The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Hey everybody, welcome to the Marketing Movement Podcast. My name is Tori Kinlick, and I'm a Director of Demand Generation at Refine Labs. Today, I want to talk a little bit about gated content, or more specifically ungating your gated content.
So many of us, if not all of us, have come across that pesky little form that stands in the way of you and the information that you're after. You're typically looking at some type of value exchange, right? The website that you're on has the information that you're looking for. And that website, that content producer, they want your information in exchange for their content.
And so the last few things, like your first name, last name, email, company name, company size, your vertical, your last four digits of your social security number, your mother's maiden name, you get it, right? And this value exchange isn't really so much of a value exchange at all. I think maybe 10 or so years ago, it made a lot of sense. That was the direction that marketing was heading.
But nowadays, buyer behavior is changing, and it's been changing quite rapidly over the past few years. Some of this is due to the global pandemic, and that forced shift towards more of a digital buyer-led process. But we can't blame it all on COVID. The reality is, there's a lot more information available to consumers today than there ever was before.
So this trend will call it. I don't think it's going to reverse itself. And so as buyers have had more information available to them at their fingertips, we as marketers and sellers have tried to adjust and meet them where they are. And this is going back a couple years ago, getting rise to content marketing, right?
The whole idea behind content marketing was that we, as marketers, really felt like we were still in control of that narrative. We were producing the content, effectively giving the research to our buyers ahead of their entrance into the buying process. And it made a lot of sense at the time, right? Number one, people have exactly caught on to what happens when you do give them your information exchange for the content.
But number two, email marketing was really big back when all this started. And so there was a lot of focus on email nurture tracks and fueling those email nurture tracks with tons of names of people that were downloading content. And this is kind of what got us into this entire situation. So why are we still getting content?
I see two reasons for it. Number one, you want to calculate the ROI of your content and the resources applied towards creating that content. Number two, you want to drop those downloaders into some type of email nurture stream or hand them over to an SDR, something of a sort. Here's the problem with both of those reasons.
They're both very self-serving. They only benefit the marketers, the sellers, the people that are producing the content. There's no benefit to the buyers whatsoever. And so this is really where it's become problematic.
So now that we've identified the problem, how do we fix it? So what I walked through was a little bit of a roadmap for getting it done, not just taking down the gates, right? Anyone can go into a marketing automation platform and remove a gate from a piece of content on a webpage. But more importantly, the things that you need to do to prepare for this shift, because it is a big shift in your marketing and sales approach.
And the considerations both ahead of during and following the undating process. And then for all you data folks out there, the metrics and KPIs that you can be focusing on following the ungating of that content, right? Because that is oftentimes the biggest pushback on ungating the content. How are we gonna measure it?
How are we gonna know that everything's working? We'll get to that. Let's start with those upfront considerations, right? So I think the first place to start, and the first place that I've started when I've done this in the past is, you wanna take a look at the performance data.
Mainly, has your gated content been leading to pipeline revenue? Let's just focus on revenue, right? Anyone can inflate a pipeline, but let's focus on revenue. So the best way to really do this is by looking at pipeline velocity.
And this is something that frankly you can't and should be doing for all of your channels. But for this purpose, let's just kind of talk about how it relates to the gating and ungating content. So what you can take a look at is assuming that you are collecting all of these content downloaders in a Salesforce campaign. And you were able to track those downloaders from lead all the way to revenue, if they're making it that far.
What you wanna take a look at inside of your CRM or your automation platform, wherever your most trustworthy data is gonna live is what's the number of opportunities that you've generated from this gated content? What is the win rate on those opportunities? And what's the average deal size of those close one opportunities? Multiply those three numbers by each other, and then divide by the sales cycle.
So the number of days that it takes for one of these leads, these content downloads to turn into revenue, and you've got yourself pipeline velocity for your gated content campaigns. So how does this compare to your other channels? If I had to take a while guess, it's probably not gonna be your highest performer. You're gonna get a dollar per day figure.
