Marketing eBooks are standalone pieces of content that people can download from your website, typically as a PDF. This allows a reader to save the book on their computer or tablet, read it at their leisure, and hopefully refer back to it in the future or share it with others. Your business can benefit from eBooks by answering potential customers' questions, improving visitor interaction with your website, and increasing your social media content. The eBook format is great for topics that are a little too broad for a blog post or those that are timeless representations of your brand. These are both important things to keep in mind when you’re trying to figure out what to write about. Ask yourself these questions to help generate eBook topics.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
First and foremost, as part of your overall brand marketing strategy, figure out who your target customer is. You may have a variety of “buyer personas," or fictional representations of people who would be interested in your product or services. You should identify personas for the various types of people in your target audience. For example, if you are a Des Moines web designer, one of your buyer personas could be a CEO or owner of a small business. Another could be an independent service provider, like a hair stylist or interior designer. You can also identify industries that you want to target, like small businesses that provide IT services or other tech support or small-to-medium sized law firms. The bottom line is that in order to find topics and write content that will appeal to your audience, you have to first identify that audience!
What Will Appeal to Your Target Audience?
Once you’ve figured out who your target audience is, you have to figure out what kind of content will appeal to them! One of the best ways to do that is to identify what their needs are at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You want to provide a variety of content so that you have something that appeals to everyone—visitors to your website, friends and followers on Facebook, and search engine users who don’t know your product at all.
Successful eBooks are those that entice a viewer to click the link, enter their information, and read several pages on a topic—but how? One way is to position your eBook as a piece of content that, in itself, fulfills a need and provides them with a service. For example, if a potential buyer is searching, “which platform should I choose for my business website,” an eBook that compares and contrasts platforms would be extremely useful. They might download it—maybe even print it out—and take it with them to meet with an IT professional or web designer. By the time they are ready to comparison shop, make a purchase, and get started on their new website design, they have learned to trust your business as one that helps meet their needs.
Why Is This a Better eBook Topic Than Blog Post?
The nature of writing a business blog is that you produce a steady stream of new content for your website. You can also take advantage of up-to-the-minute trending topics on social media, which may not be timelessly relevant, in blog posts (for example, “4 Marketing Strategies for Businesses from Pokémon Go”).
But some topics are more timeless, which makes them a better fit for an eBook. You want visitors to your Des Moines web design site to always be able to easily find and download helpful content like “25 Website Must-Haves for Driving Traffic, Leads, and Sales.” Marketing eBooks can also be a great introduction to your business, giving visitors who are in the first stages of the consideration process a look at your company and how it works (like this guide to the basic process of designing and building a custom home from a homebuilder).
Sometimes, you don’t have to choose between a blog and an eBook! You can write a shorter blog post that gives an overview of a topic and then craft an eBook that goes into more detail. For example, a blog post titled “Your Website Should Be Your #1 Employee” could outline your basic premise: an effective website is a valuable member of your team that can work 24/7. Then, an eBook on the topic could elaborate on the best ways to improve and optimize your website to make it your “best employee.”
Ready to create marketing eBooks for your business but have no idea where to start? We can help. From website development to content creation, Blue Frog is a full-service marketing company. Contact us today to learn how our team of graphic designers, website designers, commercial printing professionals, and professional writers work together to help you develop the right inbound marketing strategy for your brand.
