The Ultimate List of Gated Content Ideas That Work

TODAY'S EPISODE:

0:43
Hello, and welcome to episode number four of marketing interruption. I'm your host, Andrew Maff stone and today I'm gonna be talking about the many many things that you can use as gated content. So yesterday, obviously I went over a lot of things on how to create content and how to basically take it video and make it last few for weeks on end. And then obviously, if you're growing this content, the next goal should be to start to build that lead list or your sales and most important thing, second most important KPI is emails, you'll hear me say that a lot. So what I wanted to do is kind of go over a list of gated content that I've done over the years, mainly because there's so many times where even I'll sit down and I'll go, man, I've done all this gating content, but I can't think about what to do for so and so. And it's just daunting. So I always forget stuff. I've definitely worked with people before where they're like, I can't think of what to set up for gated content. And so I'm going to go over some things that are very common, I'm going to go over some things that are a little bit different. And I will try to go through the level of difficulty of actually getting them done as well, too. So the first one I wanted to mention was doing a calculator or a quiz. So this is more of an interactive gated content, right. So it kind of require someone to interact with said data content in order to get their email that we've all done the calculators I've done two quizzes, like honestly that you've probably come across the Disney Princess one on Facebook, where they asked me like what Disney Princess you are. So I know I'm an Ariel. So they've done those have done amazing. Um, it depends on who your clientele is. So the calculators work really well. If you're working with ecommerce sellers who don't know what the lifetime value of their, their customer is, and you just create a cow calculator that they give you an email, and then they fill it out. And obviously, it works that way. quizzes are always fun. It's interesting, because you kind of want to go through there of like, if you're depending on obviously, who you're targeting. If you're trying to find anyone with a website, and you do a quiz of you know, find out if your website is user friendly or not. And they just answer a bunch of questions, obviously, give us your email and we'll send you the results. And there's you gated content. The second thing I wanted to mention, so this one I did long time ago and it's one of the most successful I've ever had, and it was very easy to do. What I did is I created a just a, basically a Google spreadsheet. So it was live so that everyone could as they accessed it, I was constantly updating it for them. And what I did was basically a live calendar. At this time, I was helping with an agency, they were targeting ecommerce sellers. And so what I did is I created a calendar of every ecommerce conference that was coming up, along with every webinar that I got, you know, sent for whatever email because those happen all the time, and I would sift through them and make sure they weren't crap and make sure that they actually belonged on there. I had a VA helped me out who just be like, hey, so and so's date was just announced to him and added to the calendar, that kind of thing. It was a great piece of of gated content, I got a ton of emails out of it. The conversion rate was amazing. And mainly because the thing that everyone liked about it was this isn't something that I'm going to download and then it's going to get old. It's something that I'm going to download and it's going to constantly be updated. And if I'm like hey, I need to go to a conference in July or Hey, I'm going to be in a So place in November, let me see if there's something going on. It was a great piece. I loved it, I've definitely started to try to leverage it more often. Next one, similar to the live things will live lists. One that actually got me a couple weeks ago was a live social media image size list. I'm always forgetting what the sizes are my designers remember them. I don't remember them ever. So when I saw like, Oh, this one's a Google Doc, and it's constantly being updated. So if Instagram does something that again, then I can obviously see, I thought was a great idea. But a live document done through Google is very easy to do. It's very simple and people love them because they don't have to like go back and redownload it or updated. 2020 that kind of thing. So great way to actually pull in some more emails. What else they have. There's some there's some that are boring newsletters. Obviously, if you're doing a newsletter, you know, sign up, subscribe. For a newsletter the promise of newsletters is that unless you have an amazing newsletter that people are talking about and they came to your site, looking for your newsletter, it's very hard to get someone to do that. Depending on your industry, say I'm ecommerce sellers, it's a lot easier. But if you're a SaaS company or if you are, you know, selling some kind of service, it's a little bit more difficult because newsletters can be so spammy and kind of daunting. The only way I've seen those work the most is

