Do you remember the last time you downloaded an ebook? For many of us, this could be months or even years ago. Though ebooks were major players when they arrived to the marketing scene, their popularity has waned in favor of other more eye-catching offers. Keep reading to find out why this has happened and what you can do to freshen up your marketing efforts.
At the start of Inbound Marketing, many companies began to make ebooks. At the time, ebooks generated excitement for site visitors who were eager to fill out their information in order to get their hands on the insights that you had to offer.
However, as ebooks became more and more popular, everyone was publishing ebooks about anything. As a result, the average quality of these publications began to decrease, along with their effectiveness.
This is not to say that ebooks as a whole are ineffective in all cases. They are still a functional tool in marketing, and we continue to use them with many clients. The key is to know when to use them as part of a larger strategy that includes other forms of content such as videos, spreadsheets, pillar pages, and interactive tools.
If you have been keeping track of marketing trends (or seen a social media feed) in the past few years, you will notice that video has positively taken over. From Instagram TV, YouTube TV, and TikTok, the rising popularity of video is undeniable.
It's a good thing too, since using video is beneficial for your brand! Visitors to your site or social media are much more likely to interact with a video, and once they do, they are likely to pay more attention to it than written material.
If videos are placed on your website, they will also lead to longer site visits, since visitors will be staying on your site for the duration of the video. Longer site visits will also improve your SEO and ranking on Google by increasing the average visit time. This is a highly influential factor in Google's algorithm.
Best part yet? If you already have written content, it is easy to change it to video format! Simply make an outline of the blog post, and review it in your video. You can then publish this outline together with your video as a new blog post.
Spreadsheets are a great way to add value for your leads by helping them solve or better-understand their problem. They are also generally free to make and have high conversion rates, resulting in a very favorable ROI.
Why do spreadsheets work so well? First of all, they are a great way for you to show off your knowledge to your leads. You may even have a spreadsheet that you use internally as part of your working process that you use as a basis for a content offer.
Seeing a sample of the work that your company does directly put into action to help the lead solve their problem will allow them to trust you more. Here at Digifianz for example, we used to use our ROI Template and Sales Funnel Template in our own workflow, and now they are available as a content offer for those that would like to use them.
A spreadsheet can also be used to show how much benefit a product could provide to a lead. For example, a task management software could create a spreadsheet to be used by leads to record the amount of time they spend organizing their tasks throughout the week. The results of the spreadsheet could then show the lead how much time they could save by implementing the software.
Pillar pages are basically an open ebook requiring no information from a lead to access it. These pages should explore a topic in detail, linking to all related topics. Our Services page is an example of an explanatory pillar page describing the services that we offer to our clients.
Ebooks get a lot of resistance from leads once it comes time to fill in information. Though information taken from these forms is useful, it can become counterproductive if only a small amount of people visiting your ebook actually fills out the form. Pillar pages allow us to solve this problem.
Being an open web page, pillar pages are also beneficial to your site ranking and SEO, since search engines will be able to explore your pillar page for keywords and backlinks. Meanwhile, the contents of gated content offers like ebooks are all but invisible to search engines.
One of the fastest growing content offers are interactive tools which includes calculators, quizzes, and quotes. These tools allow a user to answer questions and receive results sent to the email address that they provide.
Interactive tools provide value to your leads by giving them answers to hard to answer questions like “how much does this cost?”
The answers that your leads provide to these questions can then be used to qualify them. For example, a car insurance company could include a question like “What is the make and model of your car?” in a quote tool and qualify all leads except for those that choose the response “I do not have a car”.
Digital Inbound Marketing, as with all things digital, is ever changing. A qualified agency will make a point of staying up to date on the latest trends in the industry in order to provide your leads and clients with the information and value that they are looking for.