And when you compare that to your other channels, typically what you're going to see is this is a very low performing marketing tactic. And so what you can begin to think about from here is, okay, if we were to ungate our content, if we were to move forward with this approach, what resources are gonna free up for us? People, time, money, all these things are extremely important, especially as we marketers and sellers are always being asked to do more with less. And so any time that you can free up budget or people or any of these resources and reallocate them towards something that is going to be profitable, productive for your company, you should be doing that.
And so taking a look at the performance data around this gated content, it's a great thing to do for this exercise, but it's probably something that all you dimension marketers should be doing across the board. Maybe that's a whole separate podcast episode, but we can get into that another day. Another consideration here is, is ungating content something that everyone should be doing. So who should be ungating their content?
Who shouldn't be ungating their content? In my opinion, everybody should be ungating their content. But I'll say that there's one wrinkle in that. And it's those that have their content behind a paywall today.
So there's lots of different ways to get your content. But if you're in a situation where you're producing content that is so good and so valuable that people are willing to pay you money for it, none of this really applies to you. You could probably just stop listening now, disregard anything else that you heard me say previously, and move on with your day, because you're obviously doing something right. You're producing some great content.
Your buyers are loving it so much so that you're able to monetize it. Kudos to you. Maybe you could join me on the next podcast and tell me how you did that. But for everyone else, this is very likely something that's gonna make a whole lot of sense for your marketing efforts.
So what's the best way to do it? Is it like a band-aid approach or a phased approach? I think ideally, you want to rip the band-aid off and do it in one falce move as quickly as you can and move on with a much improved buyer experience where there are no gates on your website and people can come read your content at their leisure, socialize it, whereas the phased approach, which is something that I'm seeing a little bit more today, people are dipping their toe in this ungated content idea and they're maybe only gaining a couple pieces of content or they're putting all their content on some type of microsite and just gaining that microsite. It's still gated content.
It still needs to, it still requires a person to give you their information in exchange for that content. And so is it better than gaining all your content? Sure, okay, I'll give you that. But the reality is this is something that is, to me, very binary.
You're either doing it or you're not. And in my opinion, I just can't justify why it makes sense for any company, any marketer to be getting their content with the exception of those people that are able to profit off of it. One of the other different considerations to consider is one of the other considerations here is the impact on leads and MQLs, right? This is kind of the other area that so many marketers and business leaders are so hesitant to make this change, right?
Oh, no, what's gonna happen to the leads? What are we gonna do? Go check with your sales team and ask those sellers how those gated content leads are working out for them. I think it'll be a pretty short conversation.
But let's say you don't send your content downlators to sales. That good, great. I'm sure they're really happy for it. But refer back to that performance data.
And even if you're not handing them right over to sales, you're nurturing them later, the data's not gonna lie. Chances are these campaigns are severely underperforming compared to your other efforts that are driving more high-tech leads, those efforts designed to put a message out there in front of someone for free without a value exchange necessary so that they can understand who you are, what your brand's all about, what your value proposition is, without having to give you their email address and then ignore 50 calls from a sales development rep or a bunch of automated emails that don't make a whole lot of sense and aren't all that personalized anyway. The last upfront consideration to think about is really communicating out those expected ripple effects because there will be ripple effects, right? This is a big change to your marketing efforts.
And so the stakeholders that you need to be talking to ahead of this, they're gonna care. But as long as you explain it to them while you're doing it and you explain to them what the intended effects are and how you're gonna measure those intended effects, you should be in good shape. And I'll get into who you wanna be talking to here in just a moment because next we'll move on to how to actually ungate the content. So now that we've kinda thought through all those upfront considerations, let's get on with the actual process here.
Let's ungate that content. How do we do it? Well, remove all the forms you're done. Not really, it's not quite that easy.
What you wanna be thinking about is what are those, what are those ripple effects? Where are they gonna be impacting other parts of your business? So for instance, those email nurture sequences that we referenced before, maybe they used to be a really big part of your business. And everyone was focused on continuous improvement of the email nurture sequences.
How do we improve our open rates and click the rates and blah, blah, blah. There's going to be a significantly less volume of people flowing through those email nurture sequences if the biggest thing fueling them was your gated content campaigns. So you're gonna need to give some thought to number one. Do we need to continue putting so much time and energy into our email nurture campaigns?
