Online web forms to generate leads? good or bad?

I rarely complete web forms to download a whitepaper or similar, as I know from past experience I will get telephone calls and emails harassing me to buy a product or solution.

For corporate and investment banks, most of our websites are very much glorified brochure ware sites, that look to provide information with a generic call to action generally around an offline telephone call, or option to email a business development representative.
With that in mind, how can we use the valuable content we provide online to provide avenues to establish new business relationships, without annoying visitors to which they don’t return.

Economic research and whitepapers
From my own research, it is clear that economic research is a key segment of content that banks provide at this level to prospects.

However, a significant number of corporate banks have begun to place this content behind ‘subscription’ brick walls, requiring you to tell them your life story and the names of your 3 children to even see what kind of information is available. Then no doubt you will have one of their business development team ringing you even before you have downloaded and printed off your first report!

So what’s more important? Capturing a cold lead before they have even made up their mind about you... or giving them the option to fill out their details, if they choose to let them fill it in when they feel more comfortable about your organisation?

It’s all about getting your report to the audience, and placing targeted call to actions discreetly, on the visitor’s agenda and when they are ready to talk.

The first instance sets an unequalled value balance relationship, forcing the visitor to give up quite private information (which online we always are more protective of) without giving much in return. Is this how things are going to be? I wouldn’t stick around for this if I was the customer.

Getting our position out globally
It’s also important to consider, that this kind of information although may be written for ‘customers’ and prospects, there are many other user types exist which we want to get these key facts out to.
Journalists are the most significant audience group that spring to mind, and the business TV programmes are always featuring economists and analysts from the major banks as well as private equity and hedge funds.

When these people appear on mainstream media, traffic for that hour sees a significant uplift from the ‘curious’ visitor, with on average 90% of these being new visitors.
What is an interesting statistic to watch is how many of these turn into return visitors and ultimately enter the sales channel (you need some significant resource available to get this kind of analysis!)

So what is the best approach?
So you can see from this, I personally believe dropping all your insights and whitepapers behind a sign up form can have a detrimental effect in relation to building the initial trust with your visitors online.

In theory, the content you are looking to protect should be so valuable to the reader that after reading it, the call to action or its contents should itself inspire and motivate them to get in touch with you.