Let me ask you a question. What would you remember better, the number 74702 or an elephant eating peanut butter?
Now, chances are, you’d have an easier time remembering the elephant because it is a visual and it also involves multiple senses. You may love or hate peanut butter, but you remember that smell. Can’t you? You know that elephants are gray and peanuts are brown. Maybe you’ve gone to a circus or a zoo and you’ve actually fed peanuts to elephants. But chances are, you probably haven’t seen an elephant eating peanut butter.
Now, let’s go back to that number. Do you remember what it was without scrolling back? What if I told you that it was a 747 with a 02 on the tail? Would that help you remember 74702? That’s because it gives you a visual to remember that number, and that tool or mechanism makes it easier for us to internalize what it is we’re trying to remember.
Marketing is really about getting somebody to visualize a situation, or even better yet, a positive outcome. And it works better when you can stimulate a whole bunch of senses in the process. But all too often, you see companies list out features and benefits and numbers without creating that visual image of what it is they’re trying to get across.
So why do so many people try to use facts, figures, and numbers, instead of trying to tell a story with visuals? That would do a much better job of making people remember what you’re trying to tell them. So if you want your clients to really take a look, put it in an eBook.
Well, an eBook is an electronic book. The bottom line, it’s usually a PDF and that people download. And if you’re lucky, they’ll actually read it. An eBook alone is good, but adding in more visual and mental stimulation can make it much more powerful, and that’s the system I want to talk about today.
So let’s start out and define what an eBook really is.
It’s not just a PDF, it’s a series of images that create a mental picture. The text inside of it is organized in a way that should tell a story from beginning to end. What’s the problem, what’s the solution, and what’s the outcome? And, finally, it should be a system that creates a memory for people of what it is that you’re trying to say. This can help your messages become top of mind.
So how do you create that eBook? Well, usually, it has an introduction that explains what it is you’re going to tell people and it has a conclusion that summarizes everything in-between. The in-between is usually one to five different points or one to five different chapters that you can break down into clear segmented information. If you think of it from a book standpoint, it’s five to seven chapters, an intro, three to five pieces, and a conclusion.
Now, why is that important? Because eBooks are content assets. It’s an asset that you can use in a lot of different ways. Its main purpose should be to collect names. By putting that eBook on your website or on social media with a form, you can trade the information contained in there for somebody’s information, their name, their email address, whatever you want to collect. That’s step one. But the biggest problem with any kind of eBook is people will download them, but will they read it?
The beauty of having something like an eBook in a system is that it allows you to create content that will drive people back to that eBook to, hopefully, read it completely. And you have the opportunity to remind them that they downloaded it and get them back to it again and again. So, from that eBook, you can create a series of blog posts. Each one of those connects like a standalone piece of information. From there, you can create a series of emails that basically summarize what’s in each one of those chapters.
It could be another standalone piece that you can use to remind people about the eBook. You can create email drips that say, “On chapter one of this eBook, we talk about this. Go to that blog post and read more about it.” From the blog post, you can put a banner ad on there that reminds people or even lets them know for the first time that there’s more information to this story and you can get it in the eBook.
You can create a series of awareness graphics, simple little square graphics that you can throw up on social media that get across the key points inside each one of those chapters to do the same thing. “Want to learn more, go to the blog. From the blog, you can download the eBook.” You can also create a series of video shorts that basically summarize what’s in each one of those chapters or blogs, leading them back down that same path. And there are many more opportunities that you can do with this. You can obviously grow it into a video series, or even into a full-blown print book if it makes sense.
The key is systematizing the content inside of that eBook. Now, you may be saying to yourself, “I’ve downloaded a lot of eBooks and they’re generally just big sales pitches.” Well, the reason behind that is because most people sit down to write sales pitches. So you may want to do it in a different way, and I’ve got a better way of doing that.
I’ve learned that by interviewing people I can capture better visualizations that can be incorporated inside each one of those chapters. That interview process brings out more storytelling which is core to us as human beings. By sitting down and writing something, we tend to want to put the facts together and we spend way too much time on punctuation and sentence structure rather than just helping people to understand what we’re trying to explain.
I’ve learned over thousands of interviews, that people will tell stories which leads to better eBook content. By doing that, it helps them to segment everything into chapters and thus creates a better platform for all of those additional sprouts that help people to create an ecosystem. The more you can create eBook content awareness parts, the better it will be consumed and understood. That makes it more memorable and helps you create more and better assets that can be used over and over again.
A little while back, I asked you to remember a number and a peanut butter-eating elephant. So my question for you is,
Okay, I’m sorry.
Cue the groans.
I would love to hear your thoughts on using eBooks as a part of your marketing system, to rally get your clients to take a look. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about eBooks and your own marketing system.
This article originally appeared on B2B Interactive Marketing Inc. and has been republished with permission.
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Brian Basilico is a nationally recognized author and speaker. He’s the founder and president of B2b Interactive Marketing Inc., an award winning marketing consulting and production company in Aurora Illinois. B2b helps companies and non-profits, market their products and services through the effective use of on-line tools including; websites, blogs,… View full profile ›
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