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Sep 30, 2009 -

So you’ve published an ebook or an online white paper that’s all that: compelling, well-written, informative, nicely laid out and generally appealing. You’ve packaged it for download from a sweet-looking landing page, because the next step is to deliver it to your audience. But what’s the best approach to get it into their hot little hands?

There are two schools of thought when it comes to delivery:

1. The traditional approach holds that, in exchange for the download, marketers collect names and pertinent contact information via some sort of registration roadblock. The idea, of course, is that they can use the names to market to later. You measure the success of your ebook or white paper by the number of registration forms you collect.

2. The second approach, encouraged by folks like David Meerman Scott, says that collecting names is old school and short-sighted. It’s better, David and others say, to “lose control” of your marketing and allow your ideas to spread virally, rather than hiding them behind a registration page. The impact of lots of people talking about you online ultimately pays off more handsomely, although you’ll measure success differently: in the number of downloads, or in the number of bloggers or Twitter users talking about you as they pass your content around.

The first approach is difficult for many marketers to embrace because they know that the number of downloads or views of their documents goes up exponentially when they don’t require an email address or other personal information in exchange. They know that bloggers or Twitter users will share compelling content freely, giving them loads of link love. Obsessing over sales leads is counter-productive, they say, when the real goal is visibility with your audience. “For decades, companies have offered Web content as lead bait. But the goal should be to get the word out about your organization, not to misuse the Internet for the sake of an outdated technique,” says Meerman Scott.

The second approach is also difficult for other kinds of marketers to adopt, especially in the B2B world. In part, it flies against the traditional way of capturing leads and doing business, and in part because the current economic climate makes Marketing especially anxious to produce some concrete evidence of their own department’s success, and link a definitive value to the ROI question.

So who is right? And which is the right approach for your business? In a recent interview on Blog Talk Radio, Bizzuka CEO John Munsell and I got into a discussion about it, and the bottom line is this: It depends. Or rather, it depends on your marketing goals.

If your goal is to amass a mailing list, use the first approach. You’ll get fewer downloads than you would with losing control, so the number of folks you’ll reach will be smaller, of course. You won’t benefit from any social media sharing love, but you will wind up with a list of people to market to. 

If your goal is to cast a wide net, use the second approach. Requiring your potential views to provide personal information is an ineffective strategy for casting a wide marketing net and for spreading your ideas and message. “Losing control” will allow those ideas to spread and be shared easily, and will allow your “leads” will be people who contact you as a result.

So what would you say? Which approach is right for your organization? And why?

Photo credit: lrargerich

BIO: Ann Handley is an 11-year veteran of creating and managing digital content to build relationships for organizations and individuals. Currently, Ann is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, which provides strategic and tactical marketing know-how for marketing and business professionals through a full range of online media and live events. She also blogs at her acclaimed personal web log.