Note: The ideas and thoughts here are mine and in no way reflect my employer, Aplicor.

Content marketing is growing by leaps and bounds, with good reason.  Prospects are looking for information and not interruption.  For more information, go visit the experts over at Junta42.

But if you are a marketing starting to publish content, you’re undoubtedly thinking about capturing prospect information.  After all, you cannot start lead nurturing without prospect information.  However, you must be careful.  Here’s an example of what not to do.  This is an actual registration form for a white paper from Oracle Corporation.  Shame on you, Oracle.

Please note that I once started to complete this form (and there’s even more here than in this image) but I abandoned it halfway through.  Very few people will fill out a form like this today.

To paint a picture, let’s say you are traveling and at dinner you meet a very attractive person of the opposite sex.  Regardless of your intentions, you’ll like to talk to this person.  But she does not know you.  How do you start a relationship?  If you ask her dozens of prying questions, you’ll be labeled a jerk.  That’s exactly the mistake in this form.  We look like jerks.

So what is a marketer to do?  I recommend you capture the bare minimum and let the “progressive profiling” in marketing automation systems build the rest over time.

I suggest you collect just three fields:

1. First name
2. Last name
3. Email address

That’s all you need to start building a relationship.  Good marketing automation like Marketo, HubSpot, or Eloqua all support progressive profiling.  What is Progressive Profiling?  Let’s use the definition from the experts over at MarketBright:

“In a nutshell, Progressive Profiling allows you to set up display rules for surveying and generating registrations based on the presence or absence of particular prospect details. It automatically changes the questions on forms as a customer answers them. For example, if your prospect visited your Web site last week and filled in a form to get access to a white paper, providing only their name and company to do so, the next time they visit they would be asked for a job title or area of industry instead. Each new interaction with your Web site allows you to glean more information from the prospect and build their profile, without bombarding them with onerous account registrations.”

Don’t drive away your prospects.  Gently gather information and rely on progessive profiling to capture the rest.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is Director of Marketing for Aplicor.  Prior to this, he was the President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple.”  He’s also the author of the highly acclaimed white paper, How to Find New Customers.  Lastly, he’s featured in the book by Jill Konrath “Get Back to Work Faster“