How to use e-books to increase sales?

 

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E-books have been known to be quite useful in allowing companies to engage with   their target audience most effectively and thereby drive leads in a major way. This is especially true of B2B businesses, who are known to make e-books the spearhead of their content marketing strategy. The thing with e-books is that these can be useful tools of engagement right through the sales process and not just at the time of lead generation. This is because e-books provide you with the wherewithal to address buyer pain points by way of delving into the myriad issues that matter to your prospects.

Let us look at the various ways an e-book may help provide extremely useful information about matters that concern them to your prospects:

-Guides for beginners

-Industry trends to watch out for

-Strategies for scaling up

-Case studies

-Features and benefits

-Onboarding guides

-FAQs

-Troubleshooting tips

-Driving ROI

-Stories of customer service

Promotion and Distribution

The creation of a stellar e-book is only an important first step. Equally importantly, if not more is promoting and distributing it in a strategic manner allowing you to catch the attention of the right target audience, thereby, letting you drive leads and sales. Here’s how you might achieve that-

1. Integrating it with your website

The e-book in question needs to be integrated into your website in a prominent manner. It needs to be present on the landing pages, mentioned in the blog posts and also made available in the resource libraries. It would also be a good idea to use striking visuals and descriptions to promote the e-book effectively.

2. Social media marketing

Promoting your e-book via social media marketing is a proven way of getting your target audience to notice it. Sharing important excerpts and takeaways along with a link to download the e-book on all your social media channels is a good way to attract the attention of your target audience. You may also consider using targeted advertising to connect with them.

3. Participating in webinars and events

Webinars and events are great platforms for plugging your e-book by offering it as an exclusive download for those attending the webinar or event in question.

4. Email marketing

Your email list can be very effectively used to promote your e-book to those who you think might be interested in getting it. This is a highly effective way of promoting your e-book to those who have opted to receive your emails.

5. Enter into partnerships

Collaborating with other businesses from the same industry to promote each other’s e-books is also a great way of reaching across to one another's target audience.

6. Lead generation forms

Make the download of your content subject to the sharing of contact information to enable the capturing of leads. You would do well to use forms that are to the point and ask only for information that is of use to you.

Implementing the above tactics on a consistent basis can help you leverage your e-books as potent sales driving tools. If you haven't made e-books an essential part of your content marketing strategy, it is definitely time that you did.

The Growing Importance of Content Marketing in the Age of Influencers

 

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The growing importance of influencers in leveraging content to promote goods, services and brands cannot be underestimated. In fact influencer marketing is a sub-genre of content marketing which involves using the services of influencers by way of their creating myriad kinds of content in order to persuade their loyal audience of followers to engage with the brand in question.

What does using influencer created content do for a brand?

Content created by influencers helps a brand find a voice in a market that is highly cluttered in terms of brands vying for consumer attention. This kind of content has an immense advantage over other kinds of content in that its target audience is highly engaged with their brand. The latter love to consume such content as it speaks to their interest. This makes it easy for brands to piggy ride on such attention and draw attention to their products and services.

Influencer created content is very good at

(i)                 Generating brand credibility.

(ii)                Real time engagement with target audience.

(iii)               Establishing brand authenticity.

(iv)              Reducing spending on outreach when compared with traditional means.

(v)                Increasing product sales.

(vi)              Enhancing customer loyalty.

Content Marketing via Influencers-The Way to Go

The thing