Most marketers love lead forms. Every qualified lead gets us closer to our goals, and most sales departments are clamoring for more leads. After all, what’s the point of producing high-quality content if we don’t ask for basic information from prospects in exchange for reading it?
But there’s a shift happening in inbound marketing. Major companies like Red Hat are killing their lead forms and putting their best content (even long-form content like e-books) out for anyone to access. No email address required.
I interviewed Red Hat marketing exec Jackie Yeaney last year, and she explained her rationale for un-gating this way: “You spent all this energy on this new content, so don’t you want the world to see it? Wouldn’t you rather 1,000 people see it versus 20?”
I’ve been interested in the shift away from gated content, so I went to the trenches. I found two B2B pros (one in marketing, one in sales) who made the switch to ungated content, and asked them what they’ve learned so far.
What Users Do
Timi Olotu is a copywriter and marketer at the London-based user experience testing company WhatUsersDo.
“I’ve always harbored the feeling that lead-gen forms are quite annoying,” he says. “But I didn’t think it was possible to convince a business to get rid of them.”
He got his chance at WhatUsersDo. “Because we’re a UX company, the user comes first, and we have to prioritize their experience,” he says.
He floated the idea of losing the lead forms and got the green light to test it. Any time he published a new piece of content — even content that WhatUsersDo traditionally gated, like big reports and interviews with influencers — he put it out there for free, without a lead-gen form.
He saw results fast: “I tracked traffic in analytics, and we got way more exposure than we ever would have if the content was gated,” he says. For example, when he launched a microsite for ecommerce professionals, none of the resources were gated. Because the content was accessible, Olotu shared it on GrowthHackers and saw immediate results. “It was trending for several weeks, got thousands of views and some free-trial sign-ups [the company’s main goal]. Then, a few weeks later, GrowthHackers put it in their newsletter, and we got another wave of interest,” he says.
“If we’d gated the content, we would have severely limited the people who could have benefited from the information, and the number of people who could show interest in our software. We hit the jackpot. If you don’t gate content, you can share it widely and let the quality speak for itself.”
While the reach of ungated content is well beyond that of gated content, Olotu says one of the downsides is it’s harder to track ROI. “Trying to make the connection to bottom-line revenue is tough,” he says.
In what he calls “v2” of his ungating experiment, Olotu has been looking for proactive ways to prompt people to take action — after they’ve read the content. “Instead of tricking people into giving you their email address, you give them value first. Once you’ve delivered, you can persuade them to take the next step,” such as signing up for a free trial or subscribing to the WhatUsersDo email newsletter, he says.
Flipping the lead-gen process on its head and delivering content before you ask for information “definitely improves the quality of people on the list,” he says. “It’s strictly people who have gotten a taste of what you’re offering and want more, instead of people who are projecting that they might be interested, but aren’t engaged members of your list. It’s a lot more intelligent to get the most engaged people, not just the highest number.”
Sprout Content
How do salespeople feel about ungating content? Are they shaking their heads in horror and begging for lead forms to come back? Not necessarily. I talked to Chris Hawkins, business development manager at the agency Sprout Content.
Hawkins led the move to ungate Sprout content in late 2015. He says Sprout was getting a good number of leads every month, but the vast majority weren’t qualified or didn’t fit one of Sprout’s target personas. “We didn’t want to nurture people who didn’t want to hear from us,” he says. Plus, most of his actual sales leads didn’t come through downloading gated content: “In most cases they visited seven or eight pages, and were ready to have a conversation. They were already at the bottom of the funnel.”
Most of the historical content on the Sprout site was fairly basic — what Hawkins calls “content marketing 101.” So Sprout un-gated all of that content.
The results? “I save the time I used to spend shuffling through unqualified leads,” Hawkins says. “We had better sales numbers this year [after ungating] than we did the year before. We’re not going to go back to gating.”
The Sprout team has also learned helpful lessons about what content they should create to reach their target audiences. “We’ve definitely moved toward more targeted content for the industries we go after,” he said.
His advice for others who are considering ungating: Do your research. Figure out how each piece of content is really performing. Who are your leads? Are they engaged? Are your best sales leads coming from downloads?
Then make sure your sales and marketing teams are talking. If marketers don’t know what makes a qualified lead, they won’t be able to create the content that will attract those people. Hawkins says he sits in on weekly marketing meetings. He shares what he’s hearing from prospects, and the marketing team incorporates those questions and themes into the content they create.
One of Hawkins’ points really stuck out to me: Why gate your content if the leads you’re getting aren’t even good? Un-gating seems scary, but if your current process isn’t bringing sales success, making a change is the obvious next move.