Here’s a hot take: If you’re in high-ticket B2B, landing pages have become worthless for top-of-funnel.

I once wrote a post detailing how high-ticket B2B products are purchased. The conclusion was: buyers need to learn about your product, understand it thoroughly, and, most importantly, see how it can solve their current problems.

Landing pages do not do that. For high-ticket B2B, 300-600 words (the average a landing page has) is not enough runway to convince any serious decision maker.

But there’s a second reason: Landing pages have a ‘sales vibe’ to them that keeps the visitors’ guard up, and therefore, have a very low conversion rate.

The alternative to your landing pages should be…..Gated Content.

Unlike landing pages, which are highly one-sided, gated content benefits both parties. Say you’re selling a price automation software to vacation rental managers, you could go the old school route, make a nice landing page, have a million bullet points vomiting all the features, and hope your users click the ‘schedule a demo’ button.

OR, you have option 2, the gated content option, which would typically mean having a page with an eBook, or Live Webinar, that describes exactly how this ‘price automation software’ can [Increase vacation rental revenue by X%]

This option provides a lower risk to the visitor, allowing them to assess the entire product before making a decision, without having to get hounded by an AE that would start the call with a list of intrusive questions like “so what was your revenue for the past 12 months?” No one likes to deal with that…

And for your benefit, you can acquire first-party data at a higher conversion rate, which you can leverage in future marketing.

The tradeoff is that more value is provided to the buyer, since the content behind the gate is a lot more extensive than a bunch of bullet point lists. And the seller (the B2B company) gets first-party data.

Everyone wins.

Conclusion: If you’re still sending visitors to traditional landing pages, you’re wasting time and traffic.

In other news, click below to listen to the first podcast of Scaling B2B. I got to sit down with Protim Bhaumik, CMO at Factors.ai to discuss how to measure attribution in B2B, the right way to do Linkedin ads, and much more.