Alex is with me in the studio again, and we're going to talk today about gated content.
The idea is that you kind of use your content as the carrot to lure people into giving you their details so that you can market to them or.
Bombard them with emails that they don't want.
Right. It might seem like we have a bias coming into this episode. I think before we kind of delve into why we hate it, though, it might be worth talking about why people do it and why, to be honest, for the past five, ten years, it's been the kind of go to tactic, especially, I think, in B2B or business to business marketing.
If you want to try and get somebody's contact details in order to potentially market to them, one of the techniques is to get your content. I think it's been a technique that is perceived as being a great way or an easy way of gathering email addresses and then building lists and then marketing to those lists. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, Alex is with me in the studio again and we're going to talk today about gated content. Alex, tell everybody what gated content is.
How did I know that was coming. Gated content is content that you gate by. Oh for Christ's sake. Seriously we need the buzzer from um key don't we? When you say something too obvious. No, it's when you. It's when you, uh, demand somebody's details before you give them your content. Right. So, uh, white paper, a PDF, something like that. Um, people.
Say that all the time. Oh, yes. You know, content, white papers, this, that, and the other. What is a white paper?
It's paper that's white. Come on. Dave.
Is it a thought provoking piece of content? It is put into a PDF and it's about a specific subject. And it's it's it's an authoritative, almost journal like piece of content.
You got to have some graphs and some tables and.
Graphs, tables.
Citations, all the good stuff.
It's just it comes up a lot, doesn't it? When you when people talk about cameras putting a hand up across the other side of the office. Come on, Caron, tell us what you think a white paper is. Come and tell us. Get right up close to the microphone and tell everybody. Alex is just pulled the microphone. The microphone off the desk. Right. Go for it. Now, just into the microphone.
Everything you said. But it is not a definitive, uh, sort of proposition. It's offering your philosophy on a particular subject, what you think about it. So that's why parliaments use it as a, as a means to, uh, offer up the reason behind a piece of legislation before that legislation is passed.
Anybody still awake?
I mean.
Thanks Caron.
Ahaha.
OK. Anyway. Anyway, white papers might be behind a gate, and Alex is explaining what we mean by gated content.
Yeah. So you demand somebody details before you'll let them download or demand. I think it's a demand. I think it's a demand. Yeah. Yeah. You want this guide. Put your email address in. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen that exact call to action on somebody's website before they can they can be pretty aggressive sometimes. Um, but yeah, I mean, the idea is that you kind of use your content as the carrot to lure people into giving you their details so that you can market to them or.
Bombard them with emails that they don't.
Want. Right. It might seem like we have a bias going into this episode. I'm not sure.
When was the last time you gave somebody your details in order to get a piece of content from them?
Uh, actually, to be perfectly honest, I did it earlier today because I was writing an article about planning consultancy, which I know nothing about, and I saw a definitive guide to planning consultancy, and I thought, I'll have that. And I filled in my email address.
Okay. Just on that subject of filling in your email address, the new operating system that's that Apple have just brought out, I think it's, um, what have they called it? Monterey on, on the laptops and iOS fifteen or whatever it is. Um, I don't know if they've brought it out right now or they're about to, but you'll be able to create email addresses on the fly that are like use and lose or use, use and throw away.
Yeah.
You basically use it once in order to get a piece of content or to fill in, or to do something where an email address is being demanded. And then once you've got that thing.
Just.
You can just bin it. Yeah. So, you know, you're right. Our bias is that we're not sure about gated content anymore. Um, and there are lots of good reasons for that. And not least of which this kind of throwaway email type approach.
Yeah. I think before we kind of delve into why we hate it, though, it might be worth talking about why people do it and why. To be honest, for what the past Five, ten years. It's been the kind of go to tactic, especially, I think, in B2B or business to business marketing. And people have been doing this kind of successfully for years, haven't they? Kind of putting their content behind a paywall is.
That received wisdom that it's been a good way, a successful way of generating new business?
