Settling the ungated vs. gated content marketing debate
Exploring the impact an ungated content market strategy can have on company performance for B2B marketers and sales
Highlights
- The optimal approach is a hybrid strategy: engage first, gate later
- In terms of what to gate, content has two categorizations: driving market awareness OR signaling buying intent
- Sales expect quality over quantity regarding lead generation, meaning fewer more qualified leads and brand familiarity within target accounts
- The marketing funnel as a strategic paradigm, in its linear form, is not reflective of the buyer’s journey
- Create content that builds trust to gain attention; attention creates mindshare; with mindshare comes wallet share
- True knowledge and the workings of Search Engine Optimization is lacking among marketers
Introduction
The following article is a condensed version of my master thesis to complete an MBA, with the addition of my reflections. The research comprised 250+ hours of market research, literature review, and semi-structured interviews with 15 senior marketing and sales leaders from B2B software companies.
Interviewees were asked a series of open-ended questions. A reflexive thematic analysis was applied to code the transcribed text to surface themes in answering:
Can ungating content as a strategic approach achieve superior business performance results?
The succeeding sections introduce contextual background but if you would like to get straight into it, then scroll down to the section: Results — 3 themes.
The marketing funnel and the buyer’s journey
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies largely adopt the marketing funnel to develop a marketing strategy, create content, and identify the buyer in the buying process. Average conversion rates at all stages of the funnel are well known, and personally the most aggravating of them all is the lead generation conversion rate, which can range from 1–5%.
As a result, SaaS marketers reverse engineer the funnel by first dividing their average deal size (€) against the annual target and then work from the bottom up to identify the necessary leads which must filter through each stage of the funnel. It then dictates how much marketing spend and activity is necessary to fill the funnel to meet this objective.
Findings concluded this strategy to be fair only because it measures marketing’s contribution to revenue and company performance. The findings also found the marketing funnel, in its linear form, to only capture a percentage of the market as the buyer will take their own journey with the wealth of information freely available from the internet or other offline resources. Additionally, because it cannot or is perceived difficult to measure, brand awareness (campaigns without primary lead gen goals) are forfeited as they do not make an immediate impact on the funnel — an unfortunate finding as a foundational element in the marketing mix.
First, B2B buyers do not buy in a predictable and linear order. Some may follow that process, but most do not, and they will take their preferred path. For example, they could start at the bottom of the funnel, travel to the top, exit, return to the middle, and exit again. There are limitless buying paths, and by mapping that path, you will find it mirrors something more like a bowl of spaghetti than a funnel.
Second, branding campaigns are an indispensable component of a company’s long-term strategy. The role brand awareness plays are staking mindshare by developing credibility, recognition, and trust. Marketing and sales are measured quarter-to-quarter, and therefore effort and capital are applied for short-term measurable gains. Interestingly if those short terms gains are measured over a longer period, much of it can be found to be fruitless.
Marketing is a blend of art and science; we target complex, irrational humans and buying centers. So why are we assuming there is a logical or linear process to buying behavior? Or why are we not aligning to their buying behavior?
Forces impacting lead generation conversion rates
Although the complexities pushing lead generation into low single-digit rates is generally accepted, a few notable forces are creating a bleak future.
- A survey conducted on LinkedIn found 81% of tech buyers do not fill out forms and they’d rather look for that information elsewhere than go through the hassle of filling out a form. (source)
- Millennials comprise the largest composition of the workforce and are a growing force in the decision-making process. These digital natives prefer to conduct their own independent research, relying on other sources of information other than a salesperson or filling out a form.
- Google’s zero-click features indirectly affect conversion rates by answering buyers’ questions without entering a company’s website. Messaging hidden behind a form will not be featured in Google’s SERP (search engine results page) features and therefore will not benefit from the 48.96% zero-click searches vs 41.45% organic clicks to non-google sites (source).
