For many marketers, contact forms are the go-to way to collect leads…and you can rip our forms from our cold, dead hands.
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See? We are very comfortable with this lead collection format.
But gated content presents a friction point many potential prospects might forgo. (When was the last time you clicked a news article, saw it was gated, then just went ahead and read the story from a different source?)
When you gate your content, you cut off all the earlier touchpoints buyers need to build trust.
Jess Cook has another way.
Jess, Head of Marketing at Vector, is a big believer in pinpointing the high-potential individuals they need to fill their pipeline. And the best part; she does it without a single form. (We also hear she can levitate and turn invisible.)
“Why would I use a form again if I already know who’s looking at a blog post or downloading an asset?” Jess asks.
Ungated content is a much better experience for the user, and it makes us look more forward thinking. We don’t need outdated forms to deliver great content and track where readers are in their buyer journey.
We asked her to break down exactly how she does it.
To gate or not to gate?
B2B marketers face a classic catch-22:
- Gate content to capture leads, and annoy your prospects
- Un-gate content to boost readership, and lose visibility into who’s engaging
This creates a vicious cycle, where marketing teams spend hours creating valuable content that sits locked behind forms no one wants to fill out, or gets consumed anonymously with no way to follow up.
“Something like 3% of your audience is ready to buy right this moment, and the other 97% are in the research stage,” explains Jess. When you gate your content, you shut out the 97-percenters. “You need great top-of-funnel content where they can begin to find you.”
From ABM to contact-based marketing
Using a contact-based marketing solution, you’re able to identify the specific people showing buying intent, not just interested companies, then funnel them into specific journeys.
This includes surfacing individuals’ behavior on your website, as well as flagging people performing high-intent searches related to your company (for example, storyarb would be interested in seeing who’s searching for “B2B content marketing”).
This level of insight takes the guesswork out of finding high-intent buyers to serve your ads to—and helps you avoid generic outreach to randos at your target logos.
Jess’s approach also allows marketers to un-gate their best content for both the 97% of casual visitors and the 3% ready to commit. As customers demand an increasing number of touchpoints before they buy, ungated content is crucial.
Today, the smartest B2B marketers are removing all forms, capturing 4x more contacts, and measuring exactly how each piece of content drives pipeline.
Here’s how you can do the same.
How to set up a contact-based marketing system
Set up content identification + attribution tracking
Before you un-gate your content, begin by setting up your contact identification and attribution tracking infrastructure.
This includes:
- Install contact identification tools (like Vector, Clearbit, 6sense, RB2B)
- Create CRM reports for first-touch attribution (for example, as former Head of Content at Island, these reports helped Jess discover there were 5 key blog posts that tended to be the first touchpoint for new prospects)
- Build custom tracking for each content asset (like UTM tracking and Google Analytics flows)
Take the time to establish baseline metrics from your current gated content, so you’ll have a point of comparison down the road.
Map content to intent stages
Next, map all of your content to specific stages in the buyer journey and levels of intent. For example, reading a blog post about industry trends might indicate someone is more in the research stage, while spending time on your pricing page would signal higher intent.
To get more granular, calculate the bounce rates on your gated content. Identify your top 5 pieces of content based on pipeline influence, and document content consumption paths.
This observation phase will give you a deeper understanding of which content indicates buying intent vs. more casual research.
Start tracking engagement journeys (without forms)
It’s time to open the gates—and start tracking engagement signals you can use in place of traditional form data.
Here’s what this looks like in practice:
- Monitor time on page, scroll depth, and return visits
- Score leads based on content consumption patterns (using the intent-level mapping from the previous step)
- Track customer progressions through your website
- Build profiles based on behavior, not explicitly declared information
“I like to be able to see the journey. This person came in, and the first thing they saw from us was this blog they found through organic search. Then a week later, they signed up for the newsletters. Then 2 months later, they booked a demo, and eventually they signed a deal,” says Jess.
Tracking the exact flows users take through your content ecosystem will give you invaluable insight into the unique buying behaviors of your ICP. It can also give you richer profiles to work off of than barebones forms can provide.
Create serendipitous follow-ups
Things that are nice: a thank-you card after a party, a goodnight text after a great date, a coffee catch up after meeting at a work event.
Not so nice: Instagram DMs from crypto grifters, pop-up ad windows, an umpteenth piece of junk mail from the overly aggressive local realtor.
The lesson here is that follow-up matters—but you want it to feel natural, not creepy.
To pull this off, create content-specific email nurture tracks that follow up with additional relevant info—for example, a follow-up email with prompt templates for readers who opened your AI trends report, or showing a discount code pop-up to someone who visits a product page multiple times. (See our deeper dive on the art of content-offer matching here.)
Keep a focus on being helpful (not “salesy”), and time outreach based on how recently the content was accessed. “You want to build that feeling of, ‘Wow, I was just thinking about that,’” says Jess.
At this stage, you also want to set up systems that automatically add people to targeted ad audiences, based on the specific content they’ve consumed on your website:
Instead of: “Show this ad to everyone who visits our website”
Try: “Show this ad to people who read our pricing guide but haven’t booked a demo yet”
This lets you serve hyper-relevant ads to warm prospects who’ve already shown interest in your solutions.
The ungated advantage
Jess has seen companies reap major rewards from implementing a contact-based marketing strategy.
“A lot of our customers are running tests where they compare a CBM program to their typical ABM program, and seeing results of doubled, tripled, or quadrupled qualified leads,” she explains.
That’s up to a 4x increase in qualified pipeline from content they’d already published. They just needed to make it more readable for the masses.
Other benefits of this approach include:
- Higher-quality leads because you’re targeting based on behavior, not just form fills
- Marketing teams get back the weekly hours they would have spent on form management and lead routing
- Ungated content gets read more widely (and helps move the 97% through the education part of the journey)
- Time-to-engagement speeds up, because forms aren’t creating new friction points in the buyer journey
An added bonus is smoother handoffs between marketing and sales.
“CBM helps us get better, more qualified folks in the pipeline,” says Jess.
We don’t want sales leaders coming to us for a list of contacts so they can fire off 100 cold emails. We want to be part of nurturing prospects, so they can focus their time.
Future-thinking marketers will look for ways to make their content more available than ever. When you take a contact-based approach, you can stop blocking your best prospects and start connecting with the right people, at exactly the right moment.
