#announcements
Important info for Customer Marketers & Community members
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Hi all! Hope everyone is having a great start to the year. We’re preparing for an integrated campaign with our demand gen team, and the topic of gated content has surfaced. I’d love to hear how others approach gated content for the customer audience. A few initial questions come to mind: • Do you have any standard rules in place for when you would or would not gate content for a customer? • If you’re not using a form, how are you measuring the effectiveness of content? ◦ Our DG team relies heavily on downloads/engagement as a success metric for content. When we promote content without a form, we run into the appearance of “not contributing” to success metrics for the content piece. Recognize this could be a larger conversation about content strategy, but interested to hear how others approach this topic!
Hey Leah! I have a few thoughts on this.. I think it depends on the goals of your campaign and the channels you are using to promote the content. For example, if you are trying to engage a different persona within your install base and build a lead list of net new contacts, gating content that resonates with those buyers is ok (especially if you have a good follow up cadence with the account owners).
I think it's always good to speak to the DG team as if they were in the shoes of the customer (would you fill out a form on a vendor piece of content that you already use) - maybe if you caught my attention on a Linkedin paid ad and I really wanted to see it but if you are promoting gated content through email I would likely bounce if I landed on a form because I wouldn't expect it if you already have my email... so channel is also important.
@Irwin Hipsman might have some ideas to help. @Shannon Howard as well.
Love to chat @Leah Miller and I am a Sprout Social customer too.
Hi @Leah Miller, we had a brilliant marketing analyst that captured a lot of data on attribution. Your website traffic depending on where they clicked on the page can also help with attribution. The gating requirements would depend on various things and is fluid. If it's a new story, we might gate it initially and then not gate it. I generally launch case studies on social and almost anyone can access it at some point without having to give us their email. We use different case studies, videos or assets to see which one performs better in different campaigns. Hope this helps. You can also DM me directly or schedule a meeting if you want to chat.
OOOh. Always love this discussion. Here are my thoughts: Don't gate content for customers. Why? Because the point of a gate is to capture contact information you already have. If you have the information, why do you need to capture it again???
Where people are going to push back is on tracking & lead attribution. There are ways around this. For example, putting content in a logged in environment where you can attribute pageviews to specific users. Or tracking link clicks as a proxy for pageviews, if customers are getting this content via email.
I think, yes, think about goals first and foremost to make a decision. But also think through the lens of the customer experience: Do I WANT to fill out form after form after form to access content? Never. At a previous company, we called this problem "Formageddon". We can do better than that, CX-wise. I find if you start from that: OK, we're not going to sacrifice the customer experience so how else might we track and attribute and measure success? you start getting actual creative thinking (instead of "This is how we're doing it in other places and it's easy so let's just do it that way.")
@Leah Miller We did some research last year on gating customer stories:
Should you gate your B2B case studies? For more and more SaaS marketers, the answer is ‘no.’ This year, 76% of survey respondents say they don’t gate any of their case studies, a sharp increase from 49% last year. Only 9% gate all of their case studies, while 15% gate some of them.
That is super helpful @Emily Amos, you rock!
Great insights! Similar to @Emily Amos in my last role, after much deliberation and analysis, we ungated everything. This coincided with a more robust case study program, so we spent more time promoting those on social and in email campaigns. For attribution, we relied more on site link stats, downloads and Vimeo data.
For case studies, I once experimented with ungated with a gated option.
Generally speaking, I think case studies should be ungated because why wouldn't you want people to be able to read about your customer's success? But I also understand where we could consider these BOFU/decision-making content, and thus want to know who's looking.
What I did for this experiment is the webpage was ungated. But if people wanted to download the PDF, they had to provide their contact info. A surprising amount of people entered their contact info to download the PDF. Might be worth a try!
Thanks all — Appreciate the validating insight.