Guide & Examples: Gated Lead Capture Content
To build a high-performing, full-funnel inbound marketing strategy today, you must provide value to your visitors and prospects. Do this, and you’ll enrich your marketing journeys, encouraging more users to stick with you and become qualified leads.
One of the most effective ways to provide value and relevance to visitors is to strategically use gated content to deepen brand awareness and collect lead information.
Let’s take a closer look at this strategy. In this quick guide, we’ll cover:
Any questions as you explore the guide? Reach out and let us know!
What is gated content?
Gated content includes any web content that users can access once they provide their contact information. It’s also commonly referred to as lead capture content or, more generally, downloadable resources.
What’s the sales value of gated content? By actively providing their information in exchange for a resource, users effectively qualify themselves as being interested in your brand’s offerings and expertise. Critically, this process also gives you prospects’ email addresses and consent to contact them, enabling sales outreach.
Gated content can take many forms. The requested content might be delivered as downloadable PDFs or web pages on your site accessible only through the lead capture process. You might immediately direct users to these files or pages or email them short messages with access links.
Common types of gated content include:
- Educational guides
- Product comparisons
- Free templates
- Detailed case studies
- Whitepapers and other exclusive studies and reports
- Editorial-style “state of the industry” or “our predictions” articles
- Webinar recordings
- Pre-recorded demos
As with any content marketing strategy, note that context is key to effectively using gated content as a sales enablement tactic.
Understand a user’s intent when requesting a certain resource, and then tailor your outreach to align with that intent.
For example, a user downloading a middle-funnel educational guide on a topic related to your offering might not be ready for a full sales pitch and demo. Instead, you might send them an email stream that further explores the topic, presents options for solving their problems, and highlights the most relevant aspects of your value proposition. As they further engage with your messages and become familiar with your brand, they’ll be better primed for a sales pitch.
Alternately, a user who provides their contact information to access a pre-recorded demo, product comparison guide, or other bottom-funnel resource has demonstrated greater buying intent. Direct sales outreach to explain your offering could help you capitalize on the momentum and close a deal faster.
Why does it matter?
Let’s say your blog posts and key web pages are already optimized for conversions. You might already have an email newsletter that regularly generates leads. Why invest in gated content to bolster your inbound marketing efforts?
There are a few reasons:
- Lead Generation & Qualification. Requesting gated content implies greater buying intent. These users are willing to exchange their contact information and time for something your brand has to offer, making them more viable for follow-up than contacts you might collect without the same level of demonstrated interest.
- Increased Brand Awareness. Providing value and relevance with gated content keeps your brand on your prospects’ minds. Remember, B2B sales cycles are long and getting longer. The intentional action of requesting a resource and then receiving tailored follow-up builds a stronger connection than simpler brand exposure on your website.
- Combatting Low-Click Environment. Clickthrough rates on organic search engine results are dropping, partially due to the rise of Google AI Overviews and other AI-driven tools for quick answers. Gated content gives you a way to maximize the value of your site traffic by creating an avenue for qualified visitors to actively identify themselves.
Use cases & examples
Let’s review effective use cases of gated content by examining a single site’s lead capture strategy.
Double the Donation offers visitors a range of gated resources that provide value (for both prospects and their sales team) and are presented in polished, intuitive ways. The strategy involves three distinct types of content:
- Downloadable resources
- Webinar recordings
- Product walkthroughs
Gated downloadable resources
The website centralizes its downloadable resources in a single directory- or library-style page: https://doublethedonation.com/downloadable-guides/
Above the fold on this page, visitors are immediately greeted with options to view popular resources or explore by topic. The page also prominently features its most important resource, a downloadable compilation of case studies, along with an embedded lead capture form.
As you scroll down, you can easily explore resources by category.
When you click through to download a particular guide, you see a lead capture form with a brief description that reiterates the value of the resource. Scroll down a bit, and you also see a quick preview of what to expect once you download:
Explore this example page to see the complete contents and layout of this thoughtfully-designed approach.
What do the brand’s educational resources look like? Here’s the complete PDF version of the example above:
A few reasons why we love this example:
- It targets a specific middle-funnel intent, how nonprofits can integrate matching gifts into their donor journeys. The users who take the time to download this resource demonstrate a focused interest that indicates they already understand the value of matching gifts in the first place, making them valuable prospects to contact about the brand’s fundraising tools.
- It includes rich visuals that provide real value to readers, including flowcharts, mockups, examples, and varied formatting–not just walls of blocky text.
- It ends with a quick explanation of the brand and a linked call to action to reach prospects right at the point of heightened interest.
Double the Donation’s approach to gated content, with a centralized library and dedicated lead capture pages for each resource, make it easy to promote them across the entire website. Quick buttons, links, and calls to action for specific resources can be added to relevant blog content:
This approach helps maximize the lead generation value of the brand’s downloadable resources.
By referencing and promoting these kinds of resources in spots where a user’s intent aligns with the purpose of the resource, you can actively push users further down the sales funnel, build brand awareness, and secure contact information.
Gated webinar recordings
Double the Donation’s extensive library of past webinars also pulls double-duty as a lead capture asset: https://doublethedonation.com/webinars/
On this centralized webinar page, visitors are greeted with categorized options.
The page also includes a real time feed of upcoming webinars, encouraging users to register right as they’re exposed to the full range of helpful events that the brand produces.
When you click through to learn about a webinar, you see a lead capture form for email addresses, a templated description, and social share options. Double the Donation uses an integration with webinar tool Livestorm to quickly produce and publish these pages with minimal downtime.
Take a closer look at this example webinar page to learn more.
Reasons we love this approach:
- Like with other downloadable resources, having a centralized webinar directory page makes it easy to promote your recordings across your entire site and across the web.
- Categories and an intuitive layout ensure that visitors can find video content that meets their needs and interest–in other words, their intent.
- The brand’s very active event calendar is a major investment of time and resources. Using an external tool that simplifies not just the process of producing the events but also recording and posting them for lead capture purposes allows its value to scale.
Gated product walkthroughs
Finally, we want to shout another type of gated content on the Double the Donation website.
On their webinars page, the brand also features pre-recorded product walkthroughs. These gated resources are set up similarly to webinar recordings, with dedicated pages and lead capture forms:
Videos like these essentially function as on-demand product demos with testimonial content mixed in. Publishing these recordings is a simple but impactful way to improve the customer journey and drive sales results.
Why we love this tactic:
- Even after getting to know your brand and offering, some prospects just aren’t ready for a live demo. Others just might not have the time. On-demand options give your prospects an easy choice to see your product in action without committing to a meeting or a sales pitch right away.
- If you’ve built a robust funnel of content on your website (including blog posts, case studies, downloadable resources, webinars, and more), this kind of product demo can sometimes do the selling for you. Design a helpful, consistent, and comprehensive customer journey, and your website becomes a true sales engine.
- Demo recordings and other highlight reels of your offerings are easy to share and embed across your site. Video engages visitors, lengthens time on page, and builds stronger brand awareness–which is why we recommend custom videos to all our clients. If you take the time to produce these valuable assets, actively use them like Double the Donation to generate leads, demonstrate social proof, and enrich blog content.
Easy recommendations to get started
So how can you put these examples of gated resources into action for your brand?
We have a few easy recommendations that you can adapt to fit your own needs, website, and assets:
1. Convert your valuable middle- and bottom-funnel content into downloadable resources.
You don’t have to write and design a new downloadable PDF resource from scratch–use what’s already working (or let us help).
If you have blog content that already generates traffic and leads, that indicates that it’s playing an important role in some of your buyers’ journeys. These are prime targets for conversion into downloadable resources.
For an example, consider the example resource highlighted above, Improving the Donor Journey with Matching Gifts.
This lead capture resource started life as a blog post.
Once you identify the resources on your blog that answer vital middle-funnel queries or consistently attract future customers to your site, you can take a few steps:
- Look for low-lift ways to boost the value of the blog content, for example, by adding extra tips, creating a quick free template, or appending a few relevant case studies. You can produce a 1:1 copy of the blog content in a downloadable form, but adding a little extra value will make it easier to convince users to download your resource.
- Copy the blog content and make adjustments as needed. You’ll likely need to trim the text, play with formatting, and make a few updates for freshness to mock up a downloadable resource.
- Produce the resource, either with your own graphics team or, for Nexus clients, your dedicated copywriters and designers.
While you’ll still need to create a landing page and lead capture form for your downloadable resource, this process can save you a ton of time and guesswork. You’ll have avoided producing a new resource from scratch and your resource will be clearly positioned at a valuable point in the buyer’s journey.
2. Create quick value-adds for your top-funnel visitors.
What if you want to create something new for your brand’s library of resources?
We recommend brainstorming some quick value-adds that will attract leads like a magnet.
This strategy is particularly effective for maximizing the value of your website’s top-funnel traffic.
Consider these questions:
- What are some of the broader, top-funnel topics that you’re known for or already rank highly for?
- What problems are your visitors looking to solve when they arrive on these pages?
- What can you offer that encourages visitors on these pages to stick around and remember your brand?
Quick value-add resources give these visitors a reason to engage further your brand, and they give you a consistent way to collect and qualify early-stage leads.
Here’s an example:
Double the Donation consistently ranks highly in organic Google results for all kinds of queries related to corporate giving, sponsorships, and more. This is valuable traffic, but it’s tricky–once visitors get their answers, they’re likely to leave.
The brand created a downloadable resource specifically to address this challenge:
This resource was easy to create, provides direct value for visitors, and builds awareness of Double the Donation as a helpful resource in the corporate giving space.
The Nexus team can help you brainstorm and create these kinds of value-add resources–let us know how we can help!
3. Turn your webinars into blog posts.
Publishing your recorded webinars as gated lead capture resources is a great strategy–however, depending on how you promote these recordings and your reach, they may not be super visible to as much of your audience as possible.
Blog posts are often more visible to more visitors for two key reasons:
- Visitors to your site (particularly those at a top-funnel stage of their journey and are just looking around) may be more likely to check out your blog than webinar library.
- Blog posts can also more easily be crawled by search engine bots, meaning they’re more likely to rank and attract more organic attention over time than your webinar landing pages.
By creating blog posts that recap key points of your webinar, promote the recording, and maybe even include some short clips, you can reach more users who may interested in watching the entire recording.
This strategy can be an excellent complement to larger-scale events or webinar series.
For example, Double the Donation hosted a series of webinars as part of their Virtual Workplace Fundraising Summit. They produced a blog post that summarized key takeaways from a session, directed traffic to the recording, and more generally promoted their event for next year:
Bonus points for the invaluable social proof baked into the panel-of-peers-style format of this event and blog post!
Gating your content can be a highly effective way to create lead capture opportunities, engage prospects, and maximize the value of marketing activities you’re already doing.
Try to brainstorm easy ways to adapt your current marketing assets into valuable lead capture resources for your audience–you may be surprised at the results.
Want expert guidance? The Nexus team can:
- Assess your current assets and the sales funnel they create for visitors to your site
- Lay out recommended resource types
- Create gated resources like PDF guides, videos, and more
- Develop landing pages that ensure you collect the lead information you need
Our custom content campaigns give you flexible ways to build your brand’s library of marketing resources.
Please contact us today to learn more. If you’re already a Nexus client, please reach out to your account manager to discuss your ideas–we’ll be happy to lay out some recommendations.