Well. Well, Dave, he says, googling frantically. Um, no, I mean, there are stats that show that. So eighty percent of B2B content assets, assets being the PDFs and white papers and reports that we talked about before are currently gated. So whether or not it's been successful, people certainly been doing it for years. And I'm assuming, you know, have generated a fair amount of new leads with it.
Do you think people have been doing it because they could do it?
Yeah, I mean, personally.
Because it was effective. I mean.
Yeah, I think it's it's tempting, isn't it? It's like, you know, you've put all this time and effort into writing this kind of big PDF, this big chunky book or whatever, and you think, you know, I'm going to get something back for this. I'm not just going to give it away to you for free. I can use this to to get some useful marketing data. I can see the temptation.
So just to reiterate, clarify if you want to try and get somebody's contact details in order to potentially market to them. One of the techniques that's been popular over the last five or ten years, as Alex said, is to get your content, put it behind a gate so somebody is required to put in their name and email address, sometimes just the email address. And once they do that, they get taken to another place, another web page where they can download, or sometimes they get sent a link to make sure the email address is real.
Yeah.
And then they click a link. And when you click the link, you get that piece of content. So doing it that way, which is quite common, the people are fairly sure that it's a real email address and it won't get around this problem with the Apple stuff. No, it won't get around that. Although in the previous podcast, we talked about HubSpot and one of the things HubSpot does with forms, and it's literally just a checkbox, is you can specify when you create a form to go on your website that you do not want to accept any submissions from a list of generics like gmail, yahoo, those kind of email accounts. And the list is massive.
The idea being then I guess that you'd only get people kind of signing up with their business accounts. Yeah.
That's right.
Um, yeah, I mean, I think that that again, seems like quite an aggressive tactic to me. Um, I guess it makes sense though, doesn't it? I mean, if you want to make sure that the people signing up to your people that you can kind of market to in the future, then yeah. Um, I do think though, that the whole kind of approach of, of gating content does kind of fly in the face of the kind of core philosophy, I guess, of modern digital marketing, right? Which is be helpful, I guess.
Mhm.
What about one of the major issues with content that's gated who can't see gated content?
Well, anybody that doesn't want to sign up to it. I feel like you're leading me to a precipice just to push me over. Uh. People without email addresses.
Things that are not people.
Uh. Search engines. Yeah.
Okay. Julie.
Julie, silently whispering the answer in my ear like.
This isn't a test. I just, I just like teasing you.
Um, yeah. No, I mean, that's true, isn't it? If you, I guess if you get your content, then Google and other search engines won't be able to access it. You can't rank because of it. Um, you're less likely to get backlinks to it. Um, I guess there are quite a few disadvantages really when you think about it.
But sticking with the advantages for now, the reason that people do it. Um, I think you're right. I think it's been a technique that is perceived as being a great way or an easy way of attracting, of, of gathering, not attracting, gathering email addresses or, and then building lists and then marketing to those lists. Because email marketing is still apparently very effective. We get all the stats, tell us it's still very effective.
Yeah.
Um, so, you know, without a list, you can't do email marketing. And that's one way of building your list.
Yeah.
And without triggering the kind of key buzzer, that whole idea of nurturing people of kind of slowly drip feeding them content that's interesting to them and useful. That whole thing kind of evolved around the idea of gated content, right? You kind of have to have a, a way, in a way to access people's email inbox in order to start nurturing them and turning them into a customer. Um, but all of that starts to sound a little bit creepy when you say it out loud.
Yeah. Well, a lot.
Of marketing, I think we're going to do a podcast about how creepy marketing has become because it really has. And it's interesting to see the big companies pushing back. I mean, obviously Apple, possibly Microsoft might follow suit, but Apple certainly pushing back against, uh, Facebook et al.
Yeah. Tracking. Yeah. All that stuff.
It's it's really quite interesting. Um, okay. So we can see why people do it. Um, is there anything else on the up side, the positive side of gated content before we take a look at why it might not be such a good thing to do?
