As a marketer, should you offer gated content?
After creating a piece of content, you need to think about your content marketing strategy and decide how you will distribute your content and who will be able to access your content, and how.
Should the content be freely available to every site visitor? Or should there be a price to pay for accessing the content?
The answers to these questions aren’t going to be the same for everyone.
Let’s take a look at which option could be best for your marketing strategy.
What is Ungated Content?
Ungated content is content that’s readily available to anyone who visits your website.
For instance, if you have a cooking website, you may have recipes on the website that go along with your images of prepared dishes.
Most websites offer ungated content.
Some, like many news sites, offer a mix of gated and ungated content.
In cases like this, the gated content is often marked with an icon of a padlock, so readers can know ahead of time which content is gated and which is not.
In this example, all of the content is freely available, with no gates to entry such as this:
In the example below, some of the content is gated and other content isn’t:
On the other hand, all of Yahoo’s content is ungated:
Why Would Marketers Use Gated Content?
Content gates are a valuable tool for marketers.
Used with discretion, they can be a powerful tool. This is because marketers are trying to market to potential customers.
But they can’t do that as well—or as directly—without the readers’ contact information.
The main reason why marketers use gated content is for lead generation or to grow their marketing list.
If you are a marketer and you need sales leads or you need to grow your marketing list, then having gated content might be a good marketing strategy for you.
Benefits of Ungated Content in Your Marketing Strategy
There are many good reasons why most sites offer ungated content available for their readers.
Ungated content is intended to boost SEO and increase brand recognition, and it can do just that, very effectively.
Ungated content can organically attract readers with the use of keywords and other marketing strategies.
Since it’s ungated, those readers are likely to return again and again, over long periods of time.
A perfect example of this is the Yahoo homepage. On Yahoo, site visitors have an abundance of ungated content to choose from, on a range of topics that includes entertainment, news, fashion, and more.
Yahoo is a great example of a marketing strategy that works because its readers return daily or even multiple times per day.
And Yahoo’s revenue comes, not from readers, but from the websites that they link to on their site, which is also mostly ungated content.
Now, here’s the flip side: if all you do is ungated content, you’re basically inspiring people to take without ever asking for anything in return—and that’s not always sustainable if what you need is, say, real business leads instead of just drive-by visitors. Sometimes you see a blog get tons of traffic, but they never really figure out who those readers are, or if they’d ever buy anything at all. That kind of anonymous audience isn’t always the best fit for every brand, especially if you want genuine connections (or you’re trying to nurture a complex sales funnel). It’s one of those “pick your poison” scenarios: huge volume versus tailored value.
It’s also worth noting that Google can’t index what’s hidden behind a gate. So, yes—ungated pages help your rankings (assuming decent content and SEO), but people who only offer downloads as PDF behind forms aren’t exactly winning in organic search. You end up depending on paid ads, email blasts, or social posts just to get anyone to even see your biggest pieces. Maybe you’re okay with that, but it’s something to check in on from time to time, because expectations and algorithms shift all the time. Gated and ungated aren’t just different strategies—they’re different kinds of commitments.
When Should Content be Gated?
Depending upon your marketing strategy, you’ll need to decide internally when content should be gated.
But basically, gated content can be beneficial when you have certain goals that need to be met.
They include lead generation:
- Increased sales
- More precise analytics
- More insights into site visitors
- Email list segmentation
In short, if you need the information that you can glean from your site visitors with gated content, then it’s likely a good idea to have at least some gated content on your site for marketing purposes such as marketing qualified leads.
Remember, though, just because some of your content is gated, that doesn’t mean that all of your content should be gated.
Only in instances where the site information is legally restricted should you put all of your content behind a gate.
Choosing Which Content to be Gated
So how does a marketer choose what kind of content should be gated?
In essence, if your content is gated, it needs to satisfy these criteria:
- It needs to be excellent content
- It needs to be relevant to your readers’ needs or wants
- It needs to be inaccessible elsewhere
Run through this list and answer honestly with every piece of content that you’re considering putting behind a gate.
If it doesn’t satisfy all three criteria, then it’s probably not going to be worth it for your readers to give their contact information to access.
If your content does satisfy all three of these criteria, then having it gated could be the marketing move that tips you over the hurdle.
Just be aware that you aren’t going to see instant results.
A steady stream of fresh, ungated content is still going to be needed to keep traffic flowing to your site and keep visitors coming back for more.
