In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss the fine balancing act of when to gate content, when not to gate it, and even when to charge for it. What constitutes content good enough to put behind a wall? What constitutes content good enough to ask someone for money? Listen in as they debate the creation of new software tools, the internal process for making decisions about gating content at Trust Insights, and much more.

Listen to the audio here:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-gatedcontent.mp3

Download the MP3 audio here.

Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know!

Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics!

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this week’s in your insights to give or to gate, that is the question, a bit of terrible Shakespeare paraphrasing there. But one of the problems that almost every b2b marketing company and do some b2c marketing companies as well run into is how much content Do you give away for free? What ideas do you give away for free? And what do you gain? Some folks, some marketers like David meermann, Scott and Gary van der Chuck are staunch advocates give all the best stuff away. Because you know that 99% of people will never implement it anyway. And it makes you look smart and generous. Other folks, on the more traditional sales side, the Dan Kennedy’s of the world, like, you know, give, give minimum value to prove competence, and then lock everything else away so that you grow your database, your list because you’ll live or die on your database. So Katie, as the person who’s in charge of deciding how much value we create for the world, what’s your take on on give versus gate?

Katie Robbert

Well, first of all, I think you just escalated my responsibilities to something that’s incredibly heavy. But we’ll put that aside for now, you know, it’s interesting, because there’s a couple of different things. I remember back when I was a product manager at Health IT company, we struggled with how to price the product itself. And there was a small group of us, myself included, who really felt like, we should be giving the product away for free, because the product itself, while valuable wasn’t where the company was going to make its revenue, our company was going to make revenue from the data that we collected from the product. So really, helping people get their hands on the product, so that we could collect more data was in our best interest. And the pricing model for the product sort of got a bit FUBAR over the years, and it just it created this barrier. And so I bring that up, because I think when we’re deciding what to give away, and what to gate, you know, it really does come down to not just what what’s the value to the audience, but what’s the value to us to collect information by gaining it. And so, you know, you can start to categorize your content by exclusive or thought leadership or, you know, proprietary or helpful, whatever the thing is, but really, it comes down to what do you need to get out of putting the content out there for free or gated. And I think that that’s something that people don’t tend to think about. They’re, you know, they’re very focused on their customer, their audience, you know, what they need, which is important. But in order to properly make that decision, you need to figure you’re out what you need as a company from that content.

Christopher Penn

Okay, I’ll give you an example of something that I was doing my my usual weekly video this weekend. And I felt like what I was giving away in that video was too good to give away. So it was mentally like, I can actually sell this like it was actually be a useful thing. So what was was, I