Um, only that I guess in the sense that it's definitive. It allows you to measure, um, how many people want a given piece of content, how popular a given piece of content is? Um, you can kind of collect hard and fast facts on how many people are willing to part with personal information to download something, which might tell you something about how important that information is to people or what kind of information people like. We, for example, I mean, I don't think we really get any of them anymore, but we have a load of different ebooks that you can download from our website. And by looking at the books that are kind of most popular, we get some understanding of what what kind of information people are lacking. So it's useful marketing intelligence in general, I guess.
We've been going through a process, I think, uh, and I'll see if I get nodded out by Julie, where we've been getting things we've been trying to get. We haven't done it yet, apparently. Okay, so we're talking.
By the time this podcast goes live, Dave.
Will have.
Frantically, um, maybe. Yeah.
Maybe. Maybe. Um, yeah. So we're broadly, I think, as you've probably picked up, if you're listening to this, not really in favor of gated content, but we are still doing it ourselves. It would it be fair to say, I don't know how successful it's been for us, to be honest, I'm not really sure. I think I should know the answer to that question, but I don't.
I think this is one of the key problems with it though, isn't it? Because, you know, yes, occasionally people will sign up for our content. People will kind of give us their information to download something. And that's fine. That's all good. And well, it's easy to look at that and say, oh look, it's successful, it works. But what we don't know is how many hundreds of other people would have potentially downloaded it if we hadn't demanded their personal information.
Certainly there's one of the guides that we produce, which was a C suite guide to SEO. We made that ungated. We made sure that people could just grab that. And I think if we look in the back end of HubSpot, where we where we store it, it's been grabbed more than any of the others, which suggests that, yeah, a lot of the stuff we were putting out there in gating wasn't the sort of content that people really gave a toss about, so they weren't going to give us the details in order to grab.
It.
Or just that the barrier is too high. Because I think it's easy, especially when we're kind of in that bubble of marketing and you're kind of hearing all this hype about how many leads people generate by gating their content and all that kind of thing, to forget that actually, for kind of the general public, giving away your personal information is quite a big ask. You know, even if something's really useful, nobody wants to be bombarded with another set of kind of nurturing emails or whatever. You know, it's, it's getting harder and harder to persuade people that that's actually a valuable proposition, I think.
One thing I would say, and I do think gated content has got got a role to play, but I would I don't know, I'm just making this up as I go along a little bit. But I would.
Say like, almost.
Like extreme gated content. And by that, by that, I mean, if companies have got information that are often referred to as the crown jewels, so they will share it with people, but they really want to be very selective who they share it with. So in those situations, a company might say, look, we've got this information. Um, and if you if you want it, tell us who you are. When we receive your information, we'll look at it. And if we're happy to give you it, we'll contact you on a one to one basis and say, here is that content that you've asked for? And they will actually vet every request as opposed to the normal gating, which is give us your name, give us your email address, crash, bang, wallop. There's a page, download it.
Yeah.
This is like automated versus non-automated gating, I guess, isn't it? Somebody actually got to sit there and look through it. And I think you mainly see that kind of thing. I'd be right in saying when it's like kind of market research or something, that's cost somebody a lot of money to produce, and they're then trying to do something to make sure that it isn't just kind of like freely disseminated. And I think that is fair enough.
Something of real value.
Yes.
Right. Which takes us neatly on.
To.
What I think is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they get content is they get content that absolutely shouldn't be gated. I mean, before we jumped on the podcast today, I think Julie mentioned. Or it might have been yourself, like, how about people who get like their brochure? Like we'll give you our, we'll, you know, download our brochure of products or services, but tell us who you are first. Why would you do that?
Yeah, I mean, it's this whole idea, isn't it, that you can kind of just like put anything behind a barrier that says, give me your personal details and use it to kind of elicit, elicit people's kind of personal information. But yeah, you do actually have to be offering something of real value. I don't think it can be something that people could find elsewhere for free. Otherwise, what on earth is the point in it? But yeah, I think that's one of the most kind of irritating and obnoxious trends, certainly in B2B marketing, isn't it? It's just shoving everything behind a gate like catalogues, brochures, anything. Price lists.
