Читать книгу Digital Marketing For Dummies - Ryan Deiss - Страница 48

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.

A gated offer is an exchange in value. No money changes hands; instead, you provide your new lead something of value in exchange for the right to contact the lead in the future. Gated offers are free, and a common notion among digital marketers is that because they’re giving the gated offer away for free, the product or service offered doesn’t have to be of high quality. That’s a mistake. Free does not mean low quality. When someone exchanges his contact information and gives you permission to follow up with him, he has given you value, and a transaction has taken place. This prospect has given you something that’s typically private, as well as some of his time and attention. You need to return that value if you hope to build the relationship that is required for lifelong customers. The end goal of a gated offer is to gain leads so that you can nurture them into customers over time.

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.