When you visit a website on any topic, from cooking recipes to specific marketing communities, you will probably be offered an ebook. It seems like there are hundreds of them: useful and useless, long and short, free and pricey. So what's the best way to make an ebook work to its fullest potential as a marketing tool?
Pros and Cons of Using Ebook as a Marketing Tool
As Kevin McGrath, content marketing expert at Beacon, says in his article: "Ebook is an opportunity to give detailed insight on an area of expertise, enhance marketers' reputation, and most importantly to generate new leads."
Ebooks have indeed become an effective and influential tool in marketing. Here are just a few benefits:
- It gives your customers valuable information in exchange for their contacts, which are of value to you. It's a win-win situation.
- It's a reliable source of information that enables knowledge to be transferred from the company to its clients and drives leads to your website.
- It's easy to send, share, and download.
As an ebook plays a significant role in the marketing process, the most important elements it should have are its quality and accessibility. It can take a great deal of effort to create an ebook: to find content that is educational, interesting, and effective, to design it to look engaging, and to attract the attention of current and potential clients.
And that's the point where you discover the problems and challenges of achieving your desired results when making and working with ebooks:
- It's hard to track how clients interact with each ebook. Special programs can indicate whether an email and attached files were opened, but the further history of how clients use the ebook (how long they read it, what pages are the most popular or unpopular, whether and how they share it) is unknown and in most cases impossible to track.
- Ebooks can be large, and it can become inconvenient for you to send them by email and for the customer to wait for it to download. It's a waste of time and money for the both sides.
- Ebooks are not tailored to every screen and don't look good on every device. Thus, some clients will find that it's not comfortable to read and to work with them, especially on mobile devices.
What are the Ways to Make an Ebook Strategy Work?
Modern advanced technologies certainly offer improvements that make ebooks more effective and easy-to-use. Because ebooks don't have to be very long. Or complex. Or time-consuming to create.
How can FlippingBook help solve the problems that arise while using ebooks? Here's how:
- There's no need to wait for the ebook to download—it's always available online and clients can access it wherever they want.
- You can add a lead capture form to your ebook to analyze statistics and qualify leads. If a lead leaves you their information, you will be able to see how many times they have viewed your ebook and when they left you emails. This can help you determine the quality of the lead more easily and contact them at the right time.
- Ebooks can be easily viewed on mobile devices, so it's a great opportunity to gather contact emails from smartphones and tablets. Not many people open PDFs on their mobiles.
- FlippingBook allows you to change the content in real time—updating, adding info, and correcting mistakes without having to send the file again. The updated ebook will be available via the same link.
- The content is protected—you can disable the Share, Print, and Download options to prevent the ebook from being downloaded and shared if you wish. Plus, you can password protect your sensitive documents so that only select viewers have access to your content.
- An ebook can be easily lost in a list of files on a client's computer. An ebook made with FlippingBook will always be available via a link or the company's website.
For instance, check out how colorful and bright this ebook looks. You wish you could see it all with your own eyes right away.
