The Truth About Gated Content Without The Gate

If you’re using content to market your B2B company, you may have heard about the “benefits” of gating it.

Gated content is when visitors to your site can’t access that content until they perform a certain action. Usually, it means providing their contact information, though several other requirements may be listed, as well.

The visitor then gets to view the content they wanted and the company gets information they can use to build their funnel.

At first glance, that often seems like a phenomenal way to increase – and accurately measure – the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

The truth is that the pros far outweigh the cons of gated content.

How Did Gated Content Become So Popular?

Although content marketing has become extremely popular among B2B businesses, it generally poses one very frustrating challenge: measuring the ROI of content marketing can be very difficult.

For example, it’s easy to figure out how many people visited your latest blog post. Adding a CTA may help you measure its effectiveness, but there are a number of other factors that will blur your math.

Did other blogs play a role?

How many people who came to your blog post left before giving it a chance?

With gated content, the only people who see it have prequalified themselves by taking the action requested – you know they’re a lead.

Furthermore, email marketing remains one of the most effective options. So, a blog that brings you email addresses should be a very lucrative asset.

Why Gated Content Falls Short of the Hype

Unfortunately, there are some pretty big flaws with the above reasoning.

First, more people use mobile devices than computers to access the Internet. Secondly, most B2B buyers consider their mobile devices essential for the work they do.

This is bad news for gated content because users don’t want to go through the hassle of filling out an opt-in form that may ask for their:

• Name
• Email Address
• Phone Number
• Company Name
• Position

Some ask for far more than that.

That may not seem like such a burden when you have a mouse and full keyboard, but going through each field on a phone will make users second-guess how badly they really want your information. Users may tell themselves they’ll return to the page when they’re around a computer and then forget to do so later.

Now you’ve lost a lead.

Of course, gated content can hurt your SEO, too.

Search engine’s algorithms don’t fill out forms. They have no way of getting past the gate, so your content never gets indexed.

As your content receives less traffic, you also can’t expect it to see as many backlinks, either.

Get the Benefits of Gated Content without the Gate

The reason gated content remains popular despite all of the above shortcoming is because the promise is still so alluring.

Who wouldn’t want an effortless method of increasing the ROI of the content they’ve work so hard for to create in the first place?

That was the driving force behind Hushly.

Our platform keeps your content easy-to-access while giving you the information you need to build a robust, profitable conversion funnel. Contact us today to find out how we can help you build that.