Gated or Ungated?

Justin Rowe, CMO at Impactable, a B2B LinkedIn Ad Agency, on being brave in your marketing approach.

We had about 500 people take a look at our ebook slash playbook in the past week..... ungated, and no emails collected.

So how does that help drive revenue???

Easy. Our plan is to share our expertise with our target market.

I did not want to collect emails and pester them with some nurturing drip.

Inside the playbook, we did have links to a LinkedIn slack-community they could join. Free.

Also, links to our website with transparent pricing.

And links to our YouTube channel, which is another great free resource.

Just endless ungated content and sharing our expertize.

And guess what happened? Those who have a need, and who now view us as “THE” experts in the LinkedIn Add space, figured out where our call booking links were!

Crazy right?

I didn’t have to send them an email to hand deliver them a call booking link. These people were smart enough to just find it.

I mean, it kind of makes sense, right?

They are smart enough to know they need LinkedIn ads and wanted to educate themselves further with our playbook.

And then, when they realized they didn’t actually want to do it themselves or that their current plan would take some work to pivot, they figured out how to talk to us.

It’s a brave new world out here.

What about you?

Are you brave enough to give it a try?

Lauren Lang, a B2B SaaS brand and content marketing strategist and Senior Content Marketing Manager at Constructor, on the flaws of marketing as a tactical commodity instead of a strategic cornerstone.

Show of hands. Who here loves collecting crappy leads?

It’s easy to castigate other marketers for obsessing over attribution and lead numbers, but that obsession isn’t innate.

It’s impressed upon us by the same 20yo lead gen playbooks.

It’s impressed upon us, by B2B marketing culture, which thinks click-attribution software and crop dusting the internet with forms, can replace the hard work and dedicated resources of building and positioning a brand.

It’s impressed upon us by boardroom lead quotas, which defeat their purpose by lowering lead quality and gumming up the pipeline.

Bad marketing practices are bad, but they’re not the problem in isolation. They’re merely a symptom of a broken system that views marketing as a tactical commodity instead of a strategic cornerstone.

Ungate Your Content!!! B2B-marketing LinkedIn, howls at each other.

But until marketers can gain trust and buy-in, to think strategically as well as tactically, in years as well as days, and in brand identity as well as campaign performance…

Until they can win their way into the rooms where core business strategy happens…

And until they can win decision-making hearts and minds when it comes to redefining what marketing is all about in the first place, the stuff that actually made us excited to go into the field…

Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we “actually” have a choice.

Are you looking at your marketing as a tactical commodity or a strategic cornerstone?

And have you managed to move your marketing beyond collecting bad leads?

Matt Cross, Content-fueled growth marketing @ Knotch, shares his in-your-face bottom lines, on the gated or ungated content dilemma.

Most marketers have never called an MQL.

I’ve called “thousands”…

This is what they say…

I was just doing research.

I haven’t looked at it yet.

Who are you again?

This is my personal cell phone. Don’t call it.

This is the problem with gated content.

You may have generated a lead but they aren’t really a lead because they don’t want to interact with your company yet.

A few other things it causes are things such as…

Negative brand perception,

Limited content consumption,

It also generates low intent leads and,

Hurts your SEO efforts.

Ungated content ushers the audience through a frictionless buying journey.

When they arrive at gated content or a conversion action, it has more value and the viewer is truly ready to take the next step.

Isn’t this what we all really want?

And that was Matt Cross with the bottom line.

Thomas Igou, Head of Content @ Get Accept & Host of The Sales Ladder podcast, explains why gated content gains more traction.

This was inspired by a comment from Mikhail Myzgin…

Can we really simplify the whole argument of gated vs ungated content to…

Gated is to collect contact info.

Ungated is to spread a message.

I personally, am more on the ungated side of things, though I definitely have crossed over to the “dark side” a few times.

But, I feel it’s too simplistic to reduce it to these two arguments.

If spreading your message is number one, is ungated content even the most obvious choice?

It’s sadly clear that marketing teams are pretty bad at distributing, and/or repurposing content.

If you have an ungated piece of content, reality is, you’ll spend less time distributing it.

