Give prospects access to your gated content.
5 Top Reasons to Use Gated Content
Generating leads for your sales and marketing teams is an essential first step in creating new business for the company. Fortunately, gated content can be a smart strategy for putting more leads into the funnel. While it’s not the only approach to lead generation, here are some of the top reasons to use gated content in your future advertising and marketing plans.
Reason #1: Boost Lead Generation
It’s clear by now that generating more leads is possible with gated content, but how? First, it’s important to understand that gated content is any content that requires your personal information in exchange for access to the content – thereby, unlocking the “gate.” Any time someone submits their information (usually via a form on a landing page), sales teams receive a new lead and valuable identifying data. Leads can then be used to further the sales and marketing efforts of the business.
Here is an example of a landing page for gated content:
This company is only asking for one piece of information (the user’s business e-mail address), but some forms require additional data like your name, job title, or business name.
Reason #2: Improve Sales and Marketing Strategies
Since gated content is typically engaged at a point when the prospect is ready to have a conversation about your product or service, it can be a helpful tool in optimizing strategies for sales and marketing. The information gathered from users helps you move prospects through the buyer journey in a way that’s more personalized, relevant, and effective than if you were operating without it.
Reason #3: Educate Your Prospects
Gated content – whether it’s a report, white paper, or webinar – is a valuable opportunity to educate your potential customers. You can provide exclusive information they won’t find anywhere else and position your business as a thought leader in your space. With gated assets, you establish your company and its teams as the go-to for industry trends and directions.
Reason #4: Increase Sales of Products and Services
With more-qualified leads come better potential for increased sales of your products or services. By gating your content behind a form, you gather valuable information to personalize communication and elevate chances for conversion down the road. This might include emailing the prospect with information they would find useful, giving them a call to answer questions, or serving targeted ads to move them along the path to purchase.
Reason #5: Build Website Traffic and Authority
When you promote your gated content across channels like email or social media, you’re naturally going to increase the traffic to your website where the content is hosted. Depending on the topic or your industry, you might attract potential customers or journalists or even competitors. No matter who it is, though, you’re helping to build authority for your business through this gated content that’s often in-depth and crafted through expertise.
Now that you have an idea of reasons to use gated content, you might want to leverage a piece of in-depth content like a report or case study. Be sure to define the reasons why you want to use it, so you can measure how well it’s working and determine what changes you might need to make to improve performance.