Yeah. But can you imagine the conversations that are probably going on, uh, in meetings, you know, marketing teams meeting, you know, they've got this new tool which allows them, you know, without the geeks getting involved to get content. So suddenly that's it. We're going to get everything, everything. Just get it all, get it. And then they'll get all this great data in, and then we can market to people. And it's back to that, you know, it's back to the Rumsfeld thing, isn't it? It's like there are things that we know, we don't know, and things that we don't know, that we don't know. It's kind of it's back to that, like, well, you know, for every and this came up in a, was it Kieran and I can't remember the podcast, the digital marketing podcast by the guys at target. I'm going to do a podcast, by the way, about some of the podcasts that we listen to, just to share them with other people. I'm going to do that quite soon. Um, I remember Kieran talking about it and he, because he's a bit skeptical, at least I think that came across as he was a bit skeptical and it really resonated with me. It's like all very well saying that, you know, you get to the content and you've got all these contact details, but what did you miss? How many how many people went?
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. When was the last time you read an article from The Times, for example, online?
That's a really good example. I mean, I think they're doing the right thing, I hasten to add. I absolutely think they're doing the right thing because good journalism isn't free and it shouldn't be free. You know, they've got to make money somehow.
But I also think it's fair to say that the barrier of kind of pay walling all of their articles has meant that a lot of members of the public just say, May, I can get this elsewhere for less. And, you know, the unfortunate truth is, you know, by taking a stand and saying, we're going to demand that people pay for this, they've actually found everybody's gone kind of elsewhere. Really?
Do you think? I don't know? I don't know how successful.
I'm sure somebody will pop up and tell us how wrong we are.
But I think the times, I think maybe the times are doing quite well. I'm assuming, I mean, and if you juxtapose that with, for example, go to the um well, certainly, you know, the independent website, if you honestly, the adverts that you are bombarded with when you're trying to read a piece of content makes it just about unusable. I mean, it is absolutely appalling.
And the content itself is drivel too, but, uh.
Probably probably is. Yeah, I think the Guardian do the same. I think they pretty much because they, you know, they, they don't, they've made a decision.
They just nag you, don't they.
They nag you to give them a donation, which is fair enough. I mean, they're saying, look, here it is. But this stuff isn't produced out of thin air. We could do with some help and, you know, want to give us some money and, you know, like, I'm sure that, you know, some people, we've got one customer who does that actually, we've got a customer who basically puts a thing on his website to say, look, it takes a lot of time and effort to produce this content. It's for a very niche sports market. Um, and it sounded really suspicious that it's sailing.
Okay. It's sailing.
Uh, and he quite often will put a pop up on his website, which is like, you know, this stuff costs money to produce. We'd appreciate a donation. And we've certainly it works. Okay. I mean, he's not going to retire on the money that comes in, but it helps, you know, keep the wolf from the door. And at this point, I'm just going to say we've just gone way off, way off base here. And we were supposed to be talking about gated content. You're right to bring that up though. I think that's and that's an example of gated content paywall content that people can identify with if they're not quite understanding. I think the penny will have dropped with that point you made. It was an excellent way of communicating that, I think.
And also, I think, you know, just just to go back to the point.
Finally episode twenty six or whatever it is, and you say something.
Useful. Oh, there we go. Yeah. I was just about to say something nice about you, but I just, um. No. Back to the point you were making, I guess, in the beginning, which is that you do potentially lose a lot of visitors, a lot of traffic by doing this, we're guessing.
But I say, yeah, I'd be very surprised if that wasn't the case.
Yeah. It's a very.
You can look you can look at your data and you say, well, a thousand people have looked at this page and ten people have given us their details.
So something's gone wrong.
That's not great.
Yeah.
How many opportunities have we missed in there?
