INBOUND Debate Recap: To Gate or Not to Gate?

Spoiler alert: pairing un-gated and gated content is the smart approach, but you should un-gate the vast majority of your content.

Check out the 2-minute recap below (you can turn on closed captions to watch without sound by clicking the white "cc" icon in the lower right corner).

I participated in a debate about gated vs. un-gated content at INBOUND 2020. I argued in favor of un-gating as much content as possible. My opponent, AJ Beltis from Hubspot, argued in favor of strategic gating.

While I’m normally team “it depends” when it comes to most marketing tactics, I do strongly believe that un-gated content will continue to grow in popularity among marketers. There’s absolutely a place for gated content, and often, using the two approaches in tandem yields excellent results! In fact, I used a paired strategy successfully at several companies in the past, and I know many marketers successfully leveraging gated content as a primary strategy. The question is prominent enough that Hubspot created a handy qualitative flowchart to help you decide which content to gate.

Here’s the quick summary of points made by both sides, with a deeper dive and more resources in the post below:

• Optimize for the humans. Not buyers, not users, not leads, HUMANS. If you keep audience value at the forefront of your marketing efforts, you’ll create trust, a long-term relationship, and informed buyers.
• Tracking is difficult, but it’s not our audience’s fault that we can’t measure ROI properly. Gated content is useful for tracking conversions, but a human-to-human connection is more valuable than a single form fill-out.
• Un-gated content improves SEO impact and social sharing. According to SEMrush, long-form articles (3,000+ words) receive 3x more traffic, 3.5x more backlinks, and 4x more shares than articles of average length (901-1200 words).
• Use gated content strategically to give website visitors a logical next step. Do NOT simply gate content that you would normally share as a free blog post. Gated content needs to provide explicit value to the audience to help them implement what they learned by reading un-gated content.
• We need to re-define the definition of a “lead”. It’s NOT anyone who fills out a form. Use progressive profiling, lead scoring, and tiered offerings to improve lead quality.
• Types of content to gate: Buying actions like creating an account or activating a free trial, exclusive access like alpha/beta/early access programs, time with the executive or C-suite, immediately usable assets like templates, worksheets, and calendars.

Want more details? Read on! (Fair warning: long post, lots of details and links)

SEO performance and metrics

Search Engine Optimization is a tactic to improve the likelihood that a page or site ranks high in the results of a Google query (yes, I know there are other browsers, but Google is the standard and if you rank well on Google, you probably also rank well on competitor search engines). SEO works because bots are able to “crawl” web pages, looking for evidence that a page matches a person’s search intent. In the early days of SEO, tactics like keyword stuffing were common (ie: awkwardly shove as many instances of a word into your content to trick the bots into thinking your page was most relevant). Today, SEO consists of many factors, some technical, like title, meta description, URL structure, and H2 headings, as well as a broader look at the quality of the content and depth of coverage on a topic. Google is constantly crawling, indexing, and assessing public pages, making it essential for marketers to publish, refresh, and optimize content to maintain strong search results.

But bots can’t crawl gated content. When you gate the bulk of your content, you exclude it from being included in search results. It’s possible for savvy users to work around this by searching for the title of the asset + filetype:pdf, but if they do find your content using this trick, it means they’ve bypassed the form, not that your content showed up in their search results.

SEO works best on long-form content. In fact, SEMrush found that long-form articles (posts with 3000+ words) get 3x more traffic, 3.5x more backlinks, and 4x more shares than articles of average length (901-1200 words). You know what tends to have thousands of words? eBooks. White papers. Trend reports. All the educational content that marketers tend to gate!

And many marketers go even further and gate sales content. Why would you put up a barrier for someone who actually wants to read a sales pitch? No one ever wants to read a sales pitch!

So, people looking for education can’t find you or your great content if you hide it behind a form, and they’re not really “leads” when they first hit your site. But someone looking for a product or service to solve their problem won’t stumble on your sales or solutions content if it’s gated and they are less likely to fill out a form because you haven’t shown them that you have value to offer yet. Un-gated content clearly wins for SEO.