You’ll publish it on your blog, add it once in your newsletter, and then might do a LinkedIn post and then move on.

Gated pieces of content get a lot more push because there is indeed often the goal of collecting leads. You’ll post about it on social regularly, will put paid ads behind it, contact influencers and other third parties to redistribute it for you. Probably get sales to add a hyperlinked banner in their email signature.

It will simply get a lot more traction.

So in the end, your message or the value prop of the piece will actually get much more traffic from a gated piece than an ungated one.

Are you pushing your gated content harder, or do you put the same effort behind your ungated content?

Matt Sterbenz @ Tourial, on why the “carrot at the end of the stick" method isn’t working.

Every tech marketer wants to increase Brand Awareness & Revenue Growth.

Tech marketers have a lot of options to prioritize what they want to improve in the funnel, but the default seems to typically come down to more traffic by any means necessary.

The Rationale?

Increase Ad Spend and blast out more emails. This leads to increased Brand Awareness, which in turn increases website visitors, and finally increases lead captures, demo requests, & ultimately revenue...

But why such intense focus on “Quantity” over "Quality”?

At the end of the day, the goal is to get more of your ICP’s talking to sales, & ultimately buy your product, right??

After a prospect first registers your SaaS solution even exists, there are steps in their buying journey that “NEED” to happen before they decide to dip their toe in the water any deeper by booking a demo or filling out a lead form.

Your prospect needs to quickly gauge if exploring your solution is worth spending even 20 seconds more of their time.

In order for this to happen, they need to understand…

What is your solution?

Why this solution, for me?

How does your solution work?

If they see your ads, cold emails, or even visit your site seeking to answer the questions above only to be met with buzz phrases, tag lines, or the infamous “Book a demo CTA”, what justifies any further exploration?

B2B buyers want to self-educate. 

I mean, you can understand, right??

Given the choice, who wants to block time out of their day to meet with a salesperson before seeing the basic look and feel of what they are getting into? 

There are more & more SaaS-orgs popping up every day.

Differentiation & self-service buyer engagement have never been more important.

The old “carrot at the end of the stick” is becoming pitifully ineffective in driving organic growth through conversions in Tech, as better alternatives such as Tourial now exist.

And that was Matt Sterbenz’s thoughts, on ungating your content.

Fran Langham, Head of Demand Generation @ Cognism with The LinkedIn ads she places her bets on and what “ungating" content has to do with it.

When launching into a new business segment, testing is the name of the game. But, it’s easy to stick with what’s comfortable when you have a new revenue target on your head. Right?

I encouraged my new team to "stick with what we know". Run our best content in a static ad format, add a lead-gen form and get sales to follow up on these leads ASAP.

By the end of the first quarter, we had more content leads than we had SDRs to call them, but that all-important revenue number was looking bleak.

Why?

We were focusing too much of our marketing-spend on leads that convert at a much lower rate down the funnel. 85 to 90% of content downloads = cold outreach.

So we made the shift to focus on providing value for our audience and ungating more of our content, whilst testing new add formats.

The results?

We hit 109% of our revenue target in January.

So here are my top tips on how to approach your ads on LinkedIn.

Run BOFU ads that don’t force your audience towards a demo form they have no intention of completing. Just because someone has engaged with your customer testimonial ad or product video, doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. Provide engaging video content for your audience in-feed, or link to additional content that further educates your buyer.

MOFU and BOFU ads should be served to all of your ICPs. The buying cycle is not linear. Be there when your audience is ready to buy, not when you think they should be buying.

Your product “isn’t” top secret.

So why get a prospect to jump through hoops to view it?

Run ROI-focused ads that direct your users to ungated product tours. This reduces friction, and buyers are usually 60% of their way through their research before contacting you, anyway.

Launch video snippets of your best webinars, interviews, and podcasts. As mentioned earlier, the key here is to optimize for in-feed views.

Be where your audience is, and provide value from the get-go. Sending someone an email and a link to your latest 40-minute webinar won’t get your message heard.

Be more human...

This is number 1 for me. When creating ads on LinkedIn, be honest. Don’t use "Learn more CTAs" that trick your audience into clicking through to a direct demo form, as there’s a 99.9% chance it won’t get completed.

