Gated vs. Ungated Content…What’s the Real Answer for B2B Marketers?

It’s 2024.
Are we still gaining content?
Let’s talk about the value of exclusive content and why your company
might want it in this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks for tuning into Closing Time the show for Go to Market Leaders.
I’m Val Riley, head of content and digital marketing at Insightly CRM.
Today I’m joined by Anthony Kennada.
He is CEO and founder of Audience Plus.
Welcome to the show, Anthony.. Thanks so much, Val.
Glad to be here.
Anthony, This topic is almost as old as content marketing itself,
but with today’s technology, it seems like a good time to check in on it.
What would you say to someone who contends that the new buyer’s journey, where
roughly 70 to 80% of the process is self-guided,
demands that we ungate 100% of our content?
Yeah, it’s a good question.
You know, and I think it’s something that we have to like
wear a few hats in our response.
Wear the hat of the consumer who wants, you know,
frictionless experience in order to access
value that we create through our content or deliver through our content.
And then on the marketing side, right,
we have a number to hit from a pipeline perspective.
We need to capture,
you know, some engagement data, some understanding of who our audience is.
And so there’s this tension that has long existed.
So where I look to
for a lot of inspiration on how to answer this question is the consumer world.
Where if you look to what Substack has introduced,
where folks are willfully opting in, they’re subscribing
to content from their favorite journalists or creators, Patreon
and some of these other tools have done the same for kind of the creator economy.
We start to see what could be a window to the future that suggests, okay,
some content is free and by no means should you gate everything but our ability
to establish equity in the market through our content program
requires giving away most of it candidly, something to the tune of, I’d say 80%.
But for that 20% of
sort of premium content or content that,
you know, use the word kind of exclusive, the market has shown
that not only are consumers willing to give you an email address
in exchange for access to that content, but in many cases,
they’re willing to pay for that content.
There’s a whole e-commerce
kind of element to this that we’re seeing in the consumer context.
And so I think the net net, what I would tell someone in answering
that question is I think it’s less about the friction necessarily.
And the gates or not gating it.
It’s more of how can we just create amazing content, content so good
that people will want to even pay for it, which of course we may not do.
Some companies might.
And how do we sort of build a value proposition
behind not getting access to content,
but rather getting access to membership into our brand?
So that’s how I think about it.
But I think we’re in the early days of that transition
kind of making its way into the B2B kind of use case.
I really like that perspective, Anthony, because I do feel like the emergence
of the Creator economy is certainly something that wasn’t present
when content marketing sort of had its birth, you know, 20 years ago.
So it does seem like the times have changed quite a bit.
So I love the exclusive label or like the gated label.
Is there a type of content that lends itself to being,
that could justify a gate?
Or are you saying, is it just across the board,
higher quality, more research, more in depth?
Yeah, that’s a really good question.
I think there’s a few things to consider, right?
Like, and again, in my head it’s the Pareto principles
like 80/20 on a, on a volume basis where you’re still writing SEO articles,
you’re still producing a lot of content that isn’t exclusive.
But for the 20%, there’s a couple, you know, maybe
litmus tests you could run to decide what should fit under that bucket.
One is, is this content that someone would pay for or
traditionally they’d fill out some form to access this.
So one can be like conference footage or you might have an event that you host
and we’re kind of shooting the stage or what have you.
If you didn’t come to the event, you don’t have to pay the registration
fees to attend to watch last year’s footage, but it’s exclusive
content just for our subscribers of our brand.
Then you think about like webinars, which traditionally
someone needs to fill out a form to access a webinar.
How do we think about kind of our webinar archive or some of our
historical digital events and kind of how those live on in perpetuity?
So I think that’s the first test is is this content somebody would pay for
or otherwise have to fill out a form in order to access.
And the second bid then is
what is sort of like like a framework of sorts
or some really deep research to your point that is not just an editorial article
or certainly a performance, a blog post or anything along those lines.
But how do we think about sort of kind
of taking like the IP of the brand and making that as an exclusive asset?
And so some of the things we you know,
we talked to some customers who are like evangelizing a new category,
a new movement, and they might have an underlying framework that says
these are the five or seven steps to executing said kind of playbook.
And what they might do is give away episode one for free
because now it’s ungated, it’s not exclusive, and you sort of like
hook the audience into kind of getting some of that value for free.
But then you have to be a member or a subscriber in order to access
episodes like two through seven or something of the like.
And a lot of what we’re learning there,
which is really interesting, is inspiration from an unlikely place.
If you ever watched Ted Lasso on Apple TV. Plus I think it’s called where, you know,
you watch the first episode and then you’re in and then you’re like,
Oh, shoot, I need to subscribe if I want to keep watching this series.
