You’ve spent countless hours, or maybe countless dollars creating an e-book or an offer that you really want to promote. You’ve spent time thinking about what the content should be, outlining the key points, maybe even taking care of the look and feel and design. Now what? my name is Susan Laplant-Dube, and we’re going to talk about e-book promotion.
For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to use the term “e-book”, but this could actually work with any offer that you have, whether it’s a technical guide, a checklist, a white paper, an infographic – it’s really all about making sure you promote it, that people can find it, and that you get the results you’re looking for.
#1 – Have a Strong Call To Action
So, let’s take a look at a tip that will help you promote your e-book. Start with the basics: the very first tip is: make sure you have a strong Call to Action.
You take your e-book you have on your website, and you need to make sure you have a graphical button that is compelling, that lets people know why they want to click on it and download your offer. And this call to action needs to be on several pages of your website, it needs to be in blog posts, and it needs to be anywhere that somebody might be able to find your offer.
#2 – Repurpose Your Content Using Your Blog
Number two is actually related to blog posts. Let’s say for example you have this content and you’ve written a book called “Five Questions to Ask When Hiring X”. Each of those questions can be turned into a blog post.
So, take that content, repurpose it, and with a little more effort you now have five blog posts that are going to help increase the number of pages on your website. In each of those blog posts, you should insert the call to action and make the call to action buttons say something a little different.
Maybe in this case, on the blog post, it would say “to learn the other four tips, click here and download our e-book.”
#3 – Using Social Media to Effectively Promote Content
So now, let’s move on to social media – that’s tip number three. Again, you have a lot of content you’ve already created and invested in; how can you repurpose that content?
Each of those five blog posts that you wrote can now be turned into 3 to 5 different social media posts depending on the particular social channel that you use. Write up those posts, schedule them, and make sure there is always a link leading people back to the e-book. Through that social promotion, you’re really going to grow the number of leads and conversions that you have coming in.
#4 – Draw on Your Email Databases
Hopefully you have a database of contacts. Create and send an email that tells people the reason why they want to download this particular e-book.
Yes, you have contacted these people and have a relationship with them. But maybe these people haven’t been engaged by you in a long time. This particular e-book might get them re-engaged and talking to you about particular problems that they have.
Hopefully, you’ve segmented this particular database, and you’re sending information to people who are really interested in that particular topic.
#5 – Use Email For Press Releases
Tip number five: emails can actually be turned into a press release.
If you’ve written something compelling, deep, and really important in your particular industry, write a press release, put it out on the online news-wire services. It’s affordable, gives you links back to your website, and will give you some visibility for the offer that you have.
#6 – Using Paid Advertising To Promote Content
Tip number six: do some paid advertising.
You could do paid social, you can do Google paid ads, you could do paid advertising in an industry newsletter. With social media and paid social you can be extremely targeted in the audience that you’re trying to reach, and it’s very affordable. So if you have a little extra money, set that aside for paid promotion.
#7 – Ask Friends & Colleagues to Help Promote Content
Tip number seven: ask your friends and colleagues and business partners.
There are people that you know that are trying to reach the same audience you’re trying to reach. There are people that you know that already have a strong social presence or a strong website or database to email to.
Ask those individuals, and make it easy for them by writing the social post, writing the email, and have them send it out to their database. But be prepared to reciprocate when they have a similar situation and offer that they want to send out and promote.
#8 – Make It Easy to Download and Share
And finally tip number eight: make it easy for people to download and share your offer.
If you’ve written great compelling content, make sure you have social share buttons in the offer, social share buttons on the landing page, and social share buttons even on the thank you page.
If I love the content I just read, and I want to share with my network, with a click of a button I can do that and drive people back to the offer.
Success with an e-book is not about “if I build it they will come” – you really need to take the time to do the appropriate promotion, and these eight tips are going to help you make sure you get as much traction for your offer as possible.
About Susan Laplant-Dube
Susan LaPlante-Dube is founder and co-owner of Precision Marketing Group – a full-service outsourced B2B marketing firm and HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency. Unable to deny her passion for data, content and all things inbound marketing, Susan relishes the opportunity to drill down into marketing analytics, unravel the story spelled out in the numbers and leverage these insights to help companies make sounder business decisions and improve marketing performance.
To top off a successful year in 2015, Susan and PMG co-owner Maureen Condon were recently recognized at the International Stevie Awards for Women in Business, taking home the Gold for Women-Run Workplace of the Year in their industry category. They couldn’t be prouder of the team they’ve built together! Also under PMG’s belt are four Hermes Creative Awards, two platinum and two gold, and an additional eight Marcom Awards for various achievements in marketing.
An accomplished speaker on a variety of marketing topics, Susan has appeared as a panelist and presenter at a number of functions for both national and local organizations, including HubSpot’s INBOUND Marketing & Sales Conference, the American Society for Training and Development and SCORE Boston. She’s been published in Entrepreneur.com, Boston Business Journal and Women’s Business Boston; and cited as an expert in numerous publications including Entrepreneur, Manufacturing Systems, US News and World Report and InfoWorld. In her spare time, she also enjoys teaching Harvard University staff through the Center for Workforce Development about the many ways to effectively use social media to better brand their respective departments and organizations.
Susan avidly works to make marketing accessible, flexible and fun for colleagues, clients and fellow marketing enthusiasts. Defying the commonly accepted notion that industrial B2B marketing is a dry and lackluster field, Susan is committed to raising the marketing bar, serving her clients with practical strategies that suit their needs and deliver results that make a difference.