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typically at at minimum, a weekly newsletter and most daily, I've seen the daily ones work very, very well keep them short. Keep them sweet. I mean, you have morning brew, you click you have daily Carnage, obviously morning brews, marketing, brew, and retail brew and other other brews. There are a ton of great daily newsletters that work very well. That can obviously help for engaging content if you have the ability to create a daily newsletter. It's not as easy as it sounds, I would say is probably one of the more difficult things on here. Another one I had was chat bots. So, chat bots are interesting. I will definitely get into those one of these episodes. They can be more difficult to set up depending on on your, your expertise in it, obviously. But once they're set up, they're interesting. Facebook's got a lot of rules with it. It's still such a relatively newer technology that, you know, sometimes you can do this and sometimes you can't and Facebook will tell you like, Oh, you can't do that. And it becomes a pain. Yes, but essentially, they I had another one A while ago where we set one up. It was a nice chap, I walked through a great couple different flows. Obviously if they became a lead that was even better. But one of the things that we did with that was the chat bot would then broadcast daily, some kind of big news. We were using it kind of as a news outlet and Facebook a little cranky with us constantly sending out messages every day. So became a little bit more of a pickle And you could really say the same thing with SMS. So texting people, at a certain point, it does become a little daunting to over to overshare. And it can become spammy. But if it's executed correctly, they work great. ones, I hate ebooks, white papers, digital book, that kind of crap. I have downloaded more ebooks and white papers in my life than I care to share. And I've probably read 10th of them. A lot of times like, Oh, that sounds like a good read, I'll never read it. They're also if they're done correctly, specifically, ebooks or white papers need to be relatively lengthy and they need to have some nice design to them. So even if you're actually going through and you're spending the time writing and you're spending the time designing it, it can be a bigger workload, but I've actually found that as time goes on ebooks and white papers have been so overplayed that not many people want to download them anymore. If anything, there More Timmy their work better if you just create an ebook and just send it out. So you got an email from a different piece of data content. And then several weeks later, you just go, Hey, we wrote this ebook, we thought you'd like it. For a piece of gated content, I'm finding that more and more to be a little bit more difficult, but that one is what it is. one page PDFs, so sometimes like infographics, things like that can do really well. I think the best part about those is that it's just a one pager. It's simple. Download it, you read it, you get the information you want. Maybe it's something that someone wants to print and hang in their office or something depending on what it is. But I find that the shorter form content when it comes to something like a PDF, where as opposed to like an E book or white paper is much, much better for someone to consume. So it's kind of don't waste someone's time provide as much value as you possibly can. And that kind of stuff will get downloaded a lot better than I've found with white papers and ebooks.

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Another one that I've started to do more recently. So social groups, LinkedIn group, Facebook group, hey, join our group, it's exclusive group, blah, blah, everyone kind of has one at this point. And they can get a little overwhelming as well, because you're end up in so many different groups. And you're like, I don't know what group This is anymore. There's too many people, or there's too many groups. Well, this one's different. Essentially, what I've started to do, as opposed to I just did a different platform. So what I tried to do now is a slack community. And it's there's only a handful of them right now. And I'm actually pretty shocked at how good it's doing. So far. I didn't expect it to do that. Well, because I even though slack has God knows how many millions of users. I wasn't sure if you know, not everyone has slack. Some people have Microsoft Teams or something like that. But what I essentially did was I created a slack community where you can't get in unless you apply it goes through an application process. And then you do allow someone in and then once they're in, there's further levels to it. So if You're not familiar with Slack, there's channels and you can actually make some of those channels private so will actually bring a community into one place, but then a small segment of those people will actually create a private channel. And those people will just keep their conversations there. So we've done it before with several different industries. And it's worked very well. It is probably one of the easier things to do on here simply because you're really just creating Slack channel. Sorry, creating a slack workspace, creating a some kind of landing page for it. Creating however, you're doing the gated content to get them to set landing page and then you're really just putting everyone into a slack workspace. Yes, you need to keep conversation going. Yes, you need to set up the channels and things like that. But outside of that, it's actually pretty easy to do. And then you have like the coaching guys, this is the last last one that I was able to think of for this this episode. So the short one on one sessions, stuff like that, obviously you can do other things like oh buy my book, and all I have to do is pay for shipping to me that's still kind of bulky. But the one on one sessions I've seen work very well before to where it's, Hey, you know what it works from what I've seen much better with someone who is teaching. So if it's someone who's you know, it's a marketing agency teaching other marketers or something like that, but they'll do sign up and I'll do a 25 minute, you know, quick session with you and we'll walk through your Facebook ads, we'll walk through email campaigns or anything like that. It can also work really well with SAS companies, it's a great way for them for lead generation to kind of put them into a sales funnel. But I've seen those work really well too. And that is my list. So today, of course, trying to feature a tool every week and so this week I'm going to feature outgrow outgrow is really great with the gated calculators and quizzes and things like that, that I mentioned the beginning. There's our super easy to use. If you've ever tried to make a quiz yourself through type form or if you've ever tried to create a calculator yourself through like Google Sheets, it is a nightmare. Unfortunately your years ago we did try to do that and it was not worth it. But outgrow has some great stuff you just embed into your into your website or you can send them to an old landing page, things like that. But outgrow is definitely something that I would suggest looking into if you're looking for new data content ideas. Those are my favorite. And that's all I had for today. So per usual, please rate review, subscribe and I will see everyone tomorrow. Thank you.