Pros and Cons of Gating and Un-Gating Content

Gated content limits the access of your content to limited visitors. Gating your content can be an amazing strategy to generate leads. With Gated content, you can make a long term inbound strategy for the relevant audience. Gated content reduces the dependency on cold emails and it also gives better results than cold emails. Visitors who are providing their information to access your content are the audience you are trying to target. Some great examples of gated content are Ebooks, Whitepaper, Webinar, Newsletter, and Live demo.

Pros of Gated content:

Lead Generation

Gated content gives you quality leads. You get quality leads when you are trying to sell something that can resolve your customer’s issues. To generate warm leads, your content must be compelling and helpful. Your landing page and the sign-up form must be tempting to retain your viewers.

Segmentation

Creating more than one gated content can help you with the segmentation of your customers. Based on the type of content your viewer is accessing, you can have a better idea about their pin-points and what you can do to help them.

Exclusivity

Gated content gives your viewers a sense of exclusivity. Your viewers think of gated content as a premium and unique content.

Cons of Gated Content

Fewer SEO benefits

Search engines can’t crawl gated content, and you don’t get access to backlinks. With these limitations, it’s hard to attract organic traffic.

Limited audience building

Not every customer is willing to give their personal information because of trust issues. To attract a good amount of traffic on gated content, you need to have a pre-build reputation.

Ungated Content

Ungated content is the absolute opposite of gated content. Ungated content is the free content that can be accessed by anyone. Ungated content adds informational value without asking anything in return. Ungated content is a great way to build organic awareness and motivates your audience to visit your content. Some great examples of ungated content are blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and pdf documents. Another great benefit of ungated content is that you can ungate any type of content.

Pros of ungated content

Organic SEO results

Ungated content attracts organic traffic and helps you to rank your content on search engine result pages. You need to constantly promote your ungated content on various platforms to maintain your rankings.

Reach and engagement

Shareability is one of the most amazing benefits of ungated content. A great piece of content spreads like fire. Make sure you add visuals and effective takeaways to boost the shareability factor of your content.

Cons of ungated content

Lost Leads

If your content is targeting the major pain points of your customers, they will reread it, share it, and even bookmark it. They may come again to your blog to read more content. But you don’t have any idea who they are and what their email address is.

Less control over the funnel

Without any information, you can’t analyze your visitor’s behavior and what they want. However, with the help of certain tools, you can find out link clicks, gated content downloads, pain points, and more.

Conclusion

The selection of gated and ungated content depends on various factors like the team, budget, technology stack, and time. You also need to review your short term and long-term goals to understand what content you need to generate for your target audience. Before creating it, you can analyze the pros and cons related to them.

Source: Pros and Cons of Gating and Un-Gating Content