This post was written on behalf of VTQ by Mimi Moore

As businesses strive to outperform their competitors and captivate audiences, their strategies for distributing their content can significantly impact their success. The choice between gating and ungating content is pivotal, shaping the dynamics of audience engagement and information flow.

From individual content producers to global companies, the question of whether or not to gate certain pieces of content can be a hot topic of debate.

In today’s digital age, content is not just king – it’s the entire kingdom. It educates, informs, entertains, and connects businesses with their audiences. However, this realm of opportunity comes with a critical decision for marketers and content strategists: to gate or not to gate?

The decision is crucial because it profoundly influences how companies generate leads, maintain customer relationships, and build brand authority.

Gated: Trading Trust for Knowledge

Gated content, accessible only through the exchange of information, is guarded by default. It offers a wealth of resources – whitepapers, eBooks, exclusive webinars – designed to enrich and engage. The price of admission? Your contact details and permission to interact are valuable assets.

This approach aims to enhance engagement and capture leads. It’s a swap of trust for knowledge, where the currency is information. Gating content has several advantages and disadvantages, each of which should be examined alongside your overall business strategy.

Advantages of gated content include:

Lead generation: Information from interested users can be collected, converting anonymous visitors into identifiable leads.
Quality leads: Content attracts engaged users who are typically conducting research for a future purchasing decision.
Content value: Gating enhances the content’s perceived worth, giving it authority through exclusivity.
Market insights: By requiring users to fill out forms, businesses can gather data on their market demographics and preferences, helping tailor future marketing strategies and product developments.
Segmentation and personalization: Gated content allows companies to segment their audience based on the information provided during access. This segmentation can lead to more personalized marketing efforts, increasing the effectiveness of campaigns.

Disadvantages of gated content are:

Barrier to entry: The barrier is that users must provide their personal information, which can deter those concerned about privacy and spam.
SEO impact: Gated content cannot be typically indexed by search engines, which limits its ability to attract organic traffic and enhance visibility.
User experience: A sign-up barrier could disrupt the user’s engagement journey, affecting their experience and perception of your brand.
Limited reach: By gating content, you limit the number of people accessing it, potentially preventing the broader brand exposure that could have been achieved with open access.
Dependence on quality: The effectiveness of gated content heavily depends on the quality and exclusivity of the content offered. If users feel the content is not worth exchanging their information, they may negatively perceive the brand.

Ungated Content: An Open World

In contrast, ungated content lives in the Wild West of the digital landscape. It’s the articles you peruse over morning coffee and the how-to videos that guide your DIY projects. This openness fosters a different relationship based on accessibility, shareability, and immediate trust.

It is content such as blogs, infographics, and videos that say, “Let me show you what I know, no strings attached.” The goal is to inform and invite you into a relationship where your engagement is voluntary and appreciated.

Advantages of ungated content:

Increased reach: Ungated content can easily be distributed and shared without a barrier to access, significantly increasing its viewership.
SEO benefits: Search engines can crawl and index this content, making it more likely to appear in search results and drive organic traffic to the website.
Brand authority: By freely sharing knowledge and expertise, ungated content establishes a company as a thought leader in its industry, which builds trust and credibility with its audience.
Engagement and interaction: Ungated content often promotes higher levels of engagement and interaction from users, as they can access and share the content freely, increasing comments, likes, and other forms of direct user interaction.
Speed of access: Ungated content allows for immediate consumption without requiring users to fill out forms or provide personal information, appealing to users who value ease and efficiency in accessing information.

Disadvantages of ungated content include:

Lead generation: Without a way to capture user information, converting content viewers into leads is more challenging, which may impact lead nurturing and sales strategies.
Perceived value: Because content is freely available, there’s a risk that the content may be perceived as less valuable.
Difficulty in tracking ROI: Without the gating mechanisms, tracking the content’s direct return on investment (ROI) is more complicated because connecting downloads or views to sales conversions is more challenging.
Overexposure risk: There’s a risk of content overexposure, where competitors might use valuable information or become so widespread that it loses its impact or uniqueness, potentially diluting the brand’s unique selling propositions.
Lack of audience insights: Ungated content provides fewer opportunities for collecting detailed user data. Without registration forms or other data collection methods, it’s challenging to gather insights into who is consuming the content; their preferences or behavior can impede tailored marketing efforts and customer understanding.

To Gate or Not to Gate?

How do you know when to raise your content drawbridge or leave it down?

If your primary goal is growth, then the leads generated by gated content are a powerful motivator. Content consumption is linked directly to lead capture, providing a clear metric for success. Alternatively, if brand awareness or thought leadership is the goal, ungated content may better serve by maximizing exposure and encouraging shares and discussion across digital platforms.

