The White Paper Question: To Gate or Not To Gate?

Posted by Ambal Balakrishnan May 6th 10

How should marketers leverage content? Which content should be free? Which content should be gated to genereate leads? We asked white paper experts: "How should marketers balance the need for free content (helpful for prospects decision making) Vs. the need to have content that produces a steady flow of good leads (that can directed to sales team)?"

Jonathan Kantor

Blog WhitePaperPundit Twitter Jonathan_Kantor

"B2B marketers must leverage their content via social media sites.”

Jonathan Kantor's Bio

Jonathan Kantor is the principal and founder of The Appum Group, "The White Paper Company", and has been producing commercial white papers for the past 11 years. He is also the author of the White Paper Pundit blog. Jonathan's experience with white papers is also coupled with over 25 years of enterprise business experience with leading industry innovators such as Apple Computer, Microsoft, Digital Equipment Corporation, and J.D. Edwards Enterprise Software (now a division of Oracle Corporation). This experience included a variety of sales, marketing, business development, and management positions.

Jonathan Kantor's Tip

Today the bloom has come off the rose with regard to requiring user registration for content as a means to generate sales leads. Decision makers are simply tired of dealing with the unwanted and ever expanding piles of B2B spam that is associated with this process. In fact, according to a recent survey from Spiceworks.com, more than 75% of business professionals don’t sign up anymore for ‘freebies’ such as white papers and studies.

Instead of the traditional model where content was used to ‘bait’ the customer into giving their name and email address as a way to generate leads, B2B marketers must now leverage their content via social media sites and build a base of willing followers that have a genuinely interest in the content. This of course, assumes that you HAVE great content to share from the start.

Given the current trend away from content registration, the ‘give it away for free’ social media model increases the chances of content being ‘ReTweeted’, or passed along to followers increasing the exposure for that content many times more than the traditional ‘bait’ and ‘capture’ method could ever have hoped for.

One example of the power of free distribution is a white paper from Ad Age called “Shiny New Things”, addressing the issue of early adopters in the digital product life cycle. When it was first announced via Twitter in March, the paper quickly went viral, generating hundreds of retweets on Twitter. While the volume of reTweets has dropped off after one month, the paper is still being mentioned in Social Media with regularity. This degree of exposure would not have taken place using a more traditional ‘registration required’ white paper campaign.

Jonathan Kantor Recommends

Generating More Leads with Video White Papers
Free document distribution sites: Scribd.com, DocStoc.com, Slideshare.net, Gazhoo.com, Yudu.com, and WhitePapers.org.
Blog sharing sites such as BizSugar.com, Sphinn.com, and Reddit.com.
WhitePaperPundit: The Friday FREE White Paper List, a listing of free white papers from weekly Twitter Tweets that don’t require registration, posted each Friday.
Twitter search criteria set to keywords: “White Paper”, and “White Papers”.
Google Alerts set to “White Paper”, and “White Papers”.

Michele Linn

Blog Savvy B2B Marketing Twitter MicheleLinn

"Create ungated content to generate awareness early in the buying cycle"

Michele Linn's Bio

Michele Linn is a freelance marketing writer specializing creating buyer-focused B2B marketing content, such as white papers, research reports, feature articles and case studies. Her business is devoted to making the job of B2B marketers easier by producing effective content and providing insights on how they can market it. Her website is Linn Communications.

Michele Linn's Tip

In general, marketers should consider free/ungated content for two reasons:

You want to increase the reach of your content: If your goal is awareness, it’s a great idea to not require registration. I often come back to this finding from David Meerman Scott in Worldwide Rave: “When you eliminate the requirement of supplying personal information in order to receive something, the number of downloads or views goes up by as much as a factor of 50. That’s right—if you require an e-mail address or other personal information, perhaps only 2 percent of your audience will bother to download your stuff.” Pretty compelling reason not to require registration.
You don’t have an immediate plan for follow up: If you’re collecting names for a rainy day, don’t do it – you need to start the conversation with the prospect when they register, not two months from now. I’m sure we’ve all gotten this random email from a company that was vaguely familiar, but without any context, message is meaningless.

For instance, it’s common for eBooks to not have a registration requirement. This makes a lot of sense as this type of content is typically created to generate awareness early in the buying cycle.

On the flip side, requiring registration is a great idea when you are building a list for a specific purpose and you have a plan to nurture your leads. As a note, only request the information that is needed and consider progressive profiling, where you ask for more information for every subsequent registration.