It’s Not As Simple As To Gate Or Not To Gate
Ann Handley’s recent newsletter addressed a topic marketers seem to be scratching their heads about lately: Should you, or should you not, gate content?
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, gating content means requiring a form completion (usually asking for email, name, etc.) to see it.
There’s a bit of buzz lately around the value of ungating. What I like about Ann’s approach is that she shares a success story from a company that removed forms and freely shared content, but she also gets into what you’ll want to consider before you adopt the same approach.
There are some nuances. For instance, she mentions that Marketing Profs uses a publishing model (which many of you paid newsletter creators also use), and that gates make sense in that situation.
Psst! Speaking of gates, we’re in the final phases of preparing to launch private newsletters for Curated. That will mean you can show content to subscribers only. Stay tuned. It’s thisclose to done.
To gate or not to gate, is that the question?
Jonathan Bland thinks you should stop gating ebooks. In this LinkedIn post, he walks us through the steps he thinks will help marketers convince leadership to drop the forms:
Where do you land on this issue?
Related: Here’s some more solid advice from LinkedIn, this time from Sidney Waterfall at Refine Labs. She explains how to ditch a press release announcement with these alternative approaches to new SaaS feature announcements.
Also Related (and also from LinkedIn): Content marketer Jacalyn Beales explains why you might want to ditch case studies.
Where Does Your B2B Marketing Mix Fall On This List?
Gaetano Nino DiNardi created a quick guide to B2B marketing plays, including what he categorizes as outdated, changing, and modern in his LinkedIn post.
Here are a few he put in the outdated list:
Check out the full list.
An Influencer Marketing Budget Saver?
In this Twitter thread, Taylor Lagace explains how his agency approaches influencer marketing differently, and it makes sense.
Instead of starting by booking influencers who’ve never tried products and paying for promotional posts right out the gate, they first send out a ton of product to key accounts and wait for the people who love it to share. Then, they go through a series of requests to share the UGC and later secure contracts based on how much the influencer engages and genuinely enjoys the product, because the best influencer campaigns need that level of authenticity.
He says it saves clients hundreds of thousands each year.
Read the tweet for details.
Discovered via For the Interested.
Are You Avoiding These 4 Content Marketing Pitfalls?
Anthony Gaenzle breaks down 4 pitfalls to avoid for the sake of your brand, strategy, and overall success in this piece for Content Marketing Institute. A quick look at the pitfalls he describes:
Click through for the full story.
Discovered via Social Media Today.
Why should you publish your marketing newsletter to your domain and make the archives accessible and searchable?
Matthew Sciannella and I discussed some interesting newsletter topics during his show, Industrial Marketing Live, on Monday and this was one of them.
It was tied into a question about how much information beyond an email address would be good to ask for when people sign up.
And my answer is this: if I could send you my newsletter without asking for anything, including your email address, I would.
Because the purpose of a marketing newsletter is to serve and deepen the brand:consumer relationship.
So I want to make it as easy as possible for you to read what I’ve written.
To binge the archives if you want.
Because my intention is not to get your email address.
Or to learn how many people work in your office.
Because forms with fields like that indicate I’m measuring you up to sell you something. And I’m not.
Instead, I’m showing you what it’s like to be supported by me, customer or not, with the bonus perk that you get to see the software I promote in action.
If you treat your newsletter like other content marketing and make it easy to browse without subscribing, then that subscription is an opt in to be alerted when you’ve posted something new, not a trade for something kept behind a locked gate.
Note: If you’re trying to build an email list to market the launch of an info product to, you may strongly disagree with me because you need those emails to sell your product. And if you sell sponsorships to your newsletter, you may disagree because you want a large list to tout to advertisers.
But I’d still challenge you to consider that the less mysterious and more available your content is, the more those subscriptions mean and the more engaged they’ll be because they’re indicating they don’t want to miss what you publish. This obviously does not apply to private or paid subscription newsletters.
