Content Marketing: Using Gated and UnGated Content

 Content Marketing is a subset of digital marketing but one of the main activities. It is the creation of content online and distributing it on social media platforms, Internet publishing sites, and other suitable platforms.  The objectives and goals of content marketing.

·         Awareness or Attraction

·         Engagement or Consideration

·         Goal conversion

For this purpose, the target audience has to well defined considering the gender, age, location, preferences, and many other factors are taken into consideration. It is crucial for marketers to promote brands of businesses and service professionals that own various products and services. Promotion online differs from promotion on the land where the audience may come in direct contact or by using the advertisement mechanism. Some of the advertisement mediums are TV, Radio, Newspapers, hoardings, and banners. These are costly to invest in but can attract a large number of the intended audience.

In both cases, a well-defined target audience is a must. It is important to define on the basis of gender, location, age, and preferences. Though offline marketing does not require the creation of content it certainly requires attractive slogans and catchy lines.  In the case of the target audience, the entity is invisible visitors on social media sites, Internet publishing sites, other websites, and blogs.     

 The campaign uses both gated and ungated forms of content with the aim to create awareness or attract the target audience. The next stage is to engage the target audience with write-ups, videos, blog posts, and articles. The final stage is to attract the target audience using the objective of converting to brand loyalty, going for subscriptions, or simply lead generation. Gated content is used for lead generation since a form is attached to it. The associated write-ups, videos, and infographics should attract the target audience to fill out the form and thus lead generation takes place.   

Component of Content Marketing:

SEO or search engine optimization is following the guidelines set by the search engines. Even in search engine optimization content creation has become crucial and mostly ungated content is used. Ungated content is not used for lead generation but rather for promotional purposes. The content creation is mostly for link building. This requires creating authoritative, helpful, and useful content for the links to be considered as non-spammy. The main object is the promotion of the web pages that have to be well optimized.

Professional agencies use both gated and ungated content in their marketing campaigns that are well defined.