Are Your Registration Forms Wrecking Your Content Marketing Strategy?

We’re currently in the middle of our 2013 Content Preferences Survey. I’ve been looking at the preliminary results, and it’s already clear that we’re going to have a lot to talk about when the final results are ready.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a sneak preview. One of the questions we asked involved which types of content people are willing to view in exchange for registration — name, email address, industry info, and the like. Here’s what we’re seeing so far:

ScreenShot001

This isn’t surprising in some ways: We already know that gating videos and infographics is generally a very bad idea. Conversely, we also know that gating high-value content like white papers and webinars is a practice that buyers understand and accept.

There are, however, a couple of interesting things going on here. First, B2B buyers generally expect case studies to be ungated content. Different companies handle this different ways, so this finding may influence their gating strategy.

Second, and more important, is the fact that B2B buyers take a dim view of any content that requires a long or invasive registration process. We define “limited” registration in our survey as “name, company name and email address,” with “full” registration involving anything more than that.

In other words, four out of five buyers won’t share more than the  most basic information, even for high-value content such as webcasts. Presumably, they either provide phony information or simply walk away when they’re asked to share more.

This is a missed opportunity. Content marketers have a wide variety of tools as their disposal, including progressive profiling and data-appending services, to work around this challenge. If your company can capture even a small part of that 80% that balks at providing detailed registration data, how might it affect your conversion rates and revenue impact?

By the way, if you haven’t yet taken the survey, there’s still time to do so — and to get a chance to win a VIP pass to our Content2Conversion event in New York later this month.

 

SHARE TO SOCIAL

Let's Get Started

Search the site.

View the Interactive G-Book

Fill out the form below to view the asset.