The 3 W’s of Gated Content
To gate or not to gate that is the question. There’s a time and a place for gated content, and knowing when and where can be challenging.
Take a step back and look at your customer’s buying journey. Placing high-quality content in the palm of their hands is not about if your content should be gated but more about your end goal for the piece. Gated content can be a vital asset to nurturing a customer. Knowing the ins and outs of it gives you a more holistic view for deploying an optimized content marketing strategy tailored to your audience.
In a recent blog post by one of my partners, Blake Eckert, related to the 2018 marketing trends to watch, he mentioned content marketing is still among the top 3 priorities cited by B2B organizations. Did you know that 45% of marketing budgets are spent on content? Not advertising, not tradeshows. But rather generating valuable content for their target audiences. To put this in perspective, that represents several billion dollars in annual spend.
Traditional B2B marketing has focused heavily on corporate communications and product marketing. So many organizations are still trying to understand what it means to focus on content marketing.
Welcome to 2018! Learn about some of the major innovations and trends in store for B2B marketers this year. Some trends we can expect are in their infancy, while other are brooding and reaching maturity, but one thing is for sure, they each have implications to how we will create, strategize, and implement our marketing initiatives in 2018 and beyond.
Let's face it... creating appealing content isn't always easy. It's possibly one of the most difficult aspects of marketing, encompassing the most time and effort in day-to-day marketing tasks. While many business processes are becoming automated, content creation is still a very manual procedure. It's the number one pain point that most marketers have.
I've compiled a list of 6 awesome tools and resources to help you create, edit, write, inspire and design high-quality content. (Many of the tools offer free options or minimal pricing compared to an outside agency.)