Social media reach and performance

Let’s take a deeper look at the “4x more shares” statistic from SEMrush and talk about how gated vs. un-gated content performs on social media. People don’t like content behind a gate, and they complain when someone shares gated content in a social post. In some cases, readers take additional measures to bypass the form, provide a bogus email address to avoid receiving additional emails, or a “spam” address used exclusively to download gated assets. The goal of gating content is to increase qualified leads, but if your database is full of dummy addresses, are you really generating leads, or just a database full of junk?

Take a look at just a few tweets from the last few months to see frustration with gated content:

Original thread

Original thread

Original thread

It’s also much more difficult to engage with your followers if you’re primarily sharing gated content, precisely because they won’t read it. How are you going to have a conversation when half the participants don’t have any of the information? And that’s the goal of social media: to engage with your audience. It’s not a channel for you to spam with links to content to generate “leads”.

I argued in the debate that you need to go where your audience lives. And frequently, your audience lives in channels that you don’t own, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit. If you want to be part of these communities, you have to provide value. Un-gated content is more likely to be read and shared, giving you a halo of credibility because third parties share it, relationship-building opportunities because more people have access, and increased follower growth for even greater reach and engagement. Further, when content is released un-gated, the author can re-publish on LinkedIn, which gives you access to their network. Other sites can re-publish with permission, which gives you access to their audience and a backlink. Win-win for both social and SEO.

I successfully used un-gated content to drive sharing and engagement on social media in the past when we turned a print book into an HTML5 interactive website. Each page had its own URL, which meant that we had over 150 unique links to thoughtful content available to share. We released another print-length book for free on slideshare and received hundreds of thousands of views. Now, I acknowledge that we used a paired strategy: we linked to a landing page with gated templates and diagrams for download. You could read the book for free, but we gated the resources to put the concepts into practice. We included a tiered offering for an eCourse and an in-person workshop in our nurture campaign after someone downloaded the templates. We “remembered” users and allowed them to have “unlimited” diagram downloads (ie: you had to fill out a form for the first diagram, but assuming you allowed cookies, you didn’t have to fill out a form for subsequent diagrams).

For most social sharing, un-gated content wins. But including a CTA to gated content on the landing page or blog post is a strong use case for pairing the two approaches.

Engage with humans

AJ argued that you need to give readers a logical next step, otherwise, they’ll bounce. While I completely agree that you should always offer a “next step”, I disagree that the CTA should be a gated asset or buying hurdle. In fact, during my session at INBOUND 2019, I presented a new model for the buyer’s journey: the content playground. The playground strategy asserts that marketers need to create a sophisticated strategy that allows the audience to design their own journey. Again, you’ll notice that I don’t call them “buyers”, “prospects”, or “users”. Instead, I focus on the whole human. Because HUMANS make decisions. And those decisions could be buying, referring a qualified buyer, applying to a job with your company, or any number of non-“BANT-qualified-lead” decisions that are still beneficial to your company!

So, what does it look like to give people a logical next step if you aren’t pushing them through the stages of the traditional funnel?

Atlassian's Agile Coach is an excellent example. The video series on YouTube received over 400k views and over 18k hours of watch time... which translates to 750 days! Clearly, we offer plenty of “next steps” for viewers. We also shared the videos on social media and embedded them with long-form written content on our Agile microsite, which is, spoiler alert, un-gated.

The product tutorial in the right sidebar leads to an un-gated walk-through, but it’s most useful when you active a free account to create your first workflow in Jira. But the video and left sidebar content remain accessible with no email address required. These series act as not only a driver for traditional top-of-funnel metrics like entrances, but an ongoing educational reference to help people use our products more effectively because we teach them practices, not just product features.

Speaking of practices, let’s talk about Atlassian's Team Playbook, which is also un-gated. One of my colleagues presented at a conference and shared about the team health monitor. After checking out the health monitor and associated plays, an audience member reached out directly to my colleague for help. This relationship led to the purchase of multiple products, a case study, and a thriving partnership for more testimonials and product expansion. But this conversion can't be easily tracked through a form fill-out, because it's about humans, the journey, and the relationship.

