A whitepaper with a strong title that is publicized well is like catnip for B2B marketers. But should businesses seeking qualified leads offer content freely or provide “gated” whitepapers, which require interested parties to fill out a contact form in order to access the information they seek. Mark Ryan of online marketing news site ClickZ (clickz.com) says there are arguments for both.
Advantages of gated content:
- Generates more leads than publicly available content with an optional contact form.
- Provides context to leads by showing what type of content a visitor is interested in.
- Implies that the content is valuable and you don’t just give it to anyone.
- Provides a small (and we mean small) reassurance that your competitors are not seeing your secure content.
- Stops the content from being taken by bots that scrape content from sites and use it without permission.
Advantages of public content:
- If search engines can index your white papers, prospects have a significantly higher likelihood of finding the content and finding your organization.
- The more strong content you make available to your users typically coincides with all sorts of positive engagement variables on a website, such as repeat visits, page views per session, and time on site. Strong engagement typically has a very direct correlation with strong lead generation.
- Google research and just about any sales survey will tell you that prospects do more research before they fill out a lead form than after it. Getting whitepapers out there in the open means that your prospects are more likely to read it while they are forming an opinion about your organization and products than after their opinion is solidly formed.
- If the site is not pushing every visitor to convert to a lead and is instead only getting contact form fills from genuinely interested prospects, then the sales team is able to focus more attention on the leads that they can actually convert and therefore should have a higher customer conversion rate.
Ryan also provides the negative aspects of both approaches. We have a link to the full post in our Additional Web Resources box at SalesAndMarketing.com.
