For a small company, content gating is a simple process. A web form collects lead data in exchange for access to content. However, when your enterprise looks to scale content gating with hundreds of offers across different departments, regions, and verticals, things can get complicated.
One of the main challenges is maintaining data integrity through all forms, and this is a problem many enterprises run into. They find their existing processes and martech aren’t suited for handling content gating on a global scale.
Rockwell Automation is one company that struggled to maximize their content investment as they grew. With over 400 content gates and over a dozen regions with unique data and language requirements, finding a way to make content gating faster and more efficient was an absolute must.
Challenges of Content Gating at Global Scale
No matter the size of your organization, content gating must be available for every team, in every country and across all your websites. Meeting these needs while still keeping your data consistent, your costs low and your marketing agile enough to respond to rapid needs becomes a significant challenge the bigger you get.
- Gating Everywhere: With your content offers spread out over several websites, regions and microsites, your content gates need to adapt to these demands. However, allowing local marketing teams to handle the creation of web forms results in inconsistencies in your marketing automation platform, lead data and in your user experience.
- Region-specific Needs: Web forms must be able to adapt to multiple languages and different regulatory requirements. These adjustments can’t simply be site-specific either. A visitor in the UK needs a consistent gated content experience whether they are visiting a .com, .uk or .il.
- Data Integrity: As you collect lead data across a number of websites and regions, you need to make sure this data is consistent and normalized so it can be used effectively for segmentation and marketing automation.
- User Experience: With a decentralized content gating strategy, a website visitor moving across different microsites and departments could experience the same gated content restrictions multiple times. Instead of getting more information every time, you are decreasing engagement and slowing down content consumption.
Optimizing Content Gating for Cost and Speed
When it comes to gated content, efficiency is the name of the game. If you need a marketing platform owner, a web developer, a project manager and a regional marketing manager to put together a conversion form on a landing page, the cost is huge. More importantly, it isn’t scalable.
When you consider the time and development costs of involving all of those people for a single piece of gated content and multiply it by the dozens or hundreds of landing pages you’ll need each month, the number becomes alarming.
Beyond cost, the development time can significantly hinder your organization’s agility. Without the proper platform, a global content gating operation is intensive in people, process, cost and time. Rockwell Automation was able to reduce development costs by 80% but the real win was accelerating their time to solution by over 2 quarters.
Streamlining Gated Content with Centralized
Form Management
If your enterprise expects to meet the demands of a global content strategy without increasing cost or development time, you need a centralized gating strategy. Gated content form governance must be clearly outlined and controlled by your central marketing team. However, you must also provide individual marketing teams the technology and templates required to create gated content that fits within your guidelines. The goals of your centralized content gating strategy should be:
- Streamlined Development Process: Integrating a content gating solution into your entire martech stack and creating multiple templates that allow any department or region to create forms that fit in your gating strategy eliminates the need for a lengthy development cycle. This greatly reduces the time and cost of creating new gated content.
- Tailored to Global Enterprise Needs: Choosing a content gating solution that automatically tailors web forms to regional needs and makes sure all data captured is consistent is crucial to scaling up your global content strategy while still maintaining strong data integrity.
- Progressive Profiling: By integrating your content gating solution with your marketing automation platform, you can improve the user experience and create a more effective progression of capturing lead data. Instead of presenting the same content gates multiple times, gates can be intelligent and automatically move to the next stage of progression to collect even more lead data. Progressive profiling allows you to increase lead conversion rates by asking for less information upfront while still improving lead data quality by collecting more valuable data over time.
Rockwell Automation used GatedContent.com to scale up their enterprise content gating and saw excellent results. Despite complex regional requirements and hundreds of global assets, they were able to reduce costs, improve development time, generate more valuable lead data and analytics and see a significant increase in contact conversions.