Little bonus here:
I made this quick Before You Send Checklist for the people in that audience (yes, marketers, but anyone sending a newsletter can benefit from using it), and I want to share it with you:
Before you send, ask: Does this newsletter...
...deepen your relationship with your readers?
...service as a quality touchpoint with your audience? (Would YOU read it and smile?)
...remind the reader that you (or your company) cares about their success?
...provide resources that support that success?
...feel like it was sent by a human?
...deliver quality content that earns you the right to be promotional?
Please let me know if you feel like Opt In Weekly is achieving these goals, and, if not, how I could improve.
You can find this checklist on the Notion page I built for the Industrial Marketing Live talk I gave here.
Also, if you’re interested, I’ll be chatting with Dennis Shiao from The Content Corner during his Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup next Thursday, February 4, at 3 p.m. EST. Bay Area citizenship not required.
Tip: Make Your Archives Easy To Browse And Search (+ Treat Opt In Weekly Like An Idea Repository!)
Last week, a friend posed a question about a topic I try to follow: ungated marketing content vs publisher paywalls. While I had an initial response (they’re different beasts to tackle), I’ve curated 6 articles concerning gating in this newsletter. I used the publication site search function to revisit those articles (and my commentary) to share one article with him.
I asked Seth to create a GIF showing how that works in case you want try it in your own newsletter. Or maybe you want to test it out to see what I’ve published in the past about topics like deliverability, Gmail clipping, and getting listed in newsletter directories.
Curated users who have publication sites enabled (issues can be published to the Curated.co domain or a custom domain) can show archives and allow search by going to Settings > Hosting, Subscriptions, and Publishing > Web.
Great search example in the GIF, Seth!
B2B Marketers, There’s a Disconnect Between What We Think People Want & What They Actually Want
Ray Schultz at MediaPost gives some context to a recent UberFlip survey. 500 North American B2B marketers and buyers participated in the survey, The Experience Disconnect.
Here’s how it breaks down:
52% of marketers think they’re doing great (rating of 4) for content personalization
33% of buyers rate irrelevant content as one of the most frustrating tasks when researching a purchasing decision
Whitepapers, 42%
eBooks, 30%
User reviews, 64%
Product tours, 43%
Videos, 33%
It’s not a huge surprise that marketers are prioritizing content that, when gated, earns leads, but that customers prefer to be able to learn something without that step.
Related: Check out Get Ready For Video In 2021: Watch 5 Creative Examples of B2B Marketing on YouTube.
If You’re Worried About List Size, You’re Worried About the Wrong Thing
I get it, marketers. You’re measured on number of leads. So you do the things that worked 5-10 years ago to get them: gated ebooks, pdfs, and webinars. You craft some teaser copy that promises quality content, a slew of people download it, and you celebrate until...
...Cue the sales team: “These leads aren’t any good. We can’t close them.”
In An Unconventional Approach to Email List Building, Andre Chaperon of Tiny Little Businesses argues that using the status quo approach (above) is bound to yield lackluster results. He explains that switching from bribery (give me your email and I’ll give you a solution to your problem) to value (here’s how to solve your problem, sign up for my newsletter if you want more like this) will ensure that only quality prospects opt in.
“You see, I prefer email lists (an audience, or pocket of people) that are ultra-targeted and hyper-responsive (where I can really matter to some, as opposed to trying to matter to everyone)...”
“Email lists that have been *built through attraction instead of bribery,** where I have earned prospects’ trust and attention.”*
When the value exchange is different, you’ll begin to attract only the people you want to do business with, he writes, and stop wasting the sales team’s time chasing down bad fit prospects.
Andre’s article is worth reading all the way through and bookmarking. He gives clear examples and shows how adding in steps to filter prospects (it reverses the traditional lead capture process) can make a small, hyper-target email list perform better than a mega list of people who don’t want what you’re selling.
It’s time to start focusing on the value of a small, engaged list. And, of course, convince your boss that measuring lead quality is more important than quantity.
Image: TinyLittleBusinesses.com