When deciding whether to gate, consider the content and how it aligns with the audience that you’re trying to reach. High-quality content with original research, unique insights, or in-depth analysis may justify gating as it contains exclusive benefits. However, the challenge lies in convincing your targets about the benefits of providing their information.

Segmenting potential customers to understand their behavior toward gated and ungated content can inform your content strategy. For example, B2B customers seeking answers to specific business challenges may find actionable intelligence in white papers or industry reports and be willing to exchange their contact information for access. In contrast, a B2C buyer may be more engaged with easily accessible tips, guides, and how-to articles that help them make informed decisions without providing their contact details.

Effective Strategies for Gating Content

If you decide to gate your content to support business goals, you can take several approaches to make the form filling out attractive.

Creating value: This approach offers content that feels like an equal trade for the user’s contact information. It’s essential to ensure that what’s behind the gate cannot be easily found anywhere else for free.

Exclusive content: Offer in-depth content, leverage proprietary data, or deliver insights that readers cannot find elsewhere. This could be original research, comprehensive guides, or expert analysis that speaks directly to the needs and interests of your target audience.

High-quality production: The higher the quality of your content, the more likely it’s to be perceived as valuable. Professionally designed eBooks, high-quality videos, or interactive elements in online courses are a few ways to improve the quality of your content.

Immediate utility: Ensure the content has an immediate application or use for your readers. How-to guides, templates, toolkits, or anything that offers users a “quick win” can enhance its appeal.

Minimize the Pain of Gating

To minimize the friction and to encourage potential customers, it’s critical to streamline the user experience. Start by simplifying forms, requesting only essential information like an email address to begin building a relationship. Make sure these forms are quick to load and easy to fill out, with autofill options where applicable, and regularly test them across various devices and browsers for consistent functionality.

Additionally, maintain clarity and transparency by clearly communicating what users are signing up for, how their information will be used, and what they can expect in terms of communication, including details on privacy policies.

Ungated: Generating Leads vs. Building Trust

Some organizations opt for an open approach to their content strategy, offering all content without requiring user information. While not capturing contact information makes sales teams nervous, there are valid reasons to consider this an option.

Since 39% of people provide fake information on gated forms, there’s a high risk of gathering unreliable data, compounded by privacy concerns based on regulations like the GDPR and CCPA.

By letting customers consume as much and as many different types of content as they want, your company establishes itself as an expert and can better educate visitors about your products and services. This approach can shorten the sales cycle, especially the time between interest and purchase. With 75% of buyers preferring a rep-free sales experience, offering enough content to keep buyers engaged is an intelligent strategy that prevents losing them to a competitor.

Finding a Middle Ground

Regarding gated and ungated content, it’s not an all-or-nothing decision. Different models allow you to do both, and often, giving your audience a taste of your content is enough to help them decide to trade their details for access.

Hybrid models are a strategic middle ground, allowing businesses to capture some benefits of both approaches. This model openly offers a portion of content while reserving more detailed, comprehensive, or exclusive content behind a gate.

Partial or Mid-Gating provides a preview or an executive summary of the content without requiring any information. Users who want further insights can then choose to provide their details to access the full content.

Strategies like these allow businesses to soften the edges of gating, making the exchange of information feel more like a natural part of the user experience rather than a barrier.

Embracing Boundless Content

When deciding between gated and ungated content, your company’s business objectives, the content’s value, and your audience’s preferences should all play a role in the decision.

Gating should be reserved for your most crucial content, offering previews or summaries to ensure transparency and respect for the user’s journey. Remember, 81% of customers will not download content when faced with a form.

Conversely, ungated content enhances SEO and accessibility, boosting your brand’s visibility and authority. Remember that the results may not always be predictable but are usually measurable. When Cognism, a B2B lead generation and marketing company, proactively ungated their marketing content, they saw increased web traffic, more inbound leads, and reduced cost-per-lead for their marketing campaigns. Similarly, the CEO of Aha Media Group reported a 102% increase in organic traffic to her company’s website after ungating.

When Dynamic Yield decided to experiment with ungating case studies, their downloads increased by 62%, and ungating guides increased downloads by 15%. However, gating case studies also led to a 13% increase in demo requests, highlighting the trade-off between broad reach and lead quality that marketers must consider.

Ultimately, you’re producing your content to be seen, experienced, and used. Because successful marketing is about building relationships, putting content behind a gate may make sense in some cases but defeat the purpose of making connections and building trust in others. You can effectively enhance lead quality and user engagement by balancing the insights from offering gated and ungated content and tailoring your approach to your audience’s preferences.