It’s 2023, and attention spans these days are SHORT! As a marketer, that means you’re asking for a lot when it comes to your content. Luckily, with marketing eBooks — one of our favorite forms of sales and marketing collateral — the sky’s the limit for how you can think outside the box to connect with prospects and customers.
Marketing eBooks are a great lead-generating mechanism and the ideal medium to have a little fun with formatting, while still staying on brand, of course. For anyone in need of a little inspiration for your next project, we’ve pooled our best eBook ideas and are sharing five ways you can use a little creativity to make your content marketing sing.
1. Pump up the action
The neat thing about working with software companies is that our clients have products and solutions that basically give users superpowers. Imagine! You are using a technology that can save you and your team entire weeks out of every quarter. Or, what if your platform delivers full visibility to something where you would have been otherwise left in the dark? Our spidey senses are tingling.
Consider doing your next eBook comic book style, especially if you are promoting something that can save considerable time, money, or headaches. From custom illustrations to dialed-in and action-focused copy, a comic book theme is a fun and different way to highlight your brand while showcasing capabilities.
2. Recipe for success
How-to guides make for successful eBooks. If you’re getting into it step-by-step, consider turning your next eBook into a “cookbook” of sorts. Put on your chef hat and think through the process as if directing someone through making a cake or your favorite dish.
There are a lot of fun elements to play with if you go this route. From expert hand-written “tip” graphics to building jump links to “go directly to recipe,” cookbook-style eBooks can help readers visualize what they need to do (which is use your product/service/solution to make their lives easier).
3. Choose your own adventure
One of the benefits of eBooks is that they can easily be made interactive. If your topic is covering different scenarios, a choose your own adventure style can help your reader stay enthralled for much longer than a static, boring eBook.
It might take a little extra planning, but by structuring your eBook with jump links, different “do this” or “try thats” can make a huge impression on your prospects. And, as a bonus, choosing your own adventure lends itself nicely to clever travel or task-themed graphics and thematic copy to make your eBook even more engaging.
4. Add in some side quests
Know how we just mentioned making your eBook interactive a la choose your own adventure? To borrow from our video game-playing friends, consider adding in some side quests.
What is that, you ask? Well, many video games have one overarching story, usually, it’s “beat the big boss.” A player moves from start to finish with the goal of defeating the main obstacle. But often, there are little mini-games, fights, or missions outside of the main storyline — these are your side quests.
Now, to bring it back to eBooks, a side quest might be a quiz, survey, or calculator that takes your reader away from the main content. But don’t worry! If your reader is engaging with these other forms of content then your eBook is working. If you can track how readers are navigating through your eBook by using the links, you might be able to better understand what’s either stopping them from requesting a demo or causing their deepest pain and why they’re searching for whatever problem you are solving.
5. Make it animated
PDFs are great, but a flat document can feel, well, flat. Today’s readers want movement! With modern technology, marketers have more options than a download-only link, so don’t be scared to try something new — even if you have to enlist the outside help of a copywriter or designer.
Consider animating your next eBook using the page-turning technology of a flip book.
To animate an eBook, you’ll need a format that supports animations and design, and likely create the animations using software such as Adobe Animate or HTML5/CSS3. By converting animations to a compatible format for eBook platforms, you can then integrate them into your eBook using creation software such as Adobe InDesign. Don’t forget to test and optimize the file size and performance and always be mindful of copyright laws and platform limitations.
Writer’s block? Outsource your eBook
At Content Matterz, we love marketing eBooks. Big enough to be impactful but small enough to be doable, a little creativity can go a long way for eBooks. We’ve seen how outside-the-box thinking can deliver big results for marketing content.
But are you feeling like you don’t know where or how to start?
Whether you’re feeling a light case of the creative blahs or facing a severe reality of “I just don’t have the time” (we totally feel you on that one), you can turn to a trusted agency partner to turn your eBook ideas into a smash hit content marketing piece that will help you stay on track with outreach targets — and leave your prospects salivating for more.
At Content Matterz, marketing eBooks are our jam. If you’d like to “skip to recipe,” we can help!