Ebooks are the most popular form of gated content; they get passed around by buying committees and are often consumed 2 days after it’s downloaded
More prospective customers downloaded gated content in 2023 than the year prior. Gated content consumption was up 14% compared to 2022 and 77% since 2019.
That’s according to a new study by Netline. The company sells software that provides marketers with “intent data” and that’s where the data in this study comes from. Downloading content is one signal of an intent to make a purchase.
Netline says 6.2 million people have downloaded content created by marketers and tracked from registration to deal closure through the Netline platform. That’s worth mentioning because the data in this study isn’t survey data, it’s behavioral.
As humans, we are irrational creatures, and we tend to say we believe one thing but do the opposite. This is especially true on surveys, so I generally have more confidence in data studies.
(select image for higher resolution)
Ebooks are the most downloaded form of gated content
Several other stats stood out to me from the study:
- “Ebooks remain the most popular content format for B2B professionals, representing 39.5% of all demand – with registrations increasing 34.5%.”
- “Users are 3x more likely to request an ebook than the second most popular format (guides).”
- Content is consumed by “at least four people involved in their buying committee” and “25% have at least seven people” on a buying committee reviewing content.
- “C-Level consumption represented 12.7% of audience demand, growing 7.9% YoY.”
- “53.9% of executive content consumption “came in the form of ebooks, cheat sheets, book summaries, and tips and tricks guides.”
- Content is consumed on average 31.2 hours after being downloaded.
Gated content pairs well with brand marketing
The increased consumption of gated content makes sense to me given the current economic context. B2B marketing has long been over-indexed on performance marketing – and it doubled down as the economy got shaky.
However important performance marketing is in the mix, there’s a mathematical limit to how much is enough. This is because most buyers aren’t in the market to buy your product in the moment, and that’s where brand performs best.
AI generated search results and click-less searches are adding to the reinvigorated interest in brand marketing. Yet brand marketing is hard to measure, and business want some sort of number showing their investment in brand is going to good use. That’s why gated content pairs well with brand – and it’s a good hypothesis as to why gated content consumption has jumped.
If I have to pick out the blurry fire hydrants in a captcha to download your content marketing ebook and give my contact info to your demand marketing team, I think you’re misunderstanding the direction in which demand goes.
— Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) October 10, 2024
Should you gate your content or not?
There are good cases for – and against – gated content. At a high level, I’ve observed ungated content tends to go further because there’s less friction. As such, my roots in PR influence me to have a preference for ungated content.
On the other hand, gated content provides a number. Ironically, those numbers are sometimes used to justify investments in PR. To me, it’s less about attribution and more about demonstrating how owned, shared, earned and paid media work better when working together.
There are other factors to consider including your audience, the content type, context and your organization’s internal culture. It’s not necessarily a binary decision either – I’ve seen hybrid models where an ebook is free to peruse in HTML format, but registration is required to get a neatly laid out PDF version.
It’s also important to recognize that ungated content is not represented in this study. In other words, it does not compare the performance of ungated content to gated content. What it does say is that those marketers who use gated content were more inclined to use gated content.
That seems to me good ground for experimentation. Even if you’ve made a decision about gated or ungated content, it’s worth revisiting every so often.
* * *
>>> All the cool kids are subscribing to my weekly blog posts, weekly podcasts, or a monthly newsletter that rounds up interesting reading from the last 30 days or so (examples).
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:
5 ways for B2B marketing to align with finance on brand building
Image credit: said study and Pexels
