provide tremendous value to your prospective customers when you’re trying to gain their trust. This idea can seem counterintuitive to some people because they don’t see the immediate return on this investment.
Designing an Ungated Offer
Offers that require no risk on the part of prospective customers are the most powerful way to begin to cultivate strong relationships with customers. An ungated offer such as an informative article, video, or podcast gives value without asking for contact information or a purchase. That said, these are still offers. You are offering value to prospects in exchange for their time. And for many people, no other resource is more precious than time.
The value provided by the business is generally made available to prospects using content such as blog posts, social media updates, or videos. Successful digital marketers make free content available that provides one of the following values:
Entertainment: People pay a lot of money to be entertained, and content that makes a person laugh is content that is likely to be remembered. It’s why commercials try to make you laugh (think the gecko from Geico or Flo from Progressive); they have only 30 to 60 seconds to cut through all the noise and get you to remember their product or service. Video advertisements from Poo-Pourri and Old Spice on YouTube are prime examples of marketers providing entertaining content that gets their message across.
Inspiration: People are highly moved by content that makes them feel something. The sports and fitness industry taps into this sentiment with taglines like “Just do it,” by Nike, or Fitbit campaigns showing everyday people (as opposed to celebrities and professional athletes) achieving their goals using Fitbit. Weight-loss businesses also use inspirational content by using successful customer testimonials and “before” and “after” images.
Education: Ever go to YouTube to watch a how-to video? From DIY projects to “how to rebuild a car engine,” you can easily find educational content online. People want knowledge, and providing it helps build trust. Entire blogs, sites, YouTube channels, and businesses are built around educating people, to great success. That’s why Wikipedia gets over 9 billion page views a month.
The first two value propositions (entertainment and inspiration) can be difficult to execute. But the third is within the grasp of every company. In Chapters 4 and 5, we go into more detail about the form and function of the various types of ungated content that can be produced.
Designing a Gated Offer
To graduate someone from the stage of prospect to lead, you need a gated offer that requires prospects to submit their contact information to receive value. A gated offer provides a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a specific market and is offered in exchange for the prospects’ contact information. That contact information is typically an email address, at a minimum. Returning to the dating relationship analogy earlier in the chapter, a gated offer is the equivalent of a first date. A gated offer might take the form of a white paper, a case study, or a webinar. For example, Figure 3-1 shows how HubSpot makes valuable information available in the form of a white paper that requires contact information such as name, email address, and a phone number.
Source: https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing
FIGURE 3-1: HubSpot asks for contact info in exchange for this yearly report.
Revisit the definition of a gated offer (“a gated offer provides a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a specific market and is offered in exchange for prospects’ contact information”) — and pay particular attention to the “specific” parts. Specificity is the key to a successful gated offer because it makes your offer more relevant to your audience. A lead form that simply states “Subscribe to our newsletter” is not a gated offer that will get you high conversions because it does not solve a specific problem. In the next section of this chapter, we discuss how to make your gated offer convert prospects by making it specific in terms of problem-solving, which will make your gated offer more relevant to your audience.
Zeroing in on what matters
In the previous section, we establish the idea that a specific and relevant gated offer works best for generating high opt-ins. But what does making the offer specific and relevant entail? High-converting gated offers include one, or a combination, of the following five aspects, in a specific form:
A promise
An example
A shortcut
A solution
A discount
Including at least one of these five items will help your conversion rates. The following sections take a look at each of these items.
Making a specific promise
Making a specific promise is one of the simplest things you can do to increase the number of leads you receive from a gated offer. Look at the offer that you’re delivering and think about how you can make the
