In this week’s episode we build on our topic of making more of the traffic that is already on your site by focusing on a specific tactic: Gated Content. We talk about what it is, whether or not it works, and how to get started. Contact us to get started with Michigan web design.
Transcript:
Welcome back today we’re going to be following up on last week’s topic about how to make more of the traffic authority on your site by discussing a specific tactic that Technic is gated content so if you are new to this you may be asking what is gated content and today we’re going to cover that as well as whether or not it works and how do we get started if this is something you decide that you want to implement on your site so the idea behind gated content is that you have a piece of content on your site it’s something that people are actively interested in in viewing and that instead of just having it out there and available you ask people to give you something first usually they have to register or sign up or for a newsletter or something like that it can be as simple in a lot of cases as collecting a name and email address although I have seen some forms if you’ve got a piece of content people really want you can ask them for a lot and they may put it in so I have seen some that ask for you know a company name job title you know industry categories specific questions that people have to answer it these for the most part I think you’re talking about a relatively small barrier to entry because the bigger the barrier the the more chance that instead of filling out your your form and proceeding to the content people may just bounce and so that’s the biggest question and the
biggest objection that people have to gated content is they go well does it work or am I going to totally kill my conversion rates by requiring people to give up some information then if they don’t give up the information and they bounce instead of getting a conversion maybe I get nothing so we started using gated content on our site I guess a little over a year ago from from about now and I was extremely skeptical that gated content would work I just I I assumed that it would hurt our conversion rates that people wouldn’t put their information in and I got to tell you I was dead wrong about this gaming content does work it works really well as a way of capturing more information about the people that are on your site I think the reality of the situation is that we’re going through a bit of a generational shift in the workforce we’ve got more Millennials coming in more baby boomers on the way out and in general what that means is that you’ve just got a workforce that’s just more used to and comfortable with the internet I don’t think people thinks too much about about putting their email address in anymore especially if they’re going to get something they want because I mean really let’s think about it what’s the what’s the worst that’s going to happen you wind up on our mailing list you don’t want to be on takes like two seconds to unsubscribe for most mailing lists at this point especially any that have been created relatively recently they’re all on platforms that make that process very easy people are very used to it and people just recognize that they’re not really they’re not nearly losing anything if they give you a little information you get something you want that they want and that’s what’s at the heart of this is essentially you’re giving something they want and you do have to pride them with a piece of content that they really want it can’t just be you know like you’re on your blog and you require people to sign up to few blog posts or something that people expect to get you know the content that’s generally available to them on the Internet but if you give them something that really answers a burning question or or if you can present it in such a way that it that it looks like a resource or an asset that they would want to have people are more than willing to put in a little information to check that out for ourselves on our own site we started with a pricing guide the idea is that most of the people when they hit your site the first thing they want to know is what are your services cost and this was a way that we could answer that question and still get some information out of them we’re answering their question what we’re also saying look who are you and what this is done is it’s given us a lot of a lot more transparency on who’s on our site and who’s asking that question what are your services cost and it also cuts way down on people that timely have to spend vetting people that aren’t really clients a lot of times we get traffic from people who really are looking for you know something as simple as a Wix or a Squarespace site and this is a conversation we don’t have to have because we let them know well here’s what our services cost me oh that’s that’s not me and they move on so cutting down on the amount of time you have to spend qualifying your leaves is a big side benefit of this but it also just gets you more information about who’s on your site and and sometimes you can see that it is someone you’re interested in talking to and it gives you that information so that you can reach out right away when you want to so does gated content work I would say absolutely our experience has been unequivocal via positives and I would encourage you to give it a try if you’re on the fence about it because you think it might hurt your conversion rates don’t be if you’re providing people with a real worthwhile piece of content and again it does have to be worthwhile but people are the people are going to go for that the next point that is how do you get started doing this technically it’s really not that complicated the probably the largest investment of time and effort is actually just in creating the piece of content that you’re going to be giving people in exchange for their contact information. So for us it was developing a pricing guide or a website buyers guide but for somebody else if you don’t have you know a one-sheet of your services or something that that you’re going to make available to people building that out and presenting it in such a way that people are going to want it is going to be your first and foremost challenge after that it can be as simple as you if you have a standard you know website today content management system form builder that kind of thing you’re really just building a form that says what’s your name and email address and then when they submit that form you redirect them to a page on the site where they can download the resource they want it’s not like you need to password protect it or put it in some big secure vault in most cases people don’t find content on your site unless you link to it in your navigation unless you give them a way to get there for this page where they download the resource you just don’t put it in your navigation you link to it from the form people will find the form they they’re not gonna find the page on their own most likely and you can do things like hide it from search engines and stuff if you don’t want it showing up in organic search results but people will find their way there they’ll download it and as long as that works in terms of how you’ve got your your your tracking and analytics and metrics and stuff set up that’s sufficient it really doesn’t take any more than half an hour an hour’s effort once you’ve got all the resources to create a simple landing page build a simple call to action set up a form it’s pretty simple annexing at you big gains in terms of increasing the number of leads and increasing your conversion rate on your website so thanks for watching today and I’ll see you next time.