The Current Debate

Content Marketers have long debated the best approach to maximising the impact of their work, balancing broad and often slightly conflicting objectives.

While not completely unfair to characterise the debate simply as a balance of reach vs. conversion, brand vs. leads, short vs. long term objectives, there is also a lot more nuance. Humans are funny creatures and often, there are subconscious impacts to small decisions.

There are a myriad of perspectives and complexities to the debate. Truly, the right answer probably lies somewhere in the middle depending on your marketing and brand objectives, which are likely defined by your business model.

To summarise the key points proponents of each approach might make:

To make sure I wasn’t missing anything, I asked Chat GPT for one more point on each side of the debate. It had some good thoughts, and while it was tempting to just take the credit, I don't want to make the AI angry.

Fair play, ChatGPT.

While there seems to be a gradual trend towards opening content up, the majority still adopt a hybrid approach.

Very few business’ objectives are binary and most produce diverse content in terms of format and topic, so we can adapt our strategy for different groups of content.

Typically, the decision centres on the goal for that form of content, with most falling into one of two buckets.

Top of funnel content: Things like blog posts, infographics, and videos that capture attention, and can be produced in volume relatively cheaply.

Bottom of funnel content: Typically higher value content, at least in the producer’s eye (ie. it took a while and they were really proud of it). Content like webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, eGuides, Templates, and handy tools/calculators. These are often gated.

Scarcity is often another big variable in the debate. As content has become saturated and borderline commoditised, original research or benchmark data can cut through that noise brilliantly and justify a gate.

A new approach is needed

There’s two big problems with adopting such a content-led approach.

1. The content goal is unimportant. Our goal for the reader is far more relevant.

The goal of your content strategy is not reach or leads. It is to support an effective GTM strategy as best you can; reach and leads are just the leading metrics that we could easily 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?

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.

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 be of limited use. 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.

2. We have very little data on which to base our decisions

Buyer journeys and engagement are poorly understood due to technological limitations and the relative complexity of those journeys when compared with consumer subscriptions.

This leads to two potential problems:

Firstly, 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.

Secondly and more damagingly, we can consider those assumptions to be validated or invalidated, but based on all the wrong signals.

Lets look at an example:

• Content A is identified as "conversion" content
• It performs poorly in a last touch attribution model.
• We stop promoting Content A, unaware that it is essential to one of our buyer's “jobs”.

That "job" isn't captured by an attribution model that has tunnel vision for particular inflection points (MQL, SQL, Closed) defined by our sales cycle, not our buyer’s journey.

In this example, we might deem Content A ineffective. We stop promoting it, and we avoid that topic or format in our content schedule. In doing so, our content strategy focuses entirely on certain buyer "jobs", not because they are most critical, but because they are the only elements we can measure and therefore deem impactful.

Without more sophisticated means of measuring how content performs in terms of buyer "jobs", rather than sales-centric conversion points, any insight can be misleading - it is highly likely to overlook or misrepresent that content’s performance.

Which brings me to my point.

Re-framing the Debate: From Content-led to Reader-led

We need to stop viewing this debate from the perspective of the content we produce. We need to view it from the perspective of the specific individual accessing it.

Each piece of content forms a vital touchpoint in that individual’s buyer journey. Why let that touchpoint be guided by our content strategy? Instead, we suggest you base it on an understanding of that individual buyer journey.

Let’s look at an example. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that we operate a typical 6-stage sales process and that user interacts with our website in every stage. We can track the experience a typical content-first approach provides that prospect, vs. a reader-first approach.

No fewer leads. More engagement. More credibility. More insight. Much more impact.

That first interaction is crucial. It goes from an event - a form fill, a lead - to the beginning of a known user relationship, in which we can now provide a content experience tailored to that individual. No more unnecessary friction and where friction does exist, it is carefully deployed to achieve a specific outcome. For example, data capture at a crucial stage in the journey.

I’d imagine this all sounds pretty good in theory. The challenge is in actually implementing a reader-led approach with a small team that lacks technical resources. Your enterprise Martech stack will likely enable this, but it will be a significant piece of work for a small team. For SMBs, a reader-led approach might seem completely out of reach.

Luckily, we created a better way.

Demand-Genius lets you adopt reader-first content gating, without code.

Returning to our example, lets say we want to get a bit more nuanced. Maybe the objective changes in Demo stage. No longer do we want to optimise for engagement with open content - now, we want to prioritise capturing feedback that can support our AE at this crucial inflection point.

Using Demand-Genius, we can do that really easily.

Without any code, just pull the “Demo” stage straight from your CRM. Then, use the controls below to change whatever you want about that experience.

The specifics of the value exchange you provide will vary depending on the type of content and your business goals, but the key is repositioning the reader at the centre of the decision, not the content.

This doesn't just benefit our prospects. Yes, it gives us the tools to provide a more fairer value exchange and remove friction from the buyer experience. It also allows us to optimize, where necessary, for our own commercial outcomes where necessary. It gives us the tools to balance our own needs - attribution and lead generation - with our prospects, to build a content strategy that can support a more efficient overall go-to-market motion.