Do you want to use gated content in your marketing strategy and boost your lead generation?
Content gating is arguably one of the best ways to grow your email list.
This detailed guide will discuss gated content marketing strategy, including gated content examples and best practices to help you get started.
To help you navigate, we’ve also created a table of contents:
- What Is Gated Content?
- When Should You Gate Content?
- Pros and Cons of Content Gating
- Gated Content Examples
- Gated Content Best Practices
- How to Gate Content with a Signup Form
- Why Use OptinMonster for Content Gating
What Is Gated Content?
Gated content is valuable digital information, requiring users to fill out a form before accessing them. Gated content could be about anything, such as case studies, product demos, ebooks, videos, and white papers.
Marketers use gated content to generate leads by providing prospects with valuable information in exchange for their name, email address, industry, title, and other contact information.
Here’s a gated content example:
As we’ll discuss later, gating content has pros and cons. But when done right, it can make your content more appealing, help you to engage with your target audience, and result in better leads.
At OptinMonster, We’ve seen excellent results from content gating, including one website that got 11,000 new subscribers in a month with a simple content upgrade.
Case Study: See how this one digital agency used gated content to boost conversion rates by 62% and 2x their email list.
Here’s a video tutorial if you want to skip right to implementation:
For more details, just keep reading!
When Should You Gate Content?
As Hubspot’s flowchart suggests, the best kind of gated content is valuable, shareable, and not too self-promotional.
So, if you’re going to gate a piece of content, make sure it’s relevant and provides value to your audience.
Uberflip suggests that another reason for gating content is if you have a large enough audience to make it worthwhile. If you get lots of traffic, content gating can help you to separate your most interested and committed visitors from everyone else.
You also must consider content gating as part of your overall marketing strategy, including valuable ungated content. That lets your audience understand the potential value of the gated content.
Consider whether a piece of gated content will help move prospects through the sales funnel to become customers. But don’t guess; use analytics to measure the success of your gated content in driving conversions. We’ll explain more about conversion tracking later in this guide.
Finally, gated content isn’t right for every business. While the content gating strategy can work well for businesses producing lots of content, if you’ve got a more hands-on business, like an electrician, it might not be right for you.
Pros and Cons of Content Gating
Content gating has its advocates and critics, and the strategy has pros and cons.
On the plus side, you can enhance the value of great content, which needs to be great, with gated content. If people have to provide contact details in exchange for content, it increases the perception of value.
When you gate your content, the data you collect on your audience (for example, via email marketing and analytics) can help you understand them better. That makes it easier to:
- Build a relationship with users through your marketing
- Understand who your most valuable users are
- Use email list segmentation for more targeted promotions
Those benefits lead to conversion and revenue gains. For example, Photowebo increased conversions by 3806% using gated content. Trading Strategy Guides, another OptinMonster customer, added 11,000 subscribers with a content gating script. And, WholeWhale, whose gated content example we used earlier, increased email subscribers by 100% with gated content.
But it’s not all good news, which is why some big-name blogs have decided to ungate or unlock most of their content.
Some of the disadvantages of gating content include:
- Annoyance, which may cause people to have a negative perception of your brand
- The difficulty of persuading visitors to fill out lengthy forms with too many form fields
- Reaching fewer people because fewer people share and link to gated content, resulting in poor SEO and less traffic
With these pros and cons, before you work out how to gate content, it’s important to decide whether it makes sense to gate content at all in your business. The following section will help with that.
Gated Content Examples
First, look at some common gated content examples.
One common type of gated content is a blog post or article where you have to optin to read the rest. It allows you to access some of the content, whetting your appetite for what comes next.
You’ll see this type of content gate with messaging similar to “sign up to continue reading” or “unlock now.”
You’ll see a popular version of this example in online publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and others. These let you read a certain number of articles, or a monthly quota, before removing access to the rest of the content.
And sometimes, you need to optin for additional features. For example, on the Statista website, you can see basic reports for free. However, you need to optin to get more options and to pay a subscription for full access.
Aside from blog posts and articles, content you can gate includes:
- Research reports
- Webinars
- Video replays
- Downloadable tools and resources
- Cheat sheets and checklists
Practically any lead magnet or piece of content can be gated.
Gated Content Best Practices
Now that we’ve looked in more detail at what content gating is, let’s look at some best practices.
Create Your Content
First, create valuable content to incentivize your target customers to provide their information. Our guide to creating a lead magnet will help you craft content that’s:
- Relevant to your audience
- Valuable enough to opt-in, share, and reference
- Actionable, providing tips they can use
Alternatively, you can gate a piece of existing content, like a blog post. We’ll show you how to do that later in this guide.
