A client asks: “If we’re offering a white paper as part of an upcoming campaign, should we remove it from our Website for the duration, especially if it’s ungated?”
As demand generation marketers, no matter how skillfully we construct a clear, unambiguous, unfettered path to our precious content, some prospects will still go out of their way to avoid having to register for it. Build a custom landing page with no links anywhere to your main Website, and some subset of the people who arrive at that page will back out and find the same content on your Website anyway (even if it takes them that much more time and effort to so.)
My advice: don’t fight it. You can minimize the number of people who veer from the path you’ve chosen for them by:
1) offering a clear, compelling, singular call to action, with no distracting options (“contact us”) or links to Facebook, and
2) creating a landing page that promises fulfillment with speed and convenience. For example, consider packaging content in the form of an “information kit” to increase the perceived value.
And what of the people who are determined to ignore instructions? Let them. Don’t bother removing the content from your Website, but don’t let the misfits off the hook either: require the same registration that you would if the person were responding to the campaign. The registration won’t tally as a lead from the campaign, but it’s a lead nonetheless.