EBlog

Give it all away

November 20, 2007 | Posted by: Neil

Possibly more than any other issue, the decision to give or not give content away is cause for disagreement between our agency and our clients. As with any issue, there are two sides to the story; clients need leads to make sales, in order to get leads, information must be gathered from visitors prior to giving away whitepapers, case studies and webinars etc. While we marketers tend to believe that giving away your content positions you as a thought leader among your industry.

Lets say for the sake of argument,  you were to ask for Name, Email, Phone Number & Address before a visitor could download a whitepaper. At the end of one month you had 10 downloads, 6 of which provided legitimate conta­ct info for your sales team. 0-1 of which ended up being quality leads. The following month you decide to try with no required fields, and get 100 downloads, with an undetermined number of leads from downloads being the result at the end of the month, but an increase of 2 visitors filling out the "contact us" form voluntarily, requesting more info.

Which scenario leaves your company, product or service positioned better in the market or to connect with qualified leads?  

As you go about making the decision about what info to gather, take a minute to consider the following:

• As of this week, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have finally followed the trend, and will forgo any subscription-based content.  While none of our clients will charge in dollars or cents for their content, you can bet that visitors consider the privacy of their personal information of  value, and the more your require, the more your content "costs" the visitor. Which begs the question, how much is your content really worth to the average visitor?

• If a high percentage of the emails your collect are invalid, is it really worth even collecting?

• The web is the most flexible medium ever created, use it to your advantage. Test how many download when you require registration vs. when you do not. Test asking for email alone vs. email and phone number. There is a balance to be found that fits for your organization and your website,  why not test and adjust until you find what works best for your site? ­ ­