Teasers
How can someone who writes a blog with the title
The Scientific Marketer
possibly argue against companies doing everything
possible to capture the details of the people who
view their content.
Surely, the first rule of "scientific marketing"
has to be to collect data, for without data there is no science.
Right?
A lot of companies, particularly those in the direct marketing industry,
seem to take it as axiomatic that you should lock up content and make
it available only to people who register with you.
The (supposed) "benefits" range from the obvious (you get some contact details
to use or abuse)
to the more subtle (it acts a sort of qualification; only people who
are seriously interested will bother to sign up).
It might also be regarded as a benefit that you place a small obstacle
to your competitors seeing your material, if that's something you wish
to prevent.
The clearest disadvantage of the approach is the risk that some genuine
prospects will be put off by the process.
Indeed, even if they do register,
some people will be annoyed at having been made to jump through hoops.
Less obviously, there is a different sort of qualification that the
company is denied—the self-qualification of people who bother
to contact you as opposed to those you call simply because they
filled in a form (often against their will) to gain access to some
of your content.
But perhaps the most important disadvantage is that your content becomes
almost invisible, so you become harder to find.
Search engines adore content,
and making the full text of papers available on-line makes people who
are looking for specific things much more likely to find them
even if they don't know your company.
Similarly, people are much more willing to link or otherwise refer
to content that is publicly available than to content that is accessible
only after registration.
So there are significant pros and cons to hiding content,
and clearly each case needs to be considered
separately on its own merits. Nevertheless, when I started
Stochastic Solutions,
I took the decision very early that the company would, as a policy,
make content available without registration by default.
I can't prove that this has been advantageous, but my strong sense
is that, over time, people are becoming ever more reluctant to register
before there's an obvious reason for being required to do so.
To connect this back to something I do have real and quantifiable
experience of, one of the core lessons from looking at incremental
response and uplift modelling is that negative effects in marketing
are real and much more wide-spread than is commonly believed.
I'm always amazed that anyone is surprised by this, given that
almost all of us are daily annoyed by various marketing, but most
marketers seem to feel that their own messages will be at worst neutral.
Self-delusion notwithstanding, it's hard to believe there's
anyone who, when clicking on a link that promises access to some
interesting content, doesn't feel some measure of disappointment or
irritation when taken instead to a registration form.
Should our intrepid surfer submit to the unwelcome interrogation,
even the most sanguine is likely to be less than happy if instead
of then being taken immediately to the content, she instead gets a message
saying that a link will be emailed or (worse) someone will call.
People increasingly expect and demand instant gratification,
and most are going to feel suckered if even after jumping
through hoops there is another level of delay in being granted
access to the content they seek, even if it is in the noble
cause of filtering out
m.mouse@disney.world, competitors
or other undesirables.
So think carefully before locking up content.
It may be absolutely the right thing for your business in your situation,
but on balance I suspect that most demands for early
registration—especially for marketing content—actively
undermine the very success that they're trying to generate.
Labels: cartoon, negative effects