That's debatable, I would say, for the smaller companies out there, maybe not so much for the larger companies out there where you're able to assign a person or people just to email as a tactic for your company. I think that there's some considerations there that is worthwhile to talk through, just mainly what to expect when the volume does dip. And if there are going to be any unintended consequences like mainly a sales team that doesn't exactly know what to do with their new idle time, that's a great next point to move on to. What will the sales team do with their new idle time?
Well, typically you're seeing SDR roles are the ones that are working these gated content leads. And so without these low intent leads that the SDR is going to be asked to follow up on, well, what are they gonna do with all their free time? They could be following up with a much more personalized approach on your high intent leads. That's a much preferred approach here.
One other thing that you could consider is maybe setting up some type of live chat function on your website, assign your SDRs to the live chat function, allow them to engage with people that want to engage using a platform like Live Chat on your site. And even if it's not a sales conversation, it's a great experience for the buyer. And it's something that will leave a lasting impression, especially if the SDR, manning that live chat is helpful. If they're helping to direct them around the website or towards pieces of content, ungated content, but towards pieces of content that might be relevant to them.
If they're looking to get in touch with the sales team, this is where you can do the digging, the qualification. And so having your sales development reps focusing on continuing to talk to customers, but instead talking to customers across the box, but instead talking to the ones that actually want to engage, instead of following up on the ones that maybe just wanted to do a little bit of light reading, that's probably a good idea as well. And now let's talk through some of those stakeholders. So we mentioned sales.
We mentioned the SDRs. These are gonna be the people that are gonna feel the effect of this first, because they're the ones that were responsible for following up with those content download leads. So once you've had those conversations with them about what to expect and possibly what they're going to do with their time instead, you should be okay there to move forward with on getting your content, at least as it pertains to the impact on sales. The other stakeholders that you wanna talk through is your leadership team, mainly because your performance numbers are about to look very different.
There's going to be a huge drop off in the low intent lead volume that you had been driving previously. If this lead volume was something that was effectively propping up other parts of your organization, like having a bloated SDR team or I don't know, reverse waterfall metrics that were leading into goal setting and budget allocation across the team based on who was driving the most number of leads, regardless of what they were converting into, then you're gonna wanna talk through these ripple effects with your leadership team. In particular, if you're running a lot of direct response and you have return on marketing investment goals, these are gonna need to be reassessed. So for instance, instead of looking at a channel specific ROI, change the conversation to the cost to acquire customer and specifically that CAC payback period.
Ideally, in time, your high intent inquiries are going to increase as your low intent increase decrease because your buyers will be receiving all the information or majority of the information that they need before talking to sales. So what you're really doing here is you're shortening the sales cycle, you're answering a lot of those questions and those rebuttals that your SDRs and your sales team are commonly faced with way ahead of time and you're doing this through your content marketing. It's going to possibly have an impact on the number of SDRs and even salespeople that your company needs if you're only driving these high intent leads. And so effectively that is something that could affect your cost to acquire a customer as well.
So these are all the considerations that you wanna be talking to about the leadership team, how it's going to impact those numbers, what type of parts of your business are going to be shaken up a little bit when those numbers change. And more importantly, what metrics you're gonna be focusing on or that they should be focusing on instead when you remove these low intent content download leads from the equation. So now your content's ungated. What do you do next?
And this is where we can start talking about your new measurement system. I think the best way to look at things is really leading indicators and lagging indicators. Your leading indicators are gonna be focused on content consumption to some degree. You can, without having those gated content download numbers, you can still understand content consumption.
It just looks a little different. So in particular, you can set up things like scroll depth packs on your pages where that content lives. Scrolled up the first to how far down the page a visitor makes it. So you can set a conversion event for when the person scrolls 50% of the way, 75% of the way, 100% of the way.
And these events can help give you an understanding of whether or not people are engaging with your content and how engaged they are with your content. If they're making it all the way to the bottom of that page, if this is something that you really need to know, want to know, scrolled up is a good way to do it. It's not gonna give you that same level of information on who specifically downloaded it, but you can get a much broader understanding of how that individual piece of content is performing. And in my opinion, that's much more valuable than the number of people that are interested in giving you likely some fake email address in exchange for that information.
