Question... as I am looking potentially to put together more tools for customers to have access to. How have you all looked to gate your knowledge base tools for specific clients?
-Can you gate them by domain/IE register and we recognize they are a known customer?
-Do you do approval gating? Where someone has to be approved before they log in?
-Or do you just say, we don't care everyone can log in, and just monitor it?
Just interested in hearing folk's thoughts on putting controls around access for this data.
I've used both smart content (on landing pages) and registration lists (passwords & registrations) here to help with these items. The smart content works about 80% of the time, the later 20% is affected by cookies, adblockers, etc. Passwords typically work better in this use case, we just share them via emails to recipients that are known customers.
Another way you could handle this is by using a custom cookie that is generated when the user clicks an opt-in button on your page. We actually developed a HubSpot Module for this. You can customize the message, cookie name, cookie expiration date, and branding. If you use the same module with the same cookie name on multiple pages, you could ensure that they only see it once. If that sounds like something that might help, you can learn more here: https://marketplace.hubspot.com/products/begin-bound/age-verification-gate
I'd echo what @Mike_Eastwood and @Bryantworks have explained. We've used smart content for gating based on an approval process. Once approved, the contact is added to the list and can access the content via list membership smart content. Again, not 100% reliable and it causes a delay.
What we're more commonly doing/seeing/recommending (depending on the circumstances) is to leave as much ungated as possible. We're finding that there's nothing proprietary in most of the knowledge base content and in some cases it can be beneficial for users to see that there is a comprehensive knowledge base as part of the buying qualification.
There are definitely some instances we've come across in which it would be nice to have a better gating system on certain types of content; for example, client-specific or potentially employee-specific like you'd see on an intranet/extranet.
It's an interesting discussion. More and more we're "ungating" content so it can be read by more people, and indexed by Google.
Smart Content works well for simple ungating to known visitors, however it's not 100% reliable.
As Chris mentioned there are more challenges because we rely on Cookies so different devices may give the visitor different experiences (i.e. if they ungate some content on their mobile they may not see the ungated content on their laptop).
Logins and passwords are definitely an option but it's not particularly user friendly (one day we'll look back and laugh about securing sites with passwords).
I challenge you to find a way to connect over and above your content. If you can demonstrate great value with some ungated content, what's the logical next step for the visitor to take? Is it a Strategy Session, a Video Series? In other words how can you encourage more engagement on a 1:1 level?
I've used both smart content (on landing pages) and registration lists (passwords & registrations) here to help with these items. The smart content works about 80% of the time, the later 20% is affected by cookies, adblockers, etc. Passwords typically work better in this use case, we just share them via emails to recipients that are known customers.