The Art of Balance and Gated Content

Champions of content David Meerman Scott and Seth Godin regularly speak and write and blog about creating valuable content - remarkable content is the buzz phrase - for your company's website visitors, clients and prospects. They testify that providing information is one of the best ways to spread the word about a product. And they are right - booming retweets, share widgets and the advent of social sites like StumbleUpon and Digg and Reddit are evidence of this. Online content is shared. A lot.

So what? Where's the issue with the gate? What is a gate? Who cares? Well, to work backwards with this barrage of questions, marketers and web designers care - and sales people. In my experience, sales people probably care a lot more than they know to - they are lead greedy, as they should be. A gate is usually an information gathering form before a piece of online content. It requires that the person who wants to access your company's content give a little - a little info of their own - before passing through the gate to the said content. The most important information gathered is usually an email address and a phone number. People don't generally like giving out their email addresses or phone numbers to companies they are only just learning about, and therefore, ultimately the issue is whether or not a marketer should place a gate strategically in front of a piece of content that would be really helpful and graciously received by a prospective client or lead.

An Over-analysis: Free Love vs. Gate It All

For the most part both Scott and Godin encourage the proposed content - ebooks, whitepapers, videos, articles, and so on - be available for free. Free does not just mean "no money," but requirement-free or subscription-free - payment-by-email-address-free. They believe - especially Scott - website visitors and users and interested parties should be able to access the information without sacrificing their personal information, without fear of being badgered by a sales person. I agree. I also think it works really well for book sales, but I'll get to that.

Gate it all - while I cannot say that this is HubSpot's professional stance as an organization, I did just have an interesting conversation with an unnamed Inbound Marketing Consultant there about landing pages and gating content. The consultant's said that for most businesses - HubSpot works with mostly small ones - content either takes a lot of time or costs a lot of money to produce, so the business should get a lead out of it. As we were having this conversation, this nameless consultant, who was very, very helpful as always, by the way, was showing me a lead nurturing email that was full of links to one landing page after another.

Though I have not tested it and am not sure if I care to, I'm pretty sure sending an email full of forms, essentially, would not work in my industry. If I was a marketing firm targeting other marketers, I think an email full of links to forms would be really efficient. Marketers are generally ready to fill out forms at every turn. However, in the wellness industry - specifically the massage industry - an email full of links to forms would likely seem like an email full of - wait for it - gates. And that's gates with a negative conotation.

In Truth, There are No Hard Lines

If you analyze gating to death, which I am currently doing, there are no hard lines because, in my opinion, the definition of a gate becomes blurry. Really, Scott and Godin do gate, by an expanded definition of the word as I defined it paragraphs ago. Both of them write and sell books, rationing only parts of their content for "free" and literally selling - for dough - the rest. Though they do not gather information through online forms in the same way HubSpot does, they do balance what they gatelessly give to the world for free through their blogs and speeches and book references with the hard boundary of book sales.

It should also be said, and it has not been overlooked, that HubSpot does not really gate everything. Website Grader, which I highly recommend every small business check out immediately, doesn't really even "live" on the company site. And its inbound marketing blog is a wealth of information, and of course, you are not required to subscribe to it before you read on.

The Usual Answer: Balance

Being a one-woman marketing team who has to work closely with a one-woman sales team who wants leads, leads, leads, balance, as always, seems to be the best answer. Not too much unlike the marketing experts and companies above, I find that I have accidentally been gating what I have to and balancing that with freedom.

At Lauterstein-Conway Massage School, a company I provide sales and marketing consulting for, we only gate information that contains pricing - massage school tuition and rates - and we offer pretty much everything else for free. It works because at the end of the day, everyone really wants to know how much something they want costs. That's what they really want. But the hope, of course, is that through our free content and shared knowledge, we will be educating and then guiding our website visitors and leads down the breadcrumb trail to needing, despite any gates, more information - information they will want to pay for with their email addresses and phone numbers.

Thoughts?