If not, leave things as they were. Your customers can tell you what works better if you let them. Alls I’m saying, though, is that every time I got a client to test, the walls all came down. But try it yourself and see. I only tested it three times, so that isn’t exactly overwhelming evidence. But you don’t care about overwhelming evidence. What you care about is what will work better for you. So just try it and come back here and tell us what you found it. Ruth and I are always looking to learn more.
