Marketers are always thinking about ways to convert visitors with content.

But there is no golden recipe book when it comes to the method you use to capture leads. Different tactics are going to be effective in different scenarios to generate leads from your content.

Two of the biggest lead gen tactics in content marketing are landing pages and pop-ups. 

Let’s take a look at which lead gen tactic you should consider for different scenarios.

When to Use Landing Pages

The benefit of a landing page is its singular focus on getting visitors to take a specific action.

Everything on a landing page—design, copy, call to action—contributes to one goal and that makes it a fairly effective destination to send visitors to if you want to be able to “sell” a demo request, subscription, or free trial. You can also optimize various landing page elements over time to boost your conversion rates.

But when it comes to content, landing pages are a great way for marketers to promote content that isn’t live yet to generate leads.

For example, when promoting an upcoming webinar, a landing page will allow you to entice visitors to register and set them on a track to receive automated emails leading up to the event.

Registrants understand that filling out this form will give them access to the content that will be available at a later date. They are expecting some wait time.

You can also leverage Uberflip Link CTAs to direct visitors to a landing page, which you can place to appear beside specific pieces of content or within a stream of content.

However, for content that is already live on your site, you might not want to force visitors to jump through landing page form fields and emails to get access to your content.

In this case, for content that’s already available, you can leverage less intrusive Form CTAs to capture new contacts within the experience.

When to Use Form CTAs

Form CTAs work as a passive lead generation tactic for visitors to your blog or resource center. With Form CTAs, you can capture information right away from visitors when they're ready to give it. 

Sprinkling more general CTAs throughout your blog, like the one below, can entice visitors to ask for a demo of your solution or subscribe to your blog. 

But Form CTAs can also be placed beside your content and the call to action makes sense within the experience. 

Yet when it comes to reliably capturing leads with your content over time, an Overlay CTA helps you as a marketer take a more aggressive approach.

When to Use Overlay CTAs (or Pop-ups)

An Overlay CTAs (or "pop-up") is an opt-in form that shows up when visitors are consuming your content to ask for their information. You can choose whether you allow visitors to dismiss them or leverage them to gate your content; whether you gate or not will drastically change the use case and strategy for generating leads. 

By default, Overlay CTAs can be dismissed which helps you generate leads and subscribers when you have a captive audience consuming your content. Contextual messaging and offers work best. For example, you might want to apply an Overlay CTA across your blog specifically to capture subscribers.   

You can delay Overlay CTAs to appear after a certain amount of time has passed for the reader on the page, which you can set based on the scenario. For example, we've found that 60 seconds is a reasonable amount of time to allow readers to consume our blog content before we ask them to subscribe with the Overlay CTA above.  

A great use case for delays this would be for you to give your visitor a quick preview of a video or whitepaper and, once you’ve sparked their interest, the CTA will pop up and gate the content. From there, the visitor will have to fill out the form in order to continue reading.

You can decide whether to "repeat pop-up" on subsequent views or sessions to ensure you're not interrupting the visitor's experience but to repeatedly "call them to act" until they say yes.

Gated Overlay CTAs

Leveraging Overlay CTAs to gate premium content allows you to collect leads while giving them immediate access to your content. CTAs appear on top of your content letting potential leads know that they are mere seconds away from the content they desire. Gated Overlay CTAs are a win-win situation: easy lead capture for the marketer and easy access to content for the visitor, especially when marketers leverage Progressive Profiling to collect information over time.

With Flipbooks and videos, you can choose to show item body to leverage the title, body below the content and social proof around the content to generate demand for your premium content.

Fewer clicks, better results

A mix of landing pages and Uberflip CTAs are necessary; different tactics will work in different scenarios to convert leads.

Landing pages allow you to get full information about your lead prior to the giving them the content, offer, or demo or trial.

But for existing content, why not make it easy for you and for your visitors? Instead of building a landing page or forcing visitors to make a choice between converting or bouncing, you can generate leads within the content experience itself.

When it comes to giving leads what they are looking for to entice them to convert, it's important to remember that we’re all looking to save ourselves a few clicks every day.

To gate, or not to gate? Learn the answer in our free eBook, How to Gate Your Premium Content & Generate Leads.