- With the rise of mobile usage and “more than 50% of Internet activity occurs on mobile devices, it remains a cumbersome job for prospects to fill out a non-mobile-optimized lead capture forms”. (source) It’s too easy to bail on a form then type on a mini-keyboard.
- Expectation-hesitation: in my own opinion, buyers are learning more and more not to submit their details as the expectation of a salesperson to bombard them with emails and calls is inevitable. Accordingly, the hesitation grows to fill out the form.
Content is King
Let us remind ourselves of the purpose of content — the fuel to the marketing engine. As defined by Amplify:
“Content marketing is used to attract and develop a specific target audience with the ultimate goal of creating true customer engagement. Through using content marketing, you should be striving to change and enhance your customer’s behaviour toward your company in a positive manner. If you consistently deliver valuable information to your customers, you will be able to gain their trust and following.”
In other words, content marketing is about creating brand awareness, user interest, need definition, keeping top of mind of the prospect, being visible on multiple channels, and, most importantly, creating trust. Therefore, by adding a form to your valuable content, you are not achieving a 5% lead gen rate but creating a barrier with the other 95% in your market.
So for every 100 visitors, would you rather have five prospects develop brand recognition or up to 100 prospects? And whether or not it’s 100, 90, or 50, because some will bounce, it is still magnitudes greater than 5!
Results — 3 themes
In the exploration of ungating content as a strategic approach three themes surfaced from the thematic analysis:
1. A hybrid strategy: engage first, gate later
The answer is a hybrid strategy. Balancing gated and ungated assets qualified in two categories, driving market awareness or signaling buying intent, relative to the buying journey is likely to be a superior strategy than gating all content or ungating all content. And it’s a simple question: does this piece of content signal buying intent? In other words, is it a topic/resource the buyer would only download if they were actively in a buying cycle? If not, ungate the content to drive market awareness — engage first, gate later. One respondent on the matter:
“The first thing is people need to redefine what it means to be a lead because just because somebody fills out a form does not make them a lead… in an ungated strategy its less about putting out zero gates and more about putting out the right gates which are primarily focused on gating buying actions.”
Another reason for the hybrid strategy is cooperation and alignment with the two key functions to company growth: marketing + sales. While marketing would be enthusiastic to ungate all content to develop the market and brand identity, sales expect tangible marketing results. Not quantity but ‘warm leads’ with brand familiarity within their target accounts. All sales respondents stated that quality trumps quantity in terms of leads, as the latter is a time-waster. Marketers should not confuse their sales counterpart’s declaration of “more leads” to just be more, but more qualified, engaged, and brand-aware prospects.
There was also a consensus among sales respondents regarding a gap in brand awareness campaigns, further validated by market research, as a key element to supporting sales performance. Thus, a hybrid strategy would fill the branding gap and create that balance through the proposed categorization of content: driving market awareness or signaling buying intent.
Finally, a hybrid strategy better aligns with the buying journey.
2. Know the buying journey
Gartner states, “Buyers do independent research and set their own purchase criteria, all before the first seller interaction”. (source) And estimating the customer has progressed 57% down the purchase path before engaging with a salesperson. While this research dates back several years, respondents have stated it is not 57% anymore but more like 60–70%!
Buyers are arming themselves during the initial buying phases by conducting online research, speaking to industry peers and colleagues, and consuming media from their preferred sources. As highlighted in forces impacting lead gen conversion rates, there are many reasons why they are not filling out a form, and it’s chiefly because they don’t have to!
The marketing funnel in its linear form and as a reflection of the buyer’s journey is wildly out of date. There is little written on the matter, but credible sources such as Gartner’s “looping manner” to describe the B2B buying journey, image below, were found to represent findings in a more realistic way. It conveys the complex process overlaying a multi-departmental buying center, availability of information (on- and off-line), and varying degrees of buying stage maturity. And because we don’t have automation or a martech tool to track such a buying journey we revert to the funnel. However, the key takeaway here is simply to be everywhere, and better to do it ungated to compete in the attention economy.
