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Spoiler Alert: It’s all about getting the right balance between using partner time to get content for both lead generation and brand building
A few years back when I was just getting into accounting marketing, I had an interaction with a partner that started like this, the moment I sat down to discuss a marketing idea:
“So you’re here to bother me again?”
And then I got harangued for another 20 minutes or so about how valuable his time was, and the futility of marketing, and his lack of enthusiasm, his vast and powerful referral network, and the fact that he didn’t like my tie. And that was my second week on the job.
Back then, all content was related to building firm brands, so except for the tie part, that partner had a valid concern because my ability to show him results for the use of his time was limited. That’s different today, because it’s now a best practice to get partners to contribute content for lead generation (in addition to brand building), and marketers now have the tools, technology and ability to drive top line results in ways that weren’t possible at the time I got harangued.
It’s pretty likely, however, that your content marketing program is unbalanced and that you can indeed make better use of a partner’s unbillable time by packaging their thought leadership into content that can then be used for lead generation.
Then, the marketing program can bother partners with leads.
Should the Content on Your Firm’s Website be Gated or Ungated?
That’s a pretty tough question your firm’s marketing team and marketing partner should be kicking around in your team meetings. The difference between the two is pretty simple: gated content is tucked behind a form and requires a viewer to provide contact and other info before they can do a download; Ungated content is unrestricted and doesn’t require a form.
In the B2B world, for purposes of lead generation, just about all B-to-B ebooks are gated, webinars are gated, and even email newsletters are gated unless firms have an online archive of past newsletters. Ungated content, for building corporate and personal brands, are items like online alerts, calculators, videos on YouTube, blog posts, and social media posts.
But while the difference is easy to understand, the strategic and tactical nuances are significantly more complicated, as they cross thresholds ranging from how to make the most productive use of partner and subject matter expert (SME) unbillable time to firm hubris to the urgency of showing a demonstrable return on investment from the firm’s marketing budget.
This isn’t an easy discussion.
CPA Firm Content Marketing Mini-Survey
I want to share with you the results of a mini-survey on content marketing practices that we do from time to time. We take a random selection of the TOP 200 CPA firms and look at the way they’re executing best content marketing practices. Here’s the latest one:
(1) Does the website include educational or thought leadership content?
Here’s the good news: every firm we looked at has moved beyond the “website as nothing more than an online brochure” by publishing different types of content, ranging from videos to articles to newsletter archives and more. That’s great!
(2) What’s the balance between ungated and gated content?
The results here are not so good from a best practices perspective ... in fact, they’re horrifying. Not one firm was gating content for lead generation purposes. Read that last sentence again ... NOT ONE FIRM!!
If you are not gating some portion of your content, I challenge you to go to any random partner or SME and ask this question: What would you rather see ... using the time, energy, resources and intellectual capital that you put into producing content be used for generating leads, or for building the company’s brand?
Here’s a spoiler alert: the answer should be “both”. More on this later, but right now, at least for the firms we looked at, their content marketing program was completely and utterly out of balance.
(3) Is the firm blogging with a clear identification of the presence of a blog in the navigation system?
Oh boy. Over 40% of the firms we looked at aren’t blogging.
Yes, I understand that blogging is tough to do and requires partner unbillable time and needs technology for executions and so forth and so on ....
On the other hand, point out the partners in your firm that don’t want better search engine rankings, more visibility, an easy way to build personal brands, a proprietary way of differentiating the firm via thought leadership, and the ability to own a forum for posting offers for lead generation.
Here’s something I saw on one the sites that was just sad: the firm had a blog and the last time a blog was published was in February of 2012. I challenge you to think of one positive, uplifting, brand building, thumbs up/good job perception that a visitor coming to that site will take away when they see that this firm is featuring thought leadership that’s now approaching its 3rd year birthday. My advice: start your blogging program again or take it your blog down and off your website and remove as many links to it as you can possibly find.
(4) Is the content linked to the author’s online bio page for purposes of personal brand building?
75% of the firms we looked at aren’t leveraging content they post on their site for personal branding purposes. Identifying and linking an author to their bio on the website is simple and a low hanging fruit way to leverage the investment that author has made in content marketing. In fact, if I was a partner that was contributing content, I would absolutely insist that my marketing department link my piece to my bio.
The “Secret Sauce” of Content Marketing : Balance
There’s a lot of CPA and other professional service firms that don’t gate their content because they feel it undignified to ask prospects to fill out a form. While there are ways to measure how many visitors are looking at a page of your content, there’s no way to identify who is reading your content if it’s not gated.
That’s a cultural barrier that needs to be addressed, but essentially, having only ungated content on a site means that you’ve made a decision toward what I call soft lead generation: asking a reader to make a phone call into your firm based on the strength of the thought leadership you’ve presented.
I agree. You should be doing this, but at the same time, you should be selecting and gating some content for no other purpose than lead generation. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of gated versus ungated content, and I believe that you’ll come to the conclusion that the secret is one of balance:
A Simple “Sniff Test” to Determine Whether or Not to Gate
The simplest sniff test for determining the “gateability” of a piece of content is this: “Would I give up my name and contact information to get this piece of content?”
A brochure describing services for a niche? Nope. A whitepaper called “Best Practices for Physician Compensation”? Yep. Blog posts? Nope. A guide for owners of family business on exit strategies. Absolutely.
David Dodd, in an insightful blog post called To Gate or Not to Gate – The Marketplace Will Decide wrote this:
“Many companies are now making a substantial amount of content freely available, and as this practice becomes more prevalent, potential buyers will expect to get access to content without registration. This expectation will likely make buyers more selective about the content they are willing to “pay for” with contact information. They will still be willing to register if they believe that a content resource will be particularly valuable, but if the resource looks or sounds like others that are freely available, they will be much more likely to ignore it.”
Unfortunately, there is not a rule of thumb for the proper ratio of ungated to gated content. To give you some perspective, however, we’ll typically put together a digital marketing program for our clients that will be built on 40 to 60 pieces of ungated content per year and 4 to 8 lead generation campaigns , where each campaign requires 2 pieces of gated content. Before you keel over from the 40 to 60 number, bear in mind that publishing a blog once per week accounts for 48 pieces of ungated content.
I’m going to continue to push the envelope when it comes to the way that CPA and other professional services firms market their services. It’ not only about balance ... it’s about making marketing that people love and it’s about giving your firm the opportunity to showcase your thought leadership for a bigger and better return on your investment.
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