Most content marketing campaign efforts are focused on producing a blog that is updated frequently and provides shorter amounts of information that are easily digested by the reader. This doesn't leave you with a lot of room to go in-depth about any of the solutions that you provide.
Ebook content marketing is the perfect opportunity to expand on different facets of your business or topics in your industry that you think people will benefit from understanding.
Beyond the opportunity to go into detail, ebook marketing strategies also provide several benefits that will strengthen your content marketing efforts.
1. Ebook Content Marketing Establishes Your Expert Status
The main benefit of an ebook content marketing campaign strategy is establishing your reputation online. You want to be an industry leader and a knowledgeable expert who readers can trust to solve their problems. When you offer an ebook to your readers, they can see that you've literally written the book on the subject and this will help establish and solidify your status as an authority in your industry.
2. Ebooks Have a Perceived Value
While blog posts and articles provide valuable information to your customers, the posts themselves don't hold much value to a reader. In other words, they wouldn't be willing to give you much, if anything, in exchange for the information.
An ebook, however, has a perceived value to your readers and most will be willing to give you something, usually contact information and permission to market, in exchange for your book. Readers feel like it was a fair exchange, and you supply instant gratification by giving them a product that can be downloaded immediately.
3. Ebooks are Quick to Produce
Once you have a few topics that you would like to cover, ebook content marketing can be ready for distribution in a matter of weeks rather than a matter of months like traditionally printed materials. Coming up with the content for ebooks can be as easy as rounding up a series of blog posts, articles, and infographics on a particular subject and tweaking the information to fit in a book format. White papers can also be easily be compiled and converted into ebooks. Or, flesh out an outline and hire a writer who can quickly turn your ideas into a text that is ready for publication.
Related: Freelance Writer Hiring Checklist
4. EBooks are Convenient
Once you have your ebook created, you won't have to continually manage the product. If you have completed your ebook content marketing, designed an effective ebook landing page to collect information, and have a few pages and posts pointing to your ebook, you can then shift your focus to monitoring the number of clicks and completed forms that your ebook is producing.
Ebooks are also convenient for the reader. You can choose to publish your ebook content marketing in one of the standard ebook reader formats, or make them even simpler and distribute them as PDF files that your readers can easily read on their computers, tablets, and smartphones without any special apps or even an internet connection once the download is complete.
5. Ebooks are Subtle on the Sell
Consumers on the web have become conditioned to resist direct advertisements most of the time, especially while they are still in the decision-making stage of a purchase. Using ebooks for marketing can be a safe place for customers to learn about different topics without feeling like there's a sales pitch lurking behind every corner.
That doesn't mean that they aren't a marketing opportunity for you, of course, only that the focus of your product must be on lots of relevant information and problem-solving for the reader. You can provide this information to readers and allow them to evaluate your company and your solutions with content and a tone that you control.
Related: 3 Common Ebook Content Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
6. Ebook Content Marketing is Interactive
One reason that blog posts and website articles are so useful to businesses is the ability to provide clickable links. This can be in the form of direct links to more information or easy ways to share your content by implementing social sharing buttons or tweetable quotes and statistics. These and other interactive elements can be easily added to your ebooks to give the reader a better experience while giving your content more reach.
Implementing these ebook marketing tips into your content marketing strategies will provide both your business and your customers something valuable that cannot be achieved with blog posts and articles alone. Your customers get detailed information and solutions to their problems and you receive elusive contact information and qualified leads to make your marketing efforts successful. If you want to learn more about ebook content marketing, check out our white paper, "What is Content Marketing? And Why Is It So Important?"
