Blogs and landing pages are all great when you want to boost your SEO and drive traffic to your website. But how do you turn that traffic into tangible leads? One strategy is to offer gated content.
Gated content is content that your audience can access after filling out a signup form. This might be a PDF guide about a niche aspect of your industry, a whitepaper, or free templates that your audience might use. The signup form typically asks for the user’s email address or information about their preferences.
There is some risk when it comes to gated content. Customers can be wary about sharing their contact information, for fear of their inbox being spammed with emails that don’t relate to them. Many marketers fear putting in the work to create gated content only to have that gated content collect dust on their website. But with these tips, you can create engaging and successful gated content that boosts your lead generation.
DO Create an Engaging Landing Page for the Gated Content
The webpage where users come across your gated content in the first place is called a landing page. Acing the landing page is key to drawing attention to your gated content. This is easier said than done. The average conversion rate for landing pages is about 2.35%. If you want to make them worth it, you want something closer to 10%.
Your landing page should give an overview on the topic covered in more detail within your gated content. It might explain the importance of the information held in the gated content. If your gated content is a template, your landing page might explain how the template could be used or the benefits of that template.
Make sure to work keywords naturally into your landing page and use best SEO practices to drive traffic to the page in the first place. At the end of the landing page, the call to action will encourage readers to sign up and be granted access to the gated content.
DON’T Worry About Keywords or SEO in the Gated Content
The goal of your gated content is not to boost SEO. In fact, your gated content will probably be downloadable content, so using SEO practices would likely be useless. The goal of gated content is to provide in-depth, helpful, and engaging content that your audience will enjoy and trust. The more your gated content helps your audience, the more likely they are to return to your company, thus building a lead.
DO Offer Strong Incentive
When someone fills out your signup form to access your gated content, they don’t want something that is simply a longer blog. Your gated content should offer real incentive. Exclusive insights, a thorough guide, or tools and resources that your audience can use for their own needs.
It’s also important that your gated content be relevant to your audience. The gated content should pique their interest and make them excited to learn more. Your landing page should carry the burden of proving how relevant the content is. Make sure that your content follows through.
DON’T Lump All Your Leads into One Email List
Imagine the successful scenario with your gated content: it gains you dozens and then hundreds of leads and downloads. Between different gated content offerings, you now have hundreds of emails where you can send promotional information or news about your business. What do you do with those emails?
If you put them all in the same email list, that means everyone who signs up will receive all of your promotional and marketing email, every time it goes out. That’s an easy way to make them tired of seeing your business. They may immediately delete the emails until they start to go into the spam folder automatically. They may quickly unsubscribe.
When you segment your email lists, you create an organization strategy to send out personalized marketing. Use the gated content that generated the lead as a way to get a sense of their interests or priorities. From there, you can make sure to send out emails that relate to your new leads.
DO Measure Gated Content Analytics
Once those leads start coming in, make sure you keep an eye on the analytics. How many downloads are there for each piece of gated content? How many hits did each landing page receive?
These analytics can help you in a few ways. For one thing, they can help you to segment your audience into different email lists. They can also help you to see what works and what doesn’t work about your gated content. Your analytics will help you make better gated content in the future, and understand where best to dedicate your resources.