Regardless if the buying journey is reflective of the marketing funnel or takes on a non-linear form, the key is to know the buying journey. Identify where the buyer conducts their research and consumes content, and then be there. We cannot push the buyer to align to our buying process or playbook, but we must align to their preferred journey and pull them in with purposeful content, and then we can accelerate their route to becoming a customer. A respondent on the matter:
“I think everyone has to create their own funnel and their own journey, their buyer’s journey, and they better research their buyer to figure out what that journey is and you better construct a buyer’s journey that reflects the optimal journey that your buyer wants to take.”
Finally, an interesting analogy joining the themes, a hybrid strategy and know the buying journey, was given by one of the respondents and what could be referred to as the ‘extended buying journey’.
Did you know that buying B2B software is like buying a car?
You don’t wake up one day and decide I need to buy a car. Your car begins to have issues where you spend time and money to fix them, and as more problems arise the day will come when you become fed up with the mechanic’s bills or the car finally breaks down and then you officially enter the the car-buying market. However, during the initial phases where your car has issues is when you subconsciously start to build your shortlist. You may not know it, but during the initial phases or ‘extended buying journey’, you start to subconsciously look around at other cars whether it’s your neighbor’s driveway or what’s being driven next to you on the road. And if you’re in Munich, like me, then you see BMWs, Audis, VW, and Mercedes — and there’s your shortlist. So which car brands do you think the buyer will consider first?
This same analogy applies to buying B2B software. If your SaaS company is not on the road, then you won’t be part of that subconscious shortlist and be one of the first companies inquired to shape their needs. And this is the phase where branding will make that impact because the buyer hasn’t recognized they are in a buying stage yet but their processes are beginning to fail, and they are doing some research — and they will never fill out a form. So ungating content will capture mindshare and with that comes wallet share.
Unfortunately, as branding is difficult to measure it is seen as non-essential vs. a quantifiable metric like-gating content for lead gen.
3. Build trust to gain attention
Speaking of content marketing, of course, building trust as an end objective was thoroughly discussed. The key theme that surfaced was building trust to earn attention marrying the preceding themes together. With trust comes attention, and attention is a priceless currency you cannot pay for. Companies must deliver content the market seeks to stake real estate in the buyer’s mind. It is easy to create content but difficult to publish content the market wants to read. As one respondent stated:
“It’s about getting external viewpoints, as well as being in your own bubble because when you work in an insular corporate kind of environment, you can start to believe your own hype.”
What’s more, trust is an essential ingredient in the sales cycle that sales respondents did not expect marketing to deliver. Adding trust to the forefront will exceed sales expectations by delivering content that helps the buyer buy with compelling messaging that effectively frames the problem, connecting it with a solution and supports the buyer’s challenge to attain buy-in from their buying center — the latter a task not yet taken on by sales or marketing.
A respondent introduced an interesting concept and even an alternative to the marketing funnel called the “content playground”. At the same time, there are no linear paths in a playground but countless journeys in engaging with a playground, whether you start with the swing set, slide, or monkey bars. This concept resembles what was discussed as Gartner’s “looping manner”, also opposing the linear manner of the marketing funnel. Thus, content should be ungated to allow the buyer to take whichever journey they please and content-binge. Additionally, the same respondent outlined a format for producing quality and purposeful content:
“Instead of thinking, I’m going to push you through this awareness, consideration, and purchase funnel, think about a conceptual, strategic, and tactical way of creating content. So, at the conceptual level, you’re helping people really frame up the problem: how do you think about it. At the strategic level, like what are the processes and frameworks that you need to have in place to make the conceptual idea a reality? In many cases, this is helping people think about how to evaluate the solution. Not to think about your solution, how to think about any solution. So, if they agree with you, there is this problem that exists: how do they go about solving it? And this is really equipping them to do their own research. And then at the tactical level, this is kind of the nitty-gritty where the rubber meets the road, prescriptive step-by-step instructions, and actions that they need to take.”
