To gate or not to gate: have we reached the end of the road for gated PDFs?

Gated content, in the form of PDFs and other assets, has long been a staple of content marketing. But have changing user expectations and evolving tech habits made gated long-form content a thing of the past? Not necessarily.

Gated long-form content has become a popular and established content marketing technique for several reasons. For starters, it gives marketers a reliable and universal way of outputting content and helps them build prospect data. As recently as 2023, 98% of businesses used gating to share documents with external audiences[1], citing the need to retain document integrity as a key reason.

There are several other benefits to gated long-form content: it allows you to capture valuable prospect information, such as name, email, company, phone number, and more, which can be used for targeted marketing activities and sales outreach. And offering high-value, long-form content like in-depth ebooks, brochures, and white papers helps position you as an expert or thought leader and brings in qualified leads from people who have a genuine interest in the topic, which in turn brings a higher likelihood of conversion.

Users tend to view gated content as more comprehensive and insightful. Also, your marketing activities are more measurable because you collect information from readers.

But with the rise of zero-click content on social media platforms and AI search, plus buyer resistance to filling in forms and handing over data, marketers have to decide whether to gate content or make it more freely available.

Arguments against gating

Gating is a tried-and-true content marketing technique, but it has become more complex. User experience and expectations are at the frontline in the arguments against gating: decision-makers now increasingly expect instant access and are less tolerant of online forms, delays, or email capture just to read some content. Trust and transparency are factors, with gating sometimes seen as a trap to harvest data.

Discoverability expectations have shifted, too. AI apps and aggregators have impacted the value of gated content, able to scrape and summarise insights from other sources. If your content is locked behind a form, it could be that someone else’s ungated insights and vision will get cited and ranked instead. Gated content also isn’t indexed by search engines, which impacts your SEO success. With organic visibility harder than ever to achieve, shutting your most effective content away behind a wall means it doesn’t rank, won’t get recommended by AI, and so doesn’t drive inbound discovery.

Traditional lead generation tactics have evolved, and the old practice of farming emails for nurturing is no longer the same. Data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA have made gated content riskier in terms of data compliance. And there’s the user experience in general: if you are a company that prides itself on great customer experience (CX), your content now forms part of that journey.

Every unnecessary barrier risks losing a prospect’s attention in seconds, while open access to content aligns better with the frictionless digital experiences end-users now expect. So, there is an argument that your content has become a part of the product experience itself, not a transaction. Some marketers believe that treating content as a transaction – give us your email, get our whitepaper – reduces its impact.

Arguments for keeping your content gated

There are still plenty of arguments in favour of gated content. For starters, sales teams still need leads and want good contact information for pipeline-building. Gating premium content like research reports, white papers and ebooks is still one of the few reliable ways of gathering qualified leads at scale.

A knock-on of that is that gated content gives marketers data points that can enable greater personalization and enhanced account-based marketing (ABM). Getting consent from readers means you can better track buyer journeys and tailor your outreach, something that’s critical for enterprise ABM strategies.

Gating your content also still presents your content as more valuable and exclusive, which can help you stand out in a saturated, information-overloaded marketplace. And it also indicates that the buyer is more serious: someone prepared to fill out a form for in-depth content probably has greater buying intent than a casual reader. So, you can distinguish the window shoppers from prospects genuinely considering buying a solution.

It’s worth remembering that gating still works, maybe not always. A hybrid model might suit your needs, where most of your content is ungated but hero assets like white papers are gated. Not all buyers hate gating. A survey by Mixology Digital found that 33% would be happy to provide basic details (e.g. email) to access content, while 48% say they only engage with gated content if it’s highly relevant. The rest say ‘it depends’[2].

To gate or not to gate?

There is no right or wrong answer. It depends on your goal: do you want to build an audience, or move a buyer through a process?

 If you do choose to gate your content, remember the following tips to make it as effective as possible:

• Ensure your gated content is worth gating: offer genuinely high-value, in-depth content that justifies asking people for personal information
• Give readers effective previews: demonstrate enough value on the landing page to make them want to fill in the form
• Keep forms simple: optimise them for mobile devices and try to keep the number of fields to complete as low as possible
• Use progressive profiling: only ask for small amounts of information initially, build the relationship, ask for more later on
• Have your data privacy regulation compliance available on your site and be transparent about data usage
• Don’t rely solely on form fills as your only success metric: lots of emails will be dummy or personal, and many of the nurture emails you follow up with will be ignored

So, gating content can work; it can sometimes not work. But in the era of video and shorter attention spans, it must be done strategically and provide truly valuable content. Quality over quantity is advisable, and think reader-first before you decide which way to go.

[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/01/31/20-years-of-transparency-in-pdf

[2] https://mixology-digital.com/blog/must-know-stats-about-b2b-buying