That VP of Marketing in Chicago told me to ditch gated content

I was running lead gen for our SaaS platform and had everything behind forms. Then this VP from a big insurance firm in Chicago straight up told me she ignores any gated content. She said her team doesn't have time for 10 page PDFs that promise the world. I argued back that we needed leads and she said nah, build trust first. So I tried ungating our top three white papers for 6 months. Our traffic doubled and we got way more inbound requests from real buyers. Turns out she was right, gating just filters out the people who actually matter. Anyone else had luck ditching forms for thought leadership pieces?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_john2mo ago

Did you measure if those inbound requests actually converted better?

grace_white1mo ago

My own team did almost the same experiment with our case studies about 8 months ago. We took down the gate on our three most popular ones and saw our traffic go up by like 40% but more importantly the demo requests we got from people who read them first closed at almost double the rate. Idk maybe it's just my industry but the ones filling out forms before seemed way more likely to be students or competitors poking around. The real buyers just want to see what you've got without jumping through hoops.

drew_park2mo ago

Did you track the actual conversion quality, not just the volume? I get why people love the idea of ditching gated content, but I've seen the hype train derail plenty of times. More traffic and inbound requests sound great on paper, but half those new leads might just be tire-kickers or students researching a project. If your sales team starts chasing 200 unqualified emails a month, you'll beg for those 50 legit forms back. It's not always that serious either way. I'd rather have 10 real buyers than 200 people who clicked a download link and forgot about it.