A Simple Hack to Increase Inbound Demos from Gated Content

In my recent post about LinkedIn Targetting, I talked about how promoting free trials and demos in promoted posts on LinkedIn no longer really works. Instead, I suggested providing high-quality content to direct traffic back to your own website.

There are two huge benefits to doing this.

Firstly, if you generate traffic from the right audience, you’d be crazy not to employ retargeting and remarketing strategies. I’m not going to cover that today, but I will post on it soon.

Secondly, and the subject of today’s post, is it’s possible to get an excellent conversion ratio for demos when promoting gated content using a simple funnel tactic.

Step 1

Hopefully, you have one already, but we need a compelling gated content page. The page should be specific to the content you are marketing and, where possible, remove any links, navigation, and other components that could detract the visitor’s attention from filling in the form.

Step 2

The next step is to reprogramme the Thank You page or exit page to redirect to a customised demo sign up page when the form is submitted.

The reason it needs to be customised is that you need to use messaging that acknowledges the fact the visitor has just subscribed to some gated content in the previous step, so they don’t get confused and think they are signing up for the content again (it will not please your sales team if they phone people who have no idea they requested a demo!).

To get the best possible results, you need to be using a marketing automation system like Pardot, Marketo or Hubspot. That’s because, on the second form offering a demo, you must prefill as many fields as possible. The best case is a visitor simply needs to click the book a demo CTA without filling anything in.

One last thing you might want to consider is branching. If you can employ qualification questions in the first form, you may well not want to be bothering your sales team with unsuitable inbound demos.

Your qualification fields could be company size, location, or even what technology they currently use. If you are using a marketing automation platform it should also be fairly easy to identify customers or current users.

If any of these fields throw up red flag answers, you simply need to redirect the visitor to a disqualification Thank You page and kick them out of your funnel. If you employ retargeting and remarketing strategies, you can set up visitors to this page as a custom audience that you suppress from future ad campaigns.

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