When Should Content Be Free?

Photo credit: kalandrakas

I’m not asking. Ann Handley of MarketingProfs is. Specifically, she raised the question last week on OPEN Forum, an oddly titled site since it’s only open to American Express cardholders. Even so, I recommend reading Ann’s post here. You’re welcome to offer your own thoughts below (credit cards welcome, but not required).

To summarize, Ann correctly posits two approaches to distributing your eBooks and white papers:

1. You can require interested readers to register their name, email and contact information before they access your content, or
2. You can offer content free for download, thereby encouraging readers to share it and hopefully turn it viral, thereby generating maximum exposure for minimum expense

I can see how the latter possibility would appeal to marketing types. Who would turn down bragging rights for an article that’s become the darling of the chatocracy? As Ann explains, marketers are disinclined to hide content behind a registration wall because “the real goal is visibility with your audience.”

I respectfully disagree. Visibility is the mission of advertising, not marketing. Admittedly there’s some overlap here. But the desire for content to “go viral” falls squarely on advertising’s side of the advertising-marketing Venn diagram.

Content goes viral because it promotes a shared emotion, experience or attitude, which is fundamentally what advertising aims to achieve for a brand. In a sense, the role of advertising is to feed marketing, and the role of marketing is to feed sales.

So, is content more valuable when it’s behind a registration wall, or when it’s set free to propagate on the internet.

I’m wondering why this is an either/or question. In researching this post, I referred to blog posts and slideshares of Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. Interestingly, I found he cited two almost identical statistics that seem to contradict one another.

In the first, Brian wrote on his blog that registered content could drive away 75 to 85 percent of potential leads.

In the second, he notes in a slideshare that 80% of marketing expenditures on lead generation are lost, ignored or discarded by sales. Among the top reasons, he cites, are that leads aren’t properly qualified or prioritized.

So, maybe the question should be how to qualify leads without scaring away prospective customers.

The answer isn’t a matter of which approach is better, but rather which approach applies, and when.

It’s unwise, for instance, to demand registration for content early in the buying process when customers are beginning to gather information about you and your competitors. High-level perspective, such as industry articles, buyer’s guides, web copy and case studies help customers place your value against a larger context.

This content should be offered gratis.

Make it easy for prospects to get educated about what questions to ask. You build trust by making it safe to learn those questions from you.

As customers move further along the buying process, their questions become more knowledgeable and specific. They’re better equipped to recognize content of value to their research. If you’ve already built trust by helping them learn what questions to ask, they’re more likely to submit a name or an email in exchange for more specialized content.

Carroll makes an excellent point about minimizing prospects’ commitment during the process. He recommends using a series of “micro-conversions:” requiring an email for a white paper here, a job title for an article there. Eventually, by enabling prospects to educate themselves, you’re also compiling a profile to help guide sales to close the deal.