Thanks so much for taking your time to leave your thoughts and it’s a great point you make.

The whole issue of gating content is a really interesting one, mainly because it’s so hard to prove which way is best. On one hand, gating content does directly generate leads which you can build relationships and convert into customers in a measurable way.

On the other hand however, the broader exposure of not gating your content could result in just as many customers over time… It’s just much harder to measure the direct impact (particular in an A/B test scenario, which tends to have a limited time span).

A key point to mention here is that i’m not necessarily saying you shouldn’t gate your content. I’m more arguing that instead of putting a PDF behind the gate, you should put a content website.

You can still drive all the traffic from your email campaigns, advertisements, social posts, etc to a landing page that captures email addresses, but by making the actual content piece a website as opposed to a PDF you also pick up people from search who – although they not give their email on the landing page – are additional visitors you wouldn’t have had if you made it a unsearchable PDF.

Does that make sense?

Aaron

Great post and very interesting tactic.

I’m curious – have you done any measurement to compare how many opt-ins you’ve had from people browsing the microsite? And also, how many signups had a touchpoint on the microsite? (i.e. they browsed the site and came back at a later date to signup to Campaign Monitor, from cookie tracking)?

I think while the openness of the content is great, and the increased eyeballs from Google seem great in principle, as a data-driven marketer you must be curious as to which method has the best impact on the bottom line?

100 people signing up as customers is far better than 50,000 people browsing the content – but never signing up…? I recently did a typical “gated” content piece and was considering opening up a followup course which is why this post caught my eye 🙂

p.s. the guide looks awesome 🙂