And I think also the other kind of side to the coin, I guess, is that I think there's a real value to just giving the content away, um, in the sense that you kind of foster goodwill. Um, you, you make it clear that you're a subject matter expert. I mean, there's something to be said for somebody who could be using information to kind of demand your marketing data and actually just says, well, instead, I'm going to give this away for free because I can afford to. I think that's a good look for a lot of brands. Um, I would say I agree. Helpful and authoritative. Um, and also, I think it's worth pointing out that if your gated content is actually good, um, you'll probably find that people come back anyway. I think that's something that certainly we see. Um, and certainly some of our clients see, isn't it that, you know, they're kind of repeat or return visitors. It's, it's actually very high. The proportion of people who come back to the website. So give stuff away. If people are impressed with it, they'll probably come back and ask you more questions or.
More content as well.
Yeah.
Which is another, another benefit of your content being freely available. I mean, are there any alternatives? There's no kind of halfway house is it? It's either gated or it isn't. Is that right?
Well, I mean, I think it's tricky because you see a lot of kind of softer gating, right, where you require less. So some people will demand like name, email address, company job title, you know, sock size. Yeah, whatever. Um, I think, you know, you can just do stuff where you say, you know, just bung in an email and stuff like that. And they are supposed to have kind of a lower barrier of entry that's supposed to be more kind of amenable to people. But at the end of the day, I think people are still rightly very suspicious when you start asking them for. Yeah, they're what is essentially they're the way into their inbox.
I mean, before we got clever and blocked, um, people putting in like, you know, M mouse at Disney dot com.
Yeah, a real example.
Yeah, a real example which people would have used. I mean, until we got clever and started, you know, checking to see if it was a real email address and checking to see it wasn't on a list of, of spammy email addresses, etc.. Um, I suppose it was, there was more chance of it working maybe, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not sure. I've never been that convinced by it.
Yeah, I struggle with it to be honest with you, because like I say that I can count the number of times I've signed up for gated content on one hand, and most of that has just been research for writing other people's articles. I don't think if I was ever making a decision about a purchase or a service, I would think, oh, you know, these people are friendly and helpful, so I'll just give them my email address. It seems a bit forced, really, the whole interaction.
Okay. Um, I'm frantically looking around the office to see if anybody has any views. As in, is there anything we haven't covered while we've talked about this just now? I'm looking at Julie. She's got a blank stare. So not nothing nothing forthcoming there. Um, so I don't think that, um, there's much more to say on this. Have you got any any final thoughts before, uh, before we wind this one up. And I need you to keep talking.
Well, only one thing, really, which is that I guess if you are sat there thinking, does this work or does this not work? You know, what's the right answer? You guys haven't really told us what to do. The answer is to test it and pick a piece of content that you're currently gating and kind of give it away for free. See what happens.
Just one second. Uh, this is starting to become a habit, Julie. Now talk right into the microphone hijacking again.
I think, um, business to business and business to consumer is slightly different. Um, whereas, you know, business to consumer, they spend a lot of emails out special offers and things like that. And for them to build an email list of people who want to buy from them can be really, really valuable, whereas in B2B seems not to work as well.
Okay. It's a good point.
Because it's a longer decision and being bombarded with emails, just because you downloaded something may not be the right time for you. But if you're if you're looking at a specific type of shoes or something, and you've downloaded a book about these shoes and stuff like that, then you're probably looking to buy them, and then you probably will then be open to a twenty percent off your first pair of shoes offer. And then a year later, what about another pair of shoes? So having an email list for that, and that sort of market is probably a lot more valuable than the types of customers we work with, where it's such a complicated decision that it's not as relevant.
I agree, I think that's a great point. And what you've actually the point you've raised there, I think, is the idea of gated content, not necessarily being a piece of content. It can be a gated offer. So sign up for the newsletter and you'll get a code so that you get ten percent off of a purchase. Again, B2C, that's not likely to happen with b e systems buying valves for nuclear submarines, is it?
No. And I guess that's got a lot to do with the fact that, you know, it's much easier if people are kind of personally invested in in what you're selling, if they like the products and they want them in their personal lives, for them to kind of sign up and let you bombard them. Whereas yeah, when people are in kind of business mode in the office, they're less inclined to kind of sign up for things that are going to fill their inbox.
