What could eBooks and your manufacturing marketing strategy possibly have in common? More than you would think at first glance.
Traditional marketing strategies often involve tactics that are here today and gone tomorrow. The unfortunate truth is that most businesses invest in these “temporary” assets.
As a manufacturer, you’re looking to attract and convert leads. Your current marketing strategy may be taking steps in that direction, but could benefit tremendously from incorporating eBooks.
EBooks are educational content offers that when optimized answer the questions your prospective customers are asking related to your business and services. They address the pain points that they’re feeling and speak directly to them.
Here are five reasons why you need to add eBooks to your manufacturing marketing strategy and how they’ll benefit your business:
They Unveil Who’s Exploring Your Site
When set up properly, eBooks are content offers that should only be able to be downloaded by entering information.
For your site’s visitors, they would hit a landing page and have to their information.
We refer to this as an exchange. They provide some information and in return they get access to an incredibly helpful resource.
It’s one thing to get organic visitors on your site, but it’s another thing entirely to get in-depth information about them. EBooks help you get just that, and they also enter these new contacts into a marketing automation work flow that nurtures them closer to making a buying decision.
EBooks are Solid Marketing Assets Lasting “Forever”
When you take the time to analyze your audience and tailor specific eBooks to their needs, you are investing in a marketing asset that will last forever (or as long as your site/the internet exist).
These don’t have expiration dates to them. They aren’t like billboards, where you invest in the creative work and real estate only to have them up for a few months and then taken down.
We’ve seen countless examples from our clients of audience-optimized eBooks continuing to attract organic visitors through search engines and capturing the data of marketing qualified contacts even two years after they were published.
They Move Prospects Through the Buyer’s Journey
The Buyer’s Journey simplified is: awareness, consideration and decision.
If you approach eBook creation properly, again keeping your end customer in mind, you can create marketing assets for the awareness and consideration stages. An awareness eBook would help a customer understand the issue at hand, while the consideration eBook would help them make a decision to use your company once they know what they’re dealing with.
EBooks Position Your Business As An Educator
It doesn’t take studies to prove (although many were conducted) that people buy from businesses that have educated them.
When you invest in eBooks, you are cultivating content pieces that are helpful and thus position you as an educator. As an educator you are then helping your audience through their thinking and decision process. If you can successfully do this, you’re more than likely going to score them as a customer because there is a relationship of trust established.
They Give the Sales Team Ammunition
EBooks aren’t limited to just the digital realm.
They can be vital tools for your sales team to use as they make contact with current and prospective customers. If you brand, write and design your eBooks well enough, they are more like additional brochures that can easily be shared through email.
A common example of this is an eBook I recently worked with. It was an “Office Leasing Guide” designed for a real estate company. Not only is this a valuable offer to have online, but it gives the real estate agents an additional resource to send to a prospective customer to help refine their expectations for the sales process.
Have you started using eBooks yet?