For a long time, one of the cornerstones of funnel-based content marketing has been the “Call to Action” or CTA. The idea behind the CTA is quite straight-forward, you attract people to your site with a search optimised webpage that has highlights from a larger report and then you collect people’s details by getting them to “trade” their email address for a copy of the full report (usually as a web-unfriendly .pdf).

The quid pro quo is that the user gets information and the organisation gets to market its services to that user.

With GDPR, this becomes considerably more difficult in that consent must be “freely given”. This means that the basis of the “trade” is undermined and users should be able to get their “free report” for free, without needing to give their details (see below).

This is another way that GDPR is going to fundamentally change the basis of B2B marketing and indeed the industry. Why will marketers fork out large amounts of cash to commission industry reports if they are then required to give the product created away for free? Content creation agencies and indeed many “inbound” agencies make much of their income from creating these high-value pieces of hero content so it will be interesting to see how the market evolves.

It is not likely that there will be any type of Armageddon, users will continue to educate themselves about products and services online prior to purchase; the human fundamentals will not change. However, the money-go-round will need to adjust, meaning there will be plenty of opportunities for the nimble to profit.