What is gated content?
As the name suggests, gated content is any piece of content that is locked behind some form of virtual barrier and can only be accessed by logging in or submitting one’s contact information.
If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: What is the purpose of gated content?
The main purpose of gated content is lead generation. By making your content only accessible via logging in or submitting one’s contact information, you ‘force’ visitors to become leads by signing up for an account or filling in a form.
Question #2: What types of content can I gate?
You can gate virtually any types of content you could think of, including:
- News articles
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Digital artwork
- Reports
- Pricing information
Keep in mind, however, that just because you can does not necessarily mean you should. You see, gating content may negatively impact the overall user experience for your visitors. Not only will doing so make it more tedious for them to get to the content they are looking for, it may also make them feel as if you are purposely holding the content they want hostage just to force them to give up their contact information.
There is a way to do content gating without making life hard for your visitors, but we will talk about it in more detail later.
Question #3: What are the benefits of gated content?
The main benefits of gated content are:
- It helps generate leads
- It provides valuable insight about your audience
- It protects your content from scrapers
We have already seen how it helps with lead generation earlier, so let us focus on the insights and scrapers in this section.
First, requiring visitors to sign up, log in, or submit their contact information to access your content, you learn more about who your target audience is instead of just seeing how many people are accessing your content.
In addition to this, you can use the contact information you collect to create lookalike audiences (i.e., audiences that are similar to the people on your email list) to show your digital ads to, allowing you to reach more of the people who might be interested in what you have to sell.
Content scrapers, on the other hand, are bots that are specifically designed to scour the web for content they can steal and post on another website without crediting the original author. Of course, they can only steal content that is publicly available, so if you lock yours behind a gate, then they cannot access it.
Question #4: What are the downsides to publishing this type content?
As we have seen earlier, the biggest downsides to publishing gated content are that if you do it incorrectly, you risk providing a poor user experience to your visitors and making them feel that you are more concerned with getting their contact information and selling to them than providing them with valuable content.
Needless to say, unless you publish truly innovative content that cannot be found anywhere else, there is a big chance that your website visitors would just move on to another website then go through the hassle of creating an account or surrendering their contact information.
Question #5: How can I use it effectively?
To use gated content effectively, you need to:
- Publish content worth signing up or submitting one’s contact information for
- Make it less obvious that you just want to capture leads
Let us take a closer look at each one:
First, some types of content are more suited to gating than others. Examples include:
- Reports
- Webinars
- eBooks
- Templates
- Cheat sheets
All these offer clear value, effectively making visitors feel like they are actually getting a fair offer for their time and contact information. In contrast, things like regular blog posts and news articles do not.
Second, if you can make it less obvious that you are just trying to collect leads, then you should absolutely do it. One way to do so would be to make it so that your content gets sent via email. This way, you naturally have to ask the visitor for their contact information instead of just asking for the sake of asking.
You can check this article from InstaPage to know how to use it for lead generation.