At Starfleet Media, we’re generally in the business of licensing high-value content assets, including Smart Decision Guides, co-branded eBooks and Benchmark Reports from Starfleet Research (our IT market research arm), to other B2B companies, and not the other way around. But when we came across a recent post from Tom Fishburne, a “career marketer and cartoonist,” that highlighted some of our market research on content marketing and lead generation along with his cartoon depicting an encounter between a modern-day decision maker and a medieval guard, we decided that it was our turn to acquire licensing rights to a content asset.
With respect to the pros and cons of gating content assets, Fishburne makes some good points:
“Marketers can be too fixated on site visitors only as leads to be generated. They forget about the customer experience. They forget to deliver an experience worth generating a lead.
According to Starfleet Media, companies gate 80% of major content marketing assets behind lead generation forms. I’ve read separately that companies lose 93% of visitors in paid search and social campaigns from gating content.
Our content is how many of our potential customers meet our brands for the first time. How we welcome them that first time will determine if there’s a second time, and if we have the privilege to continue the relationship at all.”