There is no question that conventional wisdom — and an overall trend for the last few years — has leaned towards less ‘content gates’ in GTM programs – i.e., offering more content un-gated.
“[A] growing contingent of marketers think gating content is a tacky, intrusive tactic that undermines the power of good content and exacerbates the tension between marketing and sales departments,” asserts Built In editor Hal Koss. That’s a strong statement, but reflects the prevailing winds.
How did we get here? How did we get so burned out on content gates?
The reasons are diverse, but generally fall into three camps: 1.) the general growth marketing ethos that GTM content should be free and freely available (and that this benefits things like SEO and Demand Experience more than it harms GTM performance), 2.) the poor reputation cultivated by GTM programs that gate low-quality content and 3.) the lack of thoughtful, progressive strategies for form data capture that lead to most GTM organizations simply asking ‘too much’ on forms.
But like all things, what was once old is now new again, and at ANNUITAS we are seeing growing interest in smart content gating strategies for GTM programs.
New Drivers for Content Gates
Two recent trends are re-igniting the value of content gating:
- Google’s sunset of third-party cookies: With Google fully phasing out third party cookie usage in Chrome by the second half of the year, 2024 will be the year where third party cookies finally disappear in go‑to‑market programs. The greatest implication? Organizations will be forced to take first party cookies and data seriously … data that is typically collected via forms.
- AI scraping: The rapid proliferation of AI technologies is leading to widespread content abuse. “AI-powered content-creating tools have the potential to crawl your website and learn from anything that you publish on it,” explains Web expert Syed Balkhi on Copyrighted. It’s a real and growing concern. “Within 14 days of the availability of code that can prevent AI data scraping, nearly 20% of the top 1,000 websites in the world began using it,” notes marketing author Mark Schaefer in a post on Medium. One of the strongest ways to protect your content is via iron-clad content gates.
These trends are breathing new life into content gates.
Emerging Benefits of Content Gates
So why would we go back to content gates? Given these trends – and their implications – there are several, emerging reasons to (re-) consider content gates:
- Opportunity to capture structured first party data: As third-party data goes away, the data driving our GTM programs will be first-party data – i.e., data we collect – and so we ‘have to’ thoughtfully collect the underlying data we need to power our orchestrated GTM interactions with prospective customers.
- Ability to control the structure of prospect data: Thoughtful questions and pick lists asked via content gates give us the ability to build a base of structured ‘telemetry’ on our prospects – driving segmentation, tracking content/channel interactions, keeping track of buying stage and better informing ‘what’s next’ in our (often automated) interactions with prospects.
- Ability to protect your valuable content: Competitors and the broader marketplace should not be stealing your ideas. AI scraping is idea stealing. There is no other way to say it or to construe it. And one of the best defenses of your differentiated ideas are for them to be available – in exchange for some structured prospect data – but otherwise protected from theft. And for it to only be available via ‘your’ digital properties … and to differentiate your site in search. “When someone commands LLMs to use your website as a source of information and take inspiration from your writing style, it may lead to issues like content duplication, which can severely hinder your website’s growth,” comments Balkhi.
- Basis for controlling your customer brand experience: Content gates – by capturing critical telemetry and by delivering meaningful buying-journey content – enable us to deliver a strong, differentiated, multi-channel brand experience to prospects and customers through Web personalization, app interactions, email, SMS, event invites, etc. This way you are able to be a steward of – and stay relevant throughout – the customer journey.
There are a lot of reasons to (re-)consider content gates … but with a caveat.
We cannot simply return to the era of the poorly designed, long form asking for a ridiculous amount of unstructured data that will never be used – in return for low-quality content. More thought needs to be put into forms – leveraging a strategic approach we refer to at ANNUITAS as a Progressive Profiling Model – and more thought needs to be put into the content they are gating.
The standard for effective content gating must be to: 1.) ask for meaningful data, 2.) do it in a structured way, 3.) ask it incrementally – never capturing more data than is appropriate to the stage of our relationship with the buyer – and 4.) deliver significant value for the data collected – meaning ‘off the charts’ valuable content, aligned to the right stage of the customer lifecycle.
