How to improve your gated content and get more reads

Gated content is a type of web content that requires users to perform some sort of online task or share contact data in order for them to access the content. You’ll find gated content useful if you want to bring readers back for repeat visits, which is why you need to improve your gated content. You need to make sure everything you say feels authentic and is appropriate for each specific piece of content.

How to improve your gated content

1. Create gated content suited to your customer journey

When creating gated content, you need to figure out which stage of the buyer’s journey your prospects are currently at. Awareness is the first step, and it’s mostly comprised of exposing people to your brand. Thus, you should create content that is related to them exploring their problem and your brand. The next steps are consideration and decision, which should all be factored into your content because it can align them with your product or service. Thus, examples of content in the consideration stage includes ways to solve a business problem.

2. Make the content valuable

If you are trying to attract new readers, make sure that gated content is actually worth their time. People are only willing to spend 10 minutes of their time if they think they will get some kind of reward. Thus this may be  an eBook, video series or personalised content. They do not want to wade through pages upon pages of useless filler just to get to something useful. If it also guarantees that once they have read through the gated content, they get access to premium membership benefits which might include discounts and freebies, then you have just grasped their attention with a nugget of gold at the end. You can conduct research into content that people value by looking at top searched keywords.

3. A good landing page will improve your gated content

To ensure successful gated content you need a well designed landing page to capture leads and potential clients from your marketing efforts, this means having a strong headline and CTA which market what is in it for them once they pass through your gated content process.

4. Change your content in line with what data shows

Whatever their reason, businesses can adjust these campaigns based on analytics if they want to. Analytics allow you to see the overall effectiveness of gated content campaigns. They can help you make decisions about how you will manage these in future. If a specific audience isn’t engaging with your blog posts, then there is no point in continuing with this strategy just because it’s working for different visitors. So, making changes based on analytics feedback is a critical part of growing your business.

Examples

Triggr produces a completely ungated blog, whereas an example of gated content would be Hubspot’s lead generation resource.