B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

To register or not, revisited: could there be a third way?

August 12th, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

One of our earliest posts was “To Register or Not?” – way back in late 2006 – in which we looked at both sides of the burning issue of whether or not to insist on collecting visitors’ strategic information in exchange for allowing them access to some crown jewel of your content suite (typically a white paper).

In thinking about updating that piece, we cast about for some truly new information.  What’s amazing is how little has changed;  it’s a bit like “Everything old is new again.”  The philosophical battle lines are still pretty much drawn between the two camps of…

• Make ’em register, those leads are our lifeblood …a camp that seems to house the majority of B2Bs, including this one;  and
• Set ’em free, reap the thought-leadership benefits of broader influence and cyber-buzz, and trust that the true leads will find you eventually …a camp with heart-tugging feel-good logic, but – as far as we can tell – not a lot of actual practitioners.

What continues to be disappointingly absent from the landscape is any definitive research, comparing the two polar positions on metrics that matter to B2B marketers.

Case in point:  a recent piece by John Bottom (across the pond in Base One Group), which does an excellent job of going through all the terrific-sounding reasons why making your content freely available should be better, such as:

• it fits better with the visitor’s stage, which is probably fairly early and nowhere near ready for a salesperson’s call; and
• it allows your “information to spread around the world, carrying with it your good name” and building your thought-leadership reputation.

John’s rant (his term, actually!) is pure opinion, with no real evidence offered.  The problem being, of course, that – unless you’re in the media business – your company doesn’t get paid based on page views;  and there’s no reliable way to know that even one of those 10- or 100-fold more white paper readers ever came back as a solid lead.  However, in the comments to John’s piece we found pointers to 2 excellent posts by Blake Hinckley at Marketing Lab that reframe the debate toward the in-between zone…

Passive Profiling –  In this post (which btw contains the only research we found on our tour: MarketingSherpa data showing that 71 percent of people who fill out a form give false answers), Blake recommends tracking a visitor’s engagement with all the content available on/from your site over time;  and he shows how that data gauges the info you would have normally gleaned from survey questions.  Only problem being, this method still requires collecting a name and email (which users are still free to lie about).

A variation on this might be Brian Carroll’s suggestion:  “You’ll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that build an opportunity profile over time, such as requesting an email address, then asking for first and last name, later requesting a phone number, and so on.”

Interactive Profiling –  Under this approach, you create several multi-step scenarios around your actual product or service, both providing and gaining further bits of information as the dialogue continues;  with the end result that you will know quite a bit about the prospect at the end, who will also have done quite a bit of self-selling.  The scenarios can be made as visually interesting as a video game, if desired (no reason that B2Cs should have all the fun!).  Yes, it will be much more costly than a standard survey form;  but as Blake says, if you “think of Interactive Profiling as content, lead grading, and the means of orienting and personalizing an entire campaign” all in one, it’s really not all that expensive.

In addition, the concept of voluntary registration was introduced by MarketingSherpa and recently commented on for Inspire by Michael Stelzner:  “Simply said, voluntary registration asks readers to fill out a form prior to reading a white paper, but says the form is optional.  The theory behind voluntary registration forms is: you can increase your readership and increase the number of quality leads.  So, in not so many words, the claim is you can have your cake and eat it too.”  Unfortunately, Sherpa’s work was based on just one rather flawed case study, so the theory is nowhere near proven as yet.

If anything is clear, it is that B2B marketers should stop thinking of “Register or Not” in the traditional dichotomous terms, and start experimenting with some of the above middle-ground methods.  No need to wait for the definitive large-scale study;  hey, there’s still some room for educated gut feel in marketing!  Your Web consultants can help you select both an approach and the best-possible testing methodology.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Converting, Lead generation