Thus, content should not focus on selling the product but explaining the problem and helping the buyer understand how to solve it. Alluding to the term “buyer enablement”, a term coined by Gartner, meaning content should help the customer buy and sell the problem internally to their team, arming the buyer with a strong argument as to why this is a problem, the impact it has on the business, and what can be done to solve it.
Again, as the salesperson has less influence in the buying process, what little content may be consumed by the buyer must be compelling enough to enable the buyer and help them sell it to their organization. Sale respondents may refer to this as when the prospect goes radio silent because at this stage is when the prospect is socializing it within their organization. They are figuring out where this is, who needs to be involved, what budget they have, and who’s going to sign it off.
Build your audience in a way that teaches them to be a customer.
A missing theme: Search Engine Optimization
Interestingly SEO (search engine optimization) did not earn itself in the spotlight as a main or even a sub-theme. Interview questions did give respondents an opportunity to speak to the impact an ungated content strategy could have on SEO. However, and shockingly too few actually had a good understanding of SEO as a strategic driver.
So, if SEO is an unfamiliar topic among marketers is there a hidden opportunity?
Gated content provides virtually no SEO value. Especially with Google’s new SERP features delivering sought information to the buyer within the search results, resulting in “zero-click searches”. And nearly half of searches make up zero-click searches! (source)
More importantly, if your company’s blog section or page optimization initiatives give you an insight into SEO’s positive outcome, ungating content would deliver many times the results! Opening up your long-form content to search bots will strengthen keywords and elevate search rankings. As discussed earlier, the buyer undertakes up to 70% of the buying journey before making themselves known to a salesperson. You cannot expect the buyer to follow your funnel, so best to align to their buying habits. In addition, the only respondent familiar with SEO:
“I can tell you when you start talking about traffic numbers and the conversion rates that we see for people using an ungated strategy. It blows it out of the water when you start looking at traffic comparisons and conversion rates compared to gated content.”
Now imagine how big your retargeting pool is going to be coupled with those high conversion rates.
Conclusion
The key concerns in gating content stem from declining conversion rates, changing buying behavior, and technological advancements. Therefore, a hybrid strategy balancing gated and ungated assets qualified in two categories (i.e., driving market awareness or signaling buying intent) relative to the buying journey is likely to be a superior strategy than gating all content or ungating all content.
Regardless of the content strategy, content quality comes first in the way of relevancy, buyer needs, how they buy, and how they wish to interact — overall alignment. Provide content that matters and helps the buyer buy by understanding the problem and it’s impact on their business so they can sell it internally.
Another key reason for the hybrid strategy is cooperation and alignment between marketing and sales. The most mutually impactful initiative of these two functions is identifying and aligning to the buyer’s journey to accelerate the path from buyer to customer. Bringing marketing and sales teams closer together to share the entire customer journey. Instead of marketing owning the top of the funnel and calling it quits once they make a hand-off to sales in the middle.
Additionally, it fuels other strategic marketing initiatives such as SEO, increases market awareness, and produces better, more quality leads. SEO has acquired greater weighting in the marketing mix as a result of Covid. If you cannot be found, then you do not exist, and sales will lose the opportunity to enter a sales cycle.
Give freely to get.
Limitations
The study focused on enterprise-level SaaS with a high price point. Further research would have to be undertaken for application to transactional SaaS products with a lower price point.
Additionally, it was determined a hybrid strategy to be more fitting with the presence of an experienced sales team with a good understanding of marketing and the ability to generate leads from their own network and tactics. Younger less seasoned sales or business development teams will expect a larger quantity of lead generation to operate — even though it was concluded sifting through large pools of leads is a time-waster. It is likely due to the misconception that more leads equal more business. If marketing would not deliver on this expectation, then it would create a disconnect between marketing and sales, sadly.
