With great content comes great responsibility. If you find yourself asking, “To gate content, or not to gate,” that is not the question – you may be missing an opportunity that gives you the best of both: SalesPage can help.
Let’s set the stage for what I’ve seen asset managers struggle with when they are engaging with marketing automation solutions like Pardot, Eloqua, HubSpot, and others. These resources make big promises. From tracking individuals’ activity through websites, emails, and advertisements to integrating seamlessly with a CRM like Salesforce. If you are a SalesPage client, you can see that activity right alongside the transactions and AUM records of your client, but that’s a topic for another day. These marketing automation resources create a great opportunity to personalize communication with advisors but are content-hungry.
The marketer’s dilemma:
“Should I require the advisor to submit a form (aka gated content) so I know who they are, or should I make the marketing piece available to everyone?”
What if I gate my content?
Marketing and sales teams spend significant time and resources to find a great idea that will enlighten advisors to shape how they do business and make the concept overwhelmingly persuasive. The information takes many forms including video, news, articles, or well-designed PDFs. Working with their toolbox of marketing resources, marketers make a significant investment to attract the right people to raise their hands and say, “I want to know more!” The problem is, if you are good enough to engage the reader to act, frequently the next action is a form they need to fill out. This is a dead-end for 80% of the readers who drop off and will never know what you had to share. An expensive lost opportunity.
“Losing traffic to content gated by a form can increase your cost per lead by 5x if 80% of that traffic drops off without reading your ideas.”
Mike Nemecek, Senior Account Manager & Marketing Strategist, SalesPage Technologies
Marketers want to do more of what is working, so tracking the activity helps them more accurately assess how marketing impacts sales and better calculate ROI. What is the right balance of prospect tracking? If you put too much emphasis on tracking, you may lose readership and therefore sales.
What if I don’t use gated content?
To ensure readers are provided access to the content they want, many marketers in the asset management industry choose to minimize the friction of their reader’s journey. One strategy is to give the content away with the hope advisors come back when they are ready to buy. In doing so, marketers give up the opportunity to identify the reader and attribute a marketing activity to a sale. All that is left is HOPE that a high-value target is not lost and will come back. Hope is not a strategy.
Can I get the best of both worlds?
When starting out with Pardot, a friend of mine was watching the activity very closely to learn what information could be gleaned from the data. In Pardot, you can see the visitor’s IP information. Once that visitor’s email address is linked to their activity you can identify who they are and their historical activity going back to when the software was installed.
While watching the viewing activity, she noticed a former co-worker’s firm was showing up on the IP tracking page. She sent a text message to this past co-worker and said “Hey, why are you visiting our site?” Shocked, they replied, “How did you know?!?” The truth is, she didn’t. It was just a guess. At that point, the next step was adding the former co-worker’s email address to Pardot to link the history.
If you guess who is visiting your site based on captured firm-level information, you will need to be very lucky to figure out the actual individuals. This is not scalable.
SalesPage can match advisors at scale
SalesPage will help you identify who is visiting your website—without gating—through CRD-level specifics. Understanding who is reading your content and having the intelligence needed to follow up and influence the sale doesn’t require the drop-off you might experience from the form-filling dilemma described earlier. The payoff is a great source of high-quality leads from existing marketing efforts and better intelligence!
SalesPage Technologies, founded October 26, 1981, is a software and services company helping investment managers better utilize data to drive more intelligent distribution.