Okay. So in summary, gated content is content that you only give people if they tell you who they are. And broadly speaking, we think it's maybe on its last legs.
Yeah.
And it's a bit rubbish. Um it can work in situations where you've got something of high value and you want to be very careful who you share it with. But that would be, that would be one instance where it might work quite well. As Julie said during her intervention, um, B2C, it can be very effective and I agree. And if you want to make somebody a special offer, you can sort of get them force them into telling you who they are. And then then they go into the list so you can can continue to market to them. Um, is that broadly speaking, covering off what we wanted to talk about?
I think the only other thing is, of course, like I say that there are kind of inherent advantages to not doing this. And it's not like you're kind of necessarily losing something by not demanding people's email addresses. Because if people are impressed with what you're saying and offering them, they'll probably end up, you know, either a customer or coming back.
At least one thing I would say in our final shot is if you're thinking of getting some content, think long and hard. Is that content really valuable? If it's your company brochure, don't even think about it. If it's something that people can get elsewhere, don't think about it. Is it something that is really unique to you? And you absolutely know people would be desperate for the information and by getting them to do it, you will then get an opportunity potentially to nurture them, market to them going forward. That's about the only situation where it's really worth considering in B2B.
Anyway, it has to be very, very valuable data for sure.
Okay. I've quite enjoyed talking about that because it's, um, what we do when we do these things is we, we don't run off a script. We, we get, um, you know, a theme and then we kind of riff on it and discuss it and, you know, based on our experience and thoughts and, and opinions. And, uh, I always enjoy doing this, but I really enjoyed that one. It was good.
Yeah, it was good. Even if you did make fun of me.
It was something that Leslie said, actually, who, who does all the post-production on these things is, uh, and I think maybe Caron mentioned it as well, these conversations that we have and there's the guys in the office are obviously the guys close by are actually privy to these conversations because they're listening to it as we record.
They don't have a choice.
They don't have a choice. That's exactly right. But it's a great opportunity for us to share information internally.
It is. Yeah. It makes you think about what you're doing as well. I think, you know, we do a lot of this stuff, you know, every day, all day. And we take it for granted that these are the things we do. You know, let's just get that content. Let's just demand somebody's email address. And it's funny actually, because I had a conversation with a client that we work with in America not so long ago. And they were kind of questioning the logic of, of getting the content. And they were saying, you know, are you sure about this? Are you sure it's a good idea to just give?
Did you really do an American accent? Then you sounded like you did. Are you sure that you want to do that?
Yeah. I'm sorry to any American listeners. Um, but no.
Sticking a hell yeah.
And, um, we ended up, you know, having kind of a bit of a tussle about whether or not it was the right thing to do. But ultimately, I think, you know, it's great to have these conversations because it does just kind of reinforce what you're telling people and what you're doing every day.
So yeah, yeah. I mean, fearlessly pursuing our client's best interests is, is, is one of our values. It's one of the things that we do. I mean, we're not just going to get content because everybody gets content and it looks like it should be gated. I mean, we are challenging and saying, why are we doing this? Is it really that valuable? I mean, I know that particular client, there is some of the some content they have. Well, it's like access to the hub that we built for them, which is for customers, I think primarily for their customers. So, you know, there are situations where you do want to know who somebody is in order to give them access to something like that. In that example, but broadly speaking, a bit of a thumbs down, we're not entirely convinced anymore.
Please convince us otherwise. You know, if you have fantastic success with some gated content, let us know.
What should people do if they want to speak to us and get get in touch with us.
Alex. Well, they should get a carrier pigeon and they should write a message on a small piece of paper, tie it to the carrier pigeons leg, and then launch it into the air.
That will work.
That will work. If only. Or I won't say it. Dave. You can't make them.
They could go onto the contacts tab and get in touch. If you want to come on the show and talk about some aspect of digital marketing, maybe you want to come on and tell us that gated content has done wonderful things for your business and you think it's great. In which case you'd be more than welcome to come and tell us about that. Um, in the meantime, I can't think of anything else to say on this subject.
I think that's pretty much everything.
Okay. That'll do.