Build a Gated Content Landing Page
Next, build a landing page where people will opt-in for your gated content. You’ll need to include the following:
- Compelling headlines
- Appealing copy
- A great call to action
Here’s a gated content example using a landing page:
For more help with building landing pages, check out these expert landing page copywriting tips and this guide to creating a landing page.
Your gated content landing page will also include an optin form. Remember to ask only for the info you truly need. Most research shows that people are more likely to fill out short forms.
Decide How Visitors Will Access the Content
Knowing how you’ll give new subscribers access to the content you’ve gated is important. Some of the options include:
- Sending the content by email, which we always recommend
- Providing an immediate download link
- Opening the content in a new window or redirecting subscribers to a page where they can access the content
By customizing the success view, you can use any of these options in any OptinMonster campaign.
Track Conversions
Finally, measurement is an important part of any marketing strategy.
You’ll want to know how many people are signing up to get your gated content and whether they’re following links to move closer to being leads. You’ll be able to do this:
- In Google Analytics
- Via your email marketing software
With OptinMonster’s conversion analytics dashboard, shown below:
This data will help you figure out what’s working so you can tweak your content gating strategy if necessary.
The next section will show you how to gate content with OptinMonster.
How To Gate Content With a Signup Form
For this tutorial, we will show you how to gate content by creating an inline form campaign for a particular page. Here’s how you do that.
Step 1: Create Your Content Gating Campaign
First, click Create New Campaign from your OptinMonster dashboard.
Next, you’ll need to choose a campaign type.
OptinMonster offers different campaign types, including:
- Floating bar
- Fullscreen
- Slide-in
To create a content lock campaign, we’ll need to select Inline Campaign.
Now, you’ll need to choose a template.
OptinMonster offers 65+ templates, and all work beautifully across all devices.
Today, we’ll pick Transform.
Name your campaign and click Start Building to enter the OptinMonster editor.
Step 2: Activate the Content Lock
First, we’ll activate the content lock feature.
Select Inline Settings from the left-hand side in your OptinMonster dashboard.
Turn the toggle switch Lock Below Campaign? to green.
Select the style of content lock you want:
- Obfuscation: will blur the content
- Removal: will completely remove content
Now, we’re ready to customize our content lock campaign.
Step 3: Design Your Content Lock Campaign
Changing anything about your content lock campaign form is easy in the OptinMonster editor.
All you need to do is click on any part of the campaign to change it.
Let’s see how that works.
To edit the text, click on it. This will bring up the editing tools, and you’ll be able to change the text’s font, copy, color, and alignment.
Similarly, to delete an element, simply click on it.
You can also add elements to your campaign, like:
- Text
- Images
- HTML
- Video
Click Add Blocks at the top of your editor.
From the left, you’ll be able to select the element you’d like. Then, drag it into place on your popup.
This is our content lock campaign after a few quick edits.
Once you’re happy with the design of your popup, you’re ready to add your email
Step 4. Choose Your Display Rules
Next, go to Display Rules. The first step to setting display rules is selecting your conditions. You’re telling OptinMonster when you want the optin to appear.
Here we’ve set the optin to display when the content URL path exactly matches the URL of the page where we want the campaign to display.
If you want to show your locked content only to visitors who are already engaged, you could also enable Visitor has viewed ‘X’ pages and set the number to 2 or more.
Step 4: Add Your Integration
To collect subscriber data via your email marketing software, you’ll need to add an integration to the platform you use.
To do this, go to Integrations at the top of the editor.
Next, select Add New Integration.
Select your email service provider from the dropdown.
Then, follow the prompts to connect your email provider with OptinMonster.
Now, it’s time to publish your content lock campaign on WordPress.
Finally, save and publish the campaign.
Grab the embed code and paste it into your post or if you’re using WordPress, go to your dashboard.
Grab the optin slug from under the Live link.
Add it to this text in place of “SLUG” to create a shortcode you can embed in your content.
[optin-monster-shortcode id="SLUG"]Why Use OptinMonster for Content Gating
Which content gating tool should you use?
OptinMonster’s built-in content locking feature is proven to get results. Remember those stats we mentioned earlier?
- Marketing agency Whole Whale increased their email signups 100% with content gating
- Photography education site Photowebo saw a jaw-dropping 3806% lift in conversions by implementing gated content with OptinMonster
- Trading Strategy Guides added 11,000 subscribers using gated content in a little over a month
You can deliver your gated content immediately with OptinMonster’s success themes.
OptinMonster also integrates with all the major email marketing platforms and content management systems, so you can use it for gating content on any site.
Not using OptinMonster yet? Click here to get started!
