Today, we’re going to wrap up our discussion on content strategy with an examination of a controversial topic: content delivery. There is a lot of debate going on right now in the B2B world about the merits of “gating” content, or putting it behind a form or paywall. The content experts at Movéo and Earnest have their own thoughts on the matter that they’ll share in today’s final post in our content strategy series. If you haven’t already, catch up on all the other posts here.
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PH
How do you make your content as available as possible to the audience? We have large discussions around “gated” content and the needs of content developers to use data capture forms because that allows the sales force to get intelligence. However, organizations now just have to let go of their content, let it get out there. If they’ve got the right marketing automation platforms in place they can do the tracking on the back of those and start to nurture those opportunities, but don’t ask for lots and lots of data to simply get a white paper or guide.
BD
You see too much drop off when you put those demands on people. You can get that information by providing valued content and they will want to subscribe, they will want to register for future content and gladly provide that information if you’re providing valued content. But on a per-piece basis, like you’re saying, nobody is going to want to do that; nobody wants to write down all his or her vitals just to get a white paper.
DS
That’s a really important point because companies see the opportunity to collect information from somebody who’s expressed…who’s raised their hand for instance. So you wind up with what are effectively gates. The company doesn’t think of it as a gate. They think of it as, “I’m going to get all this great information!” What the user experiences is a gate — a locked door. Speaking from personal experience, I’m a huge fan of white papers and downloading things and so forth and so on. If I’m looking at filling out six or eight fields of information, I don’t. I don’t do it. I’ll give you an email perhaps, but it wants my title, it wants the size of my organization and all these sorts of things, frequently I’ll say “no.”
CW
I will take it one step further than that. I totally agree, but I think there is an even bigger risk that no one is measuring at the moment. It is the even worse scenario of someone who does give all his or her details for that content but just isn’t ready to buy. Why that’s such a big problem is a lot of sales efforts and resources will be spent trying to get a meeting with that person who might be six months away, or the wrong person and you need a very different type of engagement. By “un-gating” a lot of things…it goes back to aligning to the buying cycle of organizations, and therefore, sales efforts can be far more directive. That’s a very blunt view of what a profiled lead is at the moment, and it’s almost universally wrong. You go out and speak to a hundred sales people and they will tell you the amount of wasted time they spend on poorly profiled leads. This is where marketing is doing itself a disservice and earning a bad reputation. If you take all those gates off and you accept that we need to give a lot more away to get something back, those will be better people.
BD
That’s a great point and, again, that shows you what content strategy can do for an organization. If you have objectives set, if you determine beforehand what the purpose of your content is — are you trying to create thought leadership? Then I want to get that valued content out to as many people as possible. If my objective is more about demand generation — trying to generate a lot of leads — then I would have different approach to that. There’s often times an assumption that it’s always lead generation that we’re trying to measure.
CW
Exactly.
BD
I’d like to thank our panel for a lively discussion around content strategy. It’s easy to see now that this is more than just a buzzword in the marketing world today and that it’s actually a necessity for most modern organizations. This is the first in a planned series, so please be on the look out for future discussions. Thanks everyone.
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