And.

Is that “really” what you want to be remembered for?

Thank you Fran.

And you?

What will you be remembered for?

Kelvin Claveria, Marketing @ Rival Technologies is of the opinion that gating or ungating is not that “cut and dry," or “black and white”.

To gate or not to gate...

That is the question.

While some marketers and thought leaders see this as a black-and-white issue, the right answer is in fact this…

It depends.

Should you let prospects educate themselves without hassling them for their email every time they want some info?

Absolutely.

But, sometimes having people’s info lets you provide them more value by making sure they receive appropriate follow-up communications like reminders about webinars they signed up for.

Also, to provide them with the most relevant content or new related content or connecting them to the right people from your team.

This is mostly applicable to high-intent forms like demo requests.

Like most things in B2B marketing, the right answer depends on…

Your customers, and how they consume content.

Your Martech stack. If you’re lucky enough to afford a solution like Clearbit, then go ahead and ungate everything.

The robustness of your current systems and processes. Younger companies with rudimentary systems for data enhancement and lead scoring probably can’t afford to ungate everything.

... And some other factors I probably haven’t thought of.

So, yeah, it depends. For most companies, you probably need a mix of both. Nothing wrong with gating some high-value assets as long as there’s enough value in the content.

In the end, the crucial question you need to answer is, what makes sense for “your” customers given the realities of your marketing organization and “your” business?

Thank you Kelvin, for pointing out the gray areas in the world of gating.

Sam Kuehnle, VP of Demand Generation @ Refine Labs, with some real data, on “gated versus ungated".

Hot take.

If your company gates content, plus you’re also hyper-focused on CPC and CTR metrics, you’re contradicting yourself.

You obsess over getting someone to your site as efficiently as possible, but then ignore the fact that more than 99% bounce.

Too many marketers and leaders overemphasize ad platform efficiency, decreasing CPCs and increasing CTRs, and assume the rest will take care of itself.

But isn’t the purpose of content to be “CONSUMED”?

If the 99.8% bounce rate isn’t enough for you, here’s “real data” from a test I ran between gated and ungated content.

Same audience. Same creative. Same budget. Same everything, except for the landing page the ad drove to.

The result?

Same CTRs, Same CPCs, but HIGHLY different consumption of content.

Just how different?

Gated version, average time on page… 26 seconds.

AKA - enough time to read the overview and see the form.

Ungated version average time on page… 3 minutes and 35 seconds.

AKA -  enough time to read all of the content.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

You spend all of your time, energy, and budget getting someone to come to your page. After all, “success” is getting 1 out of 200 people, or 0.5% to click.

After all that work, isn’t it a waste if they simply bounce after they hit the page?

They don’t consume the content.

They don’t create a relationship with your brand.

They don’t learn anything.

We’ve been trained on what happens when we give up our email or phone number on a B2B form.

The deluge of “I hope you appreciate my professional persistence," calls and emails.

So we simply bounce off the site if we’re not able to consume what was promised by the ad. 

Getting a click is “not” an indicator of future success to come.

Building trust, educating your ICP and creating relationships with them.

Those are.

That was Sam, on the true indicators of future success

Hey!
My name is Tal Florentin and I’m the founder of Summurai.
I’d like to thank you for listening to our playlist. This is a new format and we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Let’s get back to our main question – Gated or ungated content?
When we started curating this playlist for you, we thought there was actually a real dilemma.
But listening to this list of Summies makes it clear:
there seems to be a consensus among professionals around the belief that the days of gating content are over.
It’s time to set your content free.

But, let’s take it even one step further.
Why stop at making it easier to access your awesome content? Let’s also make it easier to consume your awesome content!
Let’s take the content that you already have and turn it into branded audio playlists such as this one you are playing right now.
We invite you to repurpose your white papers, eBooks and blog posts into audio bites, curate thought leader voices and start making some noise.

It’s time to put your audience first and bring something new to content marketing.
If this sounds like a plan, we’d love to help you get there.

In the meantime, just go ahead and #SetYourContentFree.