What purpose should your content serve? Collecting more leads and knowing your audience better, or sharing your knowledge and experience with the whole world? What's the best strategy—gating content or leaving it open?
Many things have been said about the dilemma of gated vs. open content. And we aren't going to repeat it all. For knowledge and expertise you can resort to our colleagues from Moz: they talk about the pros and cons of gated and open content and share some tips on how to improve marketing processes in their great article. Today we also want to share with you some of the benefits of gating your online documents. And some cases when leaving your content open is a better option, depending on your goals.
Open Content
When you want to share your content with a big audience, passing your knowledge and experience on to as many people as possible, then open content is your best approach. Here are the benefits that open content gives you:
- You can drive traffic from all channels (website, email, social, blog, search) to your online documents and interest more people in reading them.
- The SEO benefits are great: with the help of links and ranking abilities you can make your content very popular and easy to find. People will share it via different channels, which will get you even higher ranking positions.
- You have a bigger audience for retargeting and remarketing—you can reach everyone who reads your content.
As you see, open content has much to offer. But it's not without drawbacks: you can't get the valuable information you need to identify the people who are your best target audience. It's hard to distinguish them from other visitors and figure out who can be converted into leads. And if you plan to collect qualified leads, gated content is exactly what you need.
Gated Content
When you need to build a loyal audience that is truly interested in your content and willing to communicate with you, collecting detailed leads can help you do that. Let's look at the benefits of gated content:
- Reaching people who accessed your online documents at one point may be easier and more effective because you have a lot of detailed information about those people once they fill in the form fields. If you collected just an email or no information at all, it's very hard to connect with your potential clients.
- Having more specific information about your audience helps you understand your clients better, see which industries and companies they are from, and adjust your work to suit their needs and help them solve their problems.
This strategy can actually help you get qualified leads, but it is not ideal and has certain drawbacks, the greatest of which is that you limit the potential audience for your content. You may also think that a PDF is protected if it's gated, but this is not the case. People can still find your PDF somewhere in the open, and then you will get even fewer leads.
If the question of protecting your PDF from unwanted sharing and downloading is crucial for you, then the recently introduced FlippingBook lead capture form solves this issue perfectly. With this feature, your PDF is protected and can be accessed only through the lead capture form. It also gives you the following advantages:
- You can qualify your leads by their emails: see how many times they viewed your online documents and the exact time when they opened your emails. Knowing the right time to contact people can help you better connect with your customers.
- No matter where you put your content—whether it's a website, social network feed, or somewhere else—its lead capture form will be gathering valuable leads for you.
- When people access your online documents, they will always know that they are yours because you can add your branding, logo, and links to your company's website. When they follow the links, it also helps to increase your website's higher search rankings.
Look how clean and nice your lead capture form can look.
The road to real-time treasury
So, to gate or not to gate? What's the right strategy for my content? You may ask. And we have an answer for you:
- To get a larger audience for your content, to make a statement, or share your knowledge with the world, you should go with open content.
- To collect qualified leads and valuable information about your audience, gating content is your best option.
We hope that this article helps you improve your processes and know exactly when and why is the best time to gate your content to get more leads and valuable information about your audience.
You can find step-by-step instructions for adding a lead capture form in our Help Center.
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