Understanding the difference between gated and ungated content can make the world of difference to your lead generation and conversion rates. More about that shortly, but first – what is gated and ungated content?

Gated Content

Gated content is online content and materials, included videos, white papers, eBooks and article that need the reader to complete a form before they are able to access them. It may just ask for name and email address or could be more involved, asking for company name, job title, geographical location or phone number. These forms are sometimes knows as registration walls or information gates.

Ungated Content

So, ungated content is the opposite – it is content presented to the reader on request. There could be option to sign up or provide information to receive an incentive (such as a newsletter or additional content) but the reader can access the initial content without needing to provide any information. Think YouTube videos, social media posts, blog posts.

Gated content exists as a lead generation – gaining reader information to potential prospects or leads. But, because Google doesn’t crawl content that’s gated, less people are likely to find the content in the first place. Additionally, David Meerman Scott, a content marketing expert, believes that ungated content is downloaded 20-50 times more often than gated content. He recommended providing content freely and ungated or reducing the number of fields in the forms, at the very least.

Imagine this…you have just created (or had created for you) a great video, case study or eBook and you just know that potential clients are going to love it. You upload it to your website, you build a landing page, you add a form to the landing page in order to build your list…and you wait. Here’s what you’ve really just done…you’ve reduced your potential downloads by 95-98%. By making that fantastic content gated content you just turned every 20 potential downloads into one!

To gate or ungate your content

So, what can you do to provide your amazing content AND build your lead generation list? Reduce the number of fields you require readers to fill out. A/B testing has shown that when form fields are reduced from 11 to 4, the conversion rate increased by 120%. Do you even need four?

This doesn’t mean you need to give away all your content or even have it all ungated. Perhaps let the first piece of content be completely free and unfettered. Then, at the end of that content offer more, but this time ask for an email address in order to access it.

And, here’s where it gets a little confusing…some studies have found that while the most downloads occur when content is ungated, the most conversions/contacts may come from readers that downloaded when the same content was gated.

Obviously this means that you’ll need to do some testing of your own, and determine which outcome is best for your business – the most downloads or the most new customers/clients? The most new customers/clients or the most overall sales revenue? The most awareness or the most new leads? Determining how you measure that success of your content is a powerful influence on how you should be constructing your content marketing strategy and whether to gate or ungate and which content should be either of those.

To learn more about creating, setting up and marketing both gated and ungated content just contact the Website Design Centre team today.