So they do a good job,. I think, of giving enough value away
for free, kind of hooking the audience,
but then trying to drive the conversion to kind of keep going down that path.
Yeah, I appreciate the concept also of opting in once
and then not having to continue to opt in, because I think that, you know,
in the old days if you wanted
maybe three or four content pieces from a specific vendor,
you know, you’re filling out the form three or four times
which the people on the other end don’t want that either.
So I think that’s a huge benefit that you’re speaking to.
Yeah.
And I think that the challenge is there hasn’t really been a lot of underlying
technology to power exclusive content or like membership forums.
We’ve had like communities
and those types of things, but not through sort of the same lens.
You’re right,
you end up getting like a number of different contact records, you know,
and the database as people are signing on, signing up again and again.
So I think,
you know, it’s sort of maybe an artifact or the behavior
is an artifact of the tech stack that has, you know,
dominated the industry and not say anything bad about it.
We’ve all been using these tools.
And so I think there’s an opportunity to help power
kind of a new generation of technology to help reduce friction, but
still give marketers kind of the accurate, clean data they need.
Yeah, as someone who preaches marketing automation hygiene and CRM hygiene,
you know, those multiple records are just, you know, not the preference
by any means.
So I do think there’s a lot of value there.
So talk me down from this.
So for a while it feels like we’ve been lured into exclusively
sharing content, ungated content on social platforms.
And I get
that, you know, the audience can be exponentially bigger,
but I feel like there are upsides and downsides there as well.
Totally.
I’ve been almost on
a path to shine light on this in a way.
But I think in doing so,. I’ve almost made an enemy
of some of those channels, and I don’t think that’s the truth either.
But if we talk about the pros and cons so,
so the pros to LinkedIn, YouTube,
any of these channels that I refer to as like rented channels
where we don’t own that relationship with our audience
and they’re not a contact record in our CRM today.
They are a follower.
And what sits between us and our followers on these platforms
is an algorithm that we don’t control and so that algorithm
is throttling, distribution and access into our follower ships.
Only a fraction of our followers
actually see the content that we’re publishing on those networks.
Now, the reason that’s a good thing is that’s where everyone is.
It’s we have to compete on the battlefield for attention.
And that as content marketers has never been more of
a critical part of the job and more complex
as these algorithms change or as TikTok is on the verge of a national ban
or whatever else might be happening on these different spaces.
You know, we talk about this idea of owned media.
Owned media starts with rented engagement and we have to have a presence there
and we have to be kind of distributing our content strategically in those channels.
Now, the conviction I have is in this next generation, again, borrowing inspiration
from the consumer and creator context is we have to be actively
learning the nuances of these algorithms in order to, we’ve used the language
deplatform, I think there might be
a better word for it, but basically take your followers off
of these platforms and get them to subscribe directly to your brand.
So get them to convert into your marketable database.
And you do that by a number of different things, right?
Like distributing short form clips of podcasts just like this on LinkedIn
and then linking in the comments to the full episode on your domain,
on your property in order to build that first party relationship
with the audience.
And so the reason. I think these things are bad
is at least for the last decade or so, that I’ve been
a marketer, maybe a little
bit longer than that we publish on these networks and that’s it.
And so then the metrics that we talk about, our engagement,
how many likes, how many comments, you know, how much referral traffic
might we be getting from YouTube or some of these different platforms.
And we’re creating for those networks versus creating for our audience
with the intention of building that direct first party relationship with them,
which ultimately is going to bring that cost of distribution down to zero,
almost like guaranteed that they’re going to see the thing we send them.
And ultimately, if for whatever reason TikTok goes away,
LinkedIn decides to change certain kind of components of the algorithm,
X gets purchased by another tech billionaire or whatever.
Like everything, you know, we can sort of control our destiny
a little bit better and have that direct relationship
with our audience.
So that’s where I think how to think about these things almost like a
I wouldn’t say necessary evil, but it’s an important
it’s, it’s headwind,
but it’s important headwind for us to figure out how to navigate as an industry
in order to compete for attention, but ultimately to build to sort of like
siphon our followership into a owned kind of relationship.
Yeah, I don’t think other teams,
sales teams, even leadership teams understand
that marketing is just faced with this like ever
growing list of channels that we have to work in.
And it doesn’t it’s not easy.
But what I hear you saying is we don’t want to abandon
those channels like social media, YouTube, etc.
but the onus is on us as marketers that we have
to create a first party relationship with our audience in some way in case
we for some reason, lose grasp on those platforms.