Let me re-iterate the focus on humans. Not prospects, not leads, not buyers, not even users. Humans. Yes, it’s messy to deal with humans and they’re much harder to measure than clicks or form fill-outs or conversions on a landing page. Edelman’s trend report found that 74% of respondents had no way to link thought leadership efforts to sales or wins. But it’s not our audience’s fault that we struggle to make the case for ROI on content! We connect the dots with proxy metrics like brand awareness and sentiment surveys, matching an IP address once someone creates an account, or asking how they found us and what they read when they get on the phone with a rep. And let's face it… gated content acts as a proxy metric for a qualified lead anyways. The reality is that if you don’t optimize for human needs, questions, and solutions, you won’t “convert” a “qualified” “lead”.

We use the wrong definition for “lead”

I used a lot of quotes in the last sentence, precisely because I think most marketers and sales reps use the wrong definition of the word “lead”. A lead is NOT anyone who filled out a form! Hubspot's latest trend report showed that sales reps said only 5% of leads from marketing were high quality, precisely because we’re calling anyone who gave an email address a “lead”. Now, more sophisticated marketers use progressive profiling and lead scoring to improve lead quality, but the reality is that most people who fill out a form aren't ready to buy something. They could be competitors, they could be new to the industry and trying to learn, they could be partners looking to educate their own customers about your product or linking to your information from their content. All of these intents mean it’s a waste of a call for an SDR because these people aren’t actually “leads”.

What makes a lead good quality? Most reps use BANT - budget, need, authority, and timeline - to qualify leads. If you don't have a tiered offer, you're in even worse shape with lead quality if you gate all your content because you're allowing an eBook or white paper download to act as a proxy for BANT-qualified people to spends thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars! OF COURSE your reps are frustrated that someone who downloaded a white paper and an eBook and a trend report aren't willing to throw down a PO!

Robert Rose from CMI makes an excellent distinction between a marketing database and an audience that addresses some of these issues.

When SHOULD you gate content?

As AJ and I both shared, strategically gating content is a smart strategy. I believe that you should gate high-touch content like live events, networking-focused events, fireside chats, or round tables targeted to a small group of people with a specific purpose. Intentionally putting up a barrier ensures that the narrow audience and narrow scope remain intact.

Further, it makes sense to gate rare access, like the analyst reports, alpha, beta, or early access programs, and access to the executive team or C-suite. You want to create a high barrier to entry, so you want to vet before allowing someone to enter the conversation.

I strongly recommend that marketers consider whether their gated assets that do not meet the above criteria are, in fact, worth the trade. AJ commented that you should not gate blog posts that you turn into eBooks, and his final hot-take was that you should never gate video. I concur with the statements about quality. If the download received in exchange for an email address doesn’t provide immediate, explicit value to the person, it’s not worth gating. AJ shared Hubspot’s outstanding results for including CTAs on blog posts to gated templates and editorial calendars (you can read the article and download the assets here from this post). If you click to read the post, you’ll see it’s chock-full of valuable insights! This assures me that the template is worth the trade for an email address. Hubspot’s writers and strategists are masters of pairing un-gated content with gated content and reaping both the SEO and social media benefits, as well as strong conversions and ROI.

Finally, the most obvious content to gate: when you're asking someone to jump an explicit buying hurdle, like creating an account, activating a free trial, taking advantage of a limited-time offer, or asking to speak with someone. Allow people access all the education for free, and when they're ready to buy, trust me, they'll be happy to give you their information, time for a call, and credit card number or PO.

One last note, "gating" doesn't just mean form fill-outs on a landing page anymore, it references newsletter subscriptions, signing up with a social login vs. an email address, a pop-up form or pairing strategy, and even feature gating to drive up-sell or cross-sell decisions. You have a lot of options to reap the benefits of an un-gated strategy while increasing qualified leads. When paired with un-gated content, it actually IS high-value if someone is willing to give you their email address when you have a ton of free or open content because it shows they are more engaged.

To gate or not to gate? Yes.

In conclusion, pairing un-gated and gated content is the most strategic approach. Using gated content with a tiered offering after building trust and adding value improves reader understanding and lead quality. Though two marketers stood on opposite sides of the issue for this round, I believe the audience won this debate!

Interested in the discussion? Watch the on-demand debate at inbound.com. Questions about un-gated vs. gated content? Comment below!