Reader-led Content Gating
What can B2C paywall strategy can teach us about Content Gating? It's not your content that matters, it's the reader.
Key Takeaways
- Content gating should be reader-led, not content-led.
- Content-led decisions ignore the complexity of modern buyer journeys, and lead to bad buyer experiences.
- This is much easier to do than you think!
Building the right tech stack is key
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How to choose the right tech stack for your company?
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What to consider when choosing the right tech stack?
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What are the most relevant factors to consider?
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What tech stack do we use at Simpletech?
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The Current Debate
The debate around Content Gating centres on the misconception that it must be a binary choice.
I'd imagine this debate has come up for you internally as you attempt to balance the (often contradictory) objectives of reach vs. conversion, brand vs. leads, and so on.
While there is a trend towards ungating everything, there is a cost to that decision, and most fall somewhere in between. We'll gate some of our content.
How do we decide what will or won't be gated?
It tends to be a content-led decision, based on the cost, scarcity and perceived value of that content, mixed in with a simplistic sense of where in the funnel it will perform.
A new approach is needed
The goal of your content strategy is not reach or leads. The goal is revenue, reach and leads are just the leading metrics that are easy to measure.
Getting too bogged down in those can distract from the more important question: who is reading, and what do we want them to do?
The Buyer Journey is Complex
That question is not simple, as Gartner’s B2B Buyer Journey shows. Your customers don’t go on a neat, linear journey from problem → solution.
Gartner divide the purchasing journey into 6 “jobs”:
- Problem Identification
- Solution Exploration
- Requirements Building
- Supplier Selection
- Validation
- Consensus Creation
While the first 4 are fairly sequential, validation and consensus creation are ongoing processes that will occur throughout the B2B buyer journey. This will drive stakeholders, whether known or new parties to the decision making process, to different types of content at different points.
Even for individual stakeholders, we often lean on unvalidated assumptions. At Stage X, people will look for Information Y.
In reality, buyers engage in what Gartner calls "looping"; that is, they revisit the 6 "jobs" in an unpredictable way. In fact, data showed that each job is revisited in +75% of the deals they studied.
In this context, it’s easy to see how a content gating strategy that centres on broad assumptions that content of a particular format or type is “bottom of funnel” and another is “top of funnel” is going to lead to unwanted friction. One reader’s bottom of funnel is another’s top, depending on where they are in their buyer journey, their experience, and their role within their organisation’s broader buyer journey.
I say unwanted friction deliberately. Friction is often a dirty word in Marketing, but it can be a valuable tool that helps to further a customer relationship. Read more about that here.
Reader-Led Gating: A Lesson from B2C Paywall Strategy.
There will always be a trade-off to a content gate. It's a question of balancing buyer experience with attribution and conversion to the best of our ability.
The misconception that exists in B2B marketing, though, is that it needs to be a binary choice on a given piece of content.
It doesn't. Demand-Genius' founders spent the last 5 years helping the likes of BBC, Forbes and Financial Times implement dynamic paywalls.
Their business depends on their ability to balance those different goals optimally. The content itself is probably the least important variable in a paywall decision. What matters is the reader, their relationship with the brand, and the next action they want them to take. The gating decision is made individually for each user, based on those factors.
We've built Demand-Genius to bring the same level of sophistication to B2B content.
Demand-Genius lets you adopt reader-first content gating, without code.
I get it, getting web development resources in a B2B business can be a nightmare.
That's why we made Demand-Genius completely code-free. As a marketer, you can adapt your gating, profiling and pop-up strategy in every stage of the customer lifecycle, in literally minutes.
👇 Don't believe us? See how easy it is! 👇
This doesn't just benefit your prospects. Yes, it gives us you tools to provide a more fairer value exchange and remove friction from the buyer experience. It also allows you to optimize, where necessary, for your own commercial outcomes.
It gives us the tools to balance our own needs - attribution and lead generation - with our prospects' needs, to build a content strategy that can support a more efficient overall go-to-market motion.
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