Yeah, and I’d even double down on it and say we have to be great at those channels
in order to develop that first party relationship,
because it’s almost like of existential importance that we do,
meaning we can’t just keep relying on
LinkedIn or whatever to help us drive pipeline, which ultimately most
I think most of us are going
to be accountable for, if not even further down funnel.
And just the world that we came from is, you know, let’s say last several years,
we’d go in marketing, we’d get budget to go do like a video project or something.
We’d put a lot of time into it, maybe spend ten,
15, $20,000 with the creative agency to execute it.
We’d finish it. We’re all super excited.
We put it on YouTube and we hit publish and then a week later
our CMO asks, Hey, how did that go?
What’s the ROI on that 30k we gave you?
And you’re like,. The language starts shifting.
Your body posture kind of changes and you’re like, Well, we drove 427 views.
I think there was a bump in traffic that day.
You know, we might have heard it on a Gong. Call somewhere, some reference to it.
And we have this like passive language talking about the value
of investing in those channels.
Whereas if we drove that traffic instead to our own property, to our website
and we had some of this first party relationship kind of already established,
we could understand which accounts kind of engaged with that asset,
which prospects, we can leverage it to kind of map kind of a buyer’s journeys.
So the future is really bright
when we’re sending traffic and building relationship on a property we own versus
sending that traffic to something like a YouTube or others.
Cool.
So I have to ask an obligatory. AI question.
It feels like it’s mandatory this year, so I’d like to ask
how you see AI playing into the future of content marketing.
And Anthony,. I don’t mean content generation
because I think we’ve all seen what utter garbage ChatGPT produces.
So let’s skip over that.
I don’t think it’s replacing good quality content writers anytime soon.
But in terms of analysis,. I think there might be something there.
And so what are your thoughts?
Yeah,
we have a big announcement coming soon here,
but I’ll get kind of a sneak preview around it because I think you’re right.
I think the first generation of AI kind of started in the content world didn’t it?
With like, you know give this thing a prompt
and it’ll give you good enough content that, written articles or whatever.
And that’s sort of our introduction to AI.
But I think there’s this kind of second wave
that we’re all kind of in the throes of right now.
And it’s more about this idea of like Agenetic AI, creating
AI agents who can effectively execute
a tactical playbook or a checklist on your behalf.
And you think about some of the things
that if our team, which is, by the way, being told to do more with less,
less budget, less resources than ever before, if we could deploy
an AI agent or
several AI agents who are completely specialized on a specific playbook
to execute actions on our behalf, like what would it look like
if we had a full time data science team analyzing our audience data, helping
look for these signals, or a distribution agent
that is studying kind of traffic coming from LinkedIn or YouTube shorts
or some of these other channels and helping us develop our own
kind of playbooks on amplifying content and third party networks.
I think that’s really where a lot of the future is going.
So I’ll give one example of something that we’re working on.
How do you sort of trade off introducing friction in the form to capture
all the data that we need in order to actually make sense of this conversion
without putting like 12 fields on the forum
and making it like this, you know, very difficult experience.
You know,
you think that today you could have
somebody give us nothing more than, let’s say, a corporate email address
and then deploy a playbook of going to the website, understanding
what the company is, you know, use kind of breaking apart
the first last convention or first at.
However you think about the different ways corporate email addresses are conferred
or are configured.
Go to Google, try to find the person that works at that company,
find their LinkedIn profile, ingest that data,
and then use their current role at their current company
and maybe their work history to actually make an inference to reason
of what topics of content might this person be interested in.
And they’ve done nothing but just give you a corporate email address
and now you have all of this context before they ever clicked on one asset
of both understanding who they are and then inferring
what might they be interested in based on nothing more than their firmographics.
So that’s one example of a type of agent that I think a content team could deploy
to make decisions about the type of content
we should be producing or how we should sort of engage
with different members of our audience based on who they are,
what might they be interested in, and how does that get better
The more they actually engage with our content and start producing
that first party data.
That’s so powerful.
You know, I open this episode talking about like
how gating and ungating was like the big question in content marketing.
But now that I think about it, it’s arguing with sales about how many fields
they want to put on the form
and how many fields you want to put on the form as marketers.
So like, you’re kind of solving both of those issues,
which is like music to my ears.
That’s all the time we have for this episode.
Anthony Where can folks find you if they want to connect?
Yeah, I mean, I think LinkedIn might be best, but you can also find me
on AudiencePlus, we produce content daily
now between newsletters, episodic kind of video
content, podcast, so on.
So, you know, produce a lot of content there, but LinkedIn might be just
the quickest path.
All right, sounds good.
Thanks to everybody for tuning in to this episode of Closing Time.
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