How to Determine When and Where to Gate Your Content

Finding the Most Effective Blogging Format

In addition to his work as Director of Content Strategy at Oracle Marketing Cloud, Jeff has worked as an author, strategist, marketer, speaker, and blogger. He co-authored “The B2B Social Media Book” back in 2012 and brings his specialist insight into B2B marketing strategy to the Content Pros Podcast.
Jeff discusses the pros and cons of the controversial gated content topic, sharing valuable ideas from both sides of the debate. He also offers insight and advice on the content we never gate: blog posts—including the most effective formatting for your buck.
Besides strategy, Jeff offers us a sneak peek into some brand new pieces of content to be released in 2016, which include the top content marketers’ predictions of what will have the most impact in 2016. The kicker in these types of big content is that each prediction has to be backed by a solid piece of data.
Stay tuned for that valuable eBook and, in the meantime, enjoy Jeffrey L. Cohen’s great insights into effective content marketing strategy.

In This Episode:

• Exploration of the controversial “Content Gate”
• The most effective ways to format blog posts
• How to use channel and asset as indicators of gating preference
• Why the funnel isn’t really dead
• Why lead generation shouldn’t actually be our total focus
• Why data is so crucial and too oft forgotten
• Where to find the best data-backed predictions for 2016

Quotes From This Episode:

“You want to atomize your content. So if you have your gated piece at the center, everything else you do around it is ungated, but is derived from that and drives people back to it.” —@jeffreylcohen
“The main reason to have your content ungated is people will share it. People are more likely to look at it, more likely to consume it, more likely to share it. The flip side is that money doesn’t come from publishing. We can act like publishers all day long, but until we sell software, we’re not really creating a sustainable business. So we have to get to a place where people are raising their hand and saying, ‘Yes, I’m interested in learning more.’ To do that, you have to give them a mechanism to say, ‘Yes, I was here. Yes, I’m interested in what you’re talking about.’ That is a gated landing page with a form so that they can give you their information.” —@jeffreylcohen

“I suspect, if you were to ask most B2B companies what content marketing tactic they spend the most time doing, they would say things like posting to social networks and blogging take up a whole lot more of their time, energy, and resources than actually creating things that are behind a form. So in fact, even though we’re all measured on lead generation as a key metric, we spend way, way more time and effort distributing free content.” ‑@jeffreylcohen

“It’s way more than just a best practice. It’s what you have to do. At the end of every blog post, you have a call to action, again, leading someone to a form to download another piece of content.” —@jeffreylcohen

Resources:

• Eloqua
• Jeff’s Social Media Blog
• Oracle Marketing Cloud Blog
• Jeff’s Book
• Jeff’s Twitter

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Jeff isn’t really sure about the answer to this question if he’s being honest, but he does have some insight:
“When I was a kid, there was a Dr. Seuss book called ‘All About Me,’ which was a book where you filled in all the answers to these questions of what was your birthday, what was your parents’ birthday, things that you’re interested in, what’s your favorite color, and one of the questions was, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I actually wrote that I wanted to be a sculptor.”
He’s still a bit baffled by his answer. “To this day I have no idea why I answered that question that way. I had no interest in sculpting. At that time, I had never sculpted anything. I never even carved a turtle out of soap. I never even got that far. Later in life, I never, ever had any interest in sculpting.”
Perhaps he always knew he would be a sculptor of content!