Leads are the lifeblood of all businesses. Without leads you will never have any customers, or any profits. Your business will flatline.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.
Scary stuff!
As necessary as they are, leads can be difficult to obtain. In fact, a recent survey discovered that 60% of respondents found generating leads to be their biggest online marketing challenge.
Yikes!
In order to make a full recovery we need to find the Ultimate Lead Generation Tool.
Could eBooks be the answer?
In this blog post, we’re going to take a good look at eBooks, from conception to promotion, to see if they really are the ultimate lead generation tool.
Getting Started
To generate leads from your eBook, you need to make it valuable. So valuable that visitors to your site won’t blink twice about exchanging their contact details for it. A valuable eBook is comprehensive and resonates with your buyer personas — ideally solving a problem that they have.
Your eBook shouldn’t act as a marketing tool. In fact, you should probably only refer to your brand once of twice throughout the entire copy, if that. You don’t need to promote your brand within the pages of your eBook because:
a) The readers already know who you are
b) You have the readers’ contact details so there will be plenty of time to nurture leads and sell your products later
The copy in your eBook needs to be flawless, and so does the design. You want to come across as a thought-leader in your industry, and this means having the best of the best. Expect to spend time agonising over your copy and design, including the title and the front and back covers. When you can finally say, hand on heart, that you are 100% happy with your eBook, then you will have an ultimate lead generation tool at your disposal!
Sprucing up your Landing Page
Hubspot‘s definition of a landing page is ‘ a website page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead form‘.
Seems pretty simple…
…but there’s an art to creating a landing page.
The best landing pages are uncluttered, with limited navigation. There are only three things that you definitely need on your landing page:
A short, persuasive paragraph about the eBook
An image of the eBook front cover
A simple lead form (always, always, above the fold!)
What you’re trying to do here, is make it easy for people to convert. It’s important to place your eBook on a landing page because it makes it abundantly clear exactly what you want your website visitors to do: Convert, or leave.
To improve the overall effectiveness of your eBook as a lead generation tool you should A/B test your landing pages to ensure you get the best possible results.
Awesome Call to Action Buttons
Once you have created your landing page(s), you need to make some awesome call to action buttons to direct people towards it. Awesome call to action buttons stand out in colour and size:
Click it, it works!
Contain compelling, action-orientated copy:
And, are placed in clear view, without distracting the viewer:
Like landing pages, you should A/B test your call to action buttons to find the one that converts the most leads. You should also experiment with where you place the buttons, either on your website or within appropriate blog articles. Better yet, distribute your call to action buttons in both of those places! The more call to action buttons you have, the better. However, it’s vital that you don’t bombard your website visitors with them.
Spread the Word
As a lead generation tool, eBooks are pretty great, but there’s one problem with that:
Everyone wants a slice.
64% of B2B marketers use eBooks as a lead generation strategy — that’s a lot of competition. How do you get people to download your eBook over competitors?
Promote! Promote! Promote!
Here are our three best practises for promoting your eBook…
1. Social
Post about your eBook on your social accounts!
Everyone brags on social media, right? Some people maybe a little too much…
Still, there’s no harm in showing your eBook off proudly. You could even take statistics or short extracts from the content and put it into your posts to further entice people to download and read.
2. Email
You can also promote your eBook via email. Although, technically the people on your mailing list are already leads, sending them another eBook will help you to continue nurturing them, and make sure your brand is at the top of their mind.
3. Paid Advertising
To really get an edge over your competitors you need to take advantage of every promotional opportunity, including paid advertising.
A great platform for advertising your eBook is Facebook. With Facebook, you can create an ad that is exceptionally targeted, and affordable. Facebook allows you to target people based on location, age, interests, demographics, and more. So, you could set up an ad aimed at males aged 18-25. And, you could narrow it down further to only target people that live in your town who have just set up their own business.
Additionally, you can choose the exact amount you want to spend, and you can set your budget at as little as $1 per day! To find out more about Facebook ads, click here.
Another great place for your ads to be seen is Google. Sponsored search results show up on Google’s first page, before the organic results, so they are a great way for your eBook to be seen by potential leads. A recent study found that 64% of high commercial intent keyword searchers — people looking to buy — click on sponsored results as opposed to 35% who click on organic (unpaid) links. So, advertising with Google AdWords would definitely be a beneficial way to promote your eBook.
Closing Thoughts
The main point to takeaway from this article is that eBooks have the potential to be the ultimate lead generation tool, and for some companies, they already are. In order for your eBook to become the ultimate lead generation tool you need to make sure you cover all bases, from creating an amazing piece of content, to promoting it to the right people. For more information check out our eBook:
Pretty awesome call to action button, right?