✍️ fill your pipeline without gating your content

Two less-than-ideal features of your typical marketing funnel: 

• Gated content that lets you get contact info from forms, but creates a friction point that drives readers away (especially the ~97% of prospects who are in the “just browsing, not ready to buy” stage of the relationship)
  

• Account-based marketing that looks like cold outreach to any decision-making title at your target logos—instead of marketing/ad journeys tailored to individuals with those companies engaging with your content

Jess Cook has another way. 

As Head of Marketing at Vector, a contact-based marketing platform, Jess helps companies pinpoint the high-potential individuals they need to fill their pipeline—and she does it without a single form. 

(We also hear she can levitate and turn invisible.) 

Read on to see how she does it.

Speaking of learning from others, we’re attending Exit Five’s Drive conference this week. If you’re also in beautiful Vermont, be sure to find our VP of Content Stewart Hillhouse to catch up! Don’t worry if you can’t make it — Stew will share the biggest takeaways you need to know in next week’s newsletter.

Contact-based marketing is all about identifying unique users in your ecosystem, then funneling them to a marketing journey that matches their behavior. For example: 

Instead of: “Show this ad to everyone who visits our website”
You say: “Show this ad to people who read our pricing guide but haven’t booked a demo yet” 

Other examples might be: 

• Sending a follow-up email with prompt templates for readers who opened your AI trends report

• Showing a discount code pop-up to someone who visits a product page multiple times.

• Triggering a “resources for your team” email sequence to visitors who frequently engage with your thought leadership on social media but haven’t booked a demo

This point is to serve hyper-relevant ads to warm prospects who have already shown interest in your solutions. 

“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 We don’t need outdated forms to deliver great content and track where readers are in their buyer journey.” 

Get her in-depth guide to setting up your own contact-based marketing system—from mapping content to intent stages to creating serendipitous follow-ups—in our latest marketing playbook. 

Campaigns that got us talking: The Wimbledon social team shared nearly 6,000 posts in 6 weeks. (Just typing that makes us tired.) They did it by sticking to rules like “posted is better than perfect” and “emotion over production.”

AI hack you pretend to already know: Obviously the more context you can give a chatbot, the better its responses. But at what point are you spending more time feeding it context than you would just carrying out the prompt yourself? Here’s a guide to building your own AI copilot—and striking the right context/efficiency balance. 

Stuff that made us scroll back up: A mini-explainer on the difference between brand vs. product marketing—and how they work together. 

We’re hearing from more and more marketers that they want to do more with their existing contacts. 

You know, the ones you worked so hard to convert, only to pass them off to sales…and cross your fingers they turn into pipeline.

Value-packed editorial newsletters (in the style of the one you’re reading, ahem) are the best way to increase the lifecycle and likelihood of a prospect converting into a customer. 

We know because we’ve seen it work firsthand. 

We could talk all day about how to get your newsletter engine humming. Book a time to learn more about standing up—or leveling up—your newsletter as part of our new Essentials tier.

When someone visits your pricing page 3x, but doesn’t book a demo, what is your typical next step? Vote here.

• Send them a discount code

• Pop up a chat widget

• Have sales reach out directly

• Cross fingers, keep waiting 

We also recently asked you what the hardest part of content partnerships is. No surprises here: measuring ROI is a key challenge across marketing projects.

The old playbook says to gate your content, and hope people fill out forms. The new playbook says: Make your content irresistible, then track who’s actually engaging.

Now go to our marketing blog and read all that gate-free deliciousness. Please.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… Little Free Library hit a new milestone this year with the launch of its 200,000th book-sharing box. These community boxes run on the “take a book, share a book” honor system, letting neighbors exchange tomes in the ultimate ungated content exercise. Find one near you.