So continuing on the conversion events, right? It's not always very black and white, very simple. For instance, I worked at a company once where all of our content on our website was embedded in i-frames. And so scroll depth tracking was not an option for us.
And so in that event, you can work with Google Tag Manager and maybe track things like button and inline link clicks. This event tag could be set up just like any other conversion event tag on your site. Just make sure that you're categorizing it appropriately so that you're not counting it as maybe the same type of conversion as somebody who's raising their hand and asking to talk to a sales team. Some of the other leading indicators, page traffic, right?
That's pretty straightforward one. What type of traffic are you getting to that page? Is that traffic staying on your so time on page, time on site? How long are people staying around on that piece of content?
It might be a lot longer if there's not a form there now. I can tell you how many times I click a link and I see a form and I just bounce immediately in those same instances. If I had seen that the content was ungated when I landed on the site, then I can guarantee that I would have spent much more time. So that's an area where you can get a sense of how long people are staying on that page and is that improving over time.
You have to be a little bit careful with that, right? For instance, if you've got, let's say, download PDF links on that same page, the time on page, time on site statistic could be a little bit misleading. So how long does it actually take you to go onto a site and click download now button? Five seconds.
So your time on site metrics wouldn't look great there, but it's an angle to consider. You also want to be looking at the lagging indicators, right? And those are going to be more focused on pipeline. That's what we all care about as marketers.
Pipeline and Close One revenue. As it pertains to pipeline, your lead volume is going to drop. We've discussed this. It's going to drop because you're cutting out a lot of those low intent leads.
As long as you prepare your colleagues, the stakeholders, you should be OK there. Looking at lead and pipeline velocity, we talked about the pipeline velocity formula before. You're making it easier to consume content. You should effectively be able to shorten the number of days that it takes for someone to come inbound and convert into Close One revenue.
And so you would expect that your velocity metrics are going to improve as well. Lead conversion rates. Right now, if you've got a bunch of low intent leads that are mucking up your funnel and you cut those out, guess what? All your conversion rates are going to look a whole lot better right away.
As side traffic trends like we talked about before, bounce right time on site, unique visitors, always going to keep an eye on. There's other metrics that you could focus on, excuse me, other tactics you could focus on to improve some of these metrics as well, like effective cross-linking strategies and so on and so forth. But I think ICP traffic trends is another one that is worthwhile to consider if you have the tech in place to be able to monitor if you're driving the right people to your site. Ideally, if you have that tech in place, then you're in a position where if you've got an effective content distribution strategy, you should see a pretty significant lift in the ICP traffic coming and staying on your site.
Because you're producing content for this ICP. If you're distributing it to them directly, and you're creating an improved buyer experience for them to absorb the content, then those trends are going to be looking pretty strong. The number of ICP specific inquiries, ideally, would go up as well. And your sales cycle should be effectively a little bit shorter than it was before.
So that's kind of a high level view of those leading and lagging indicators. So to recap, we talked about how to prepare for the shift. Beltfront considerations, looking at your performance data, band-aid approach versus a phased approach. What's going to happen with all the leads?
We talked about the actual ungating content process, the impact on email nurture tracks. What's your SDR team going to do with that idle time? And who do you want to talk to within your business? And what do you want to talk to them about, as far as expectation setting for those stakeholders that will likely be impacted now that you don't have those low-income leads coming to your site, and you're asking yourself something to follow up on them.
And then lastly, we talked about those leading and lagging indicators. So you've got your measurements system in place now. So from here, now the focus needs to be on content distribution. I think we'll probably save that topic for another podcast, because that's a deep one.
And there's a lot of different directions that we can take things from there. But bottom line is, just because your content is ungated, does not mean that everything is going to magically improve. You still need to make sure that you're pushing that content out there to the right people, that you're participating in communities and engaging directly with your clients and prospects. Not all the content that you're out there distributing needs to be written content, long-form content.
Some of this can be summarized just by way of participation, effective participation in inside of communities. It's a great way to spread and improve your brand reputation. But like I said, content distribution is a topic for another day. So with that, I am going to wrap it here and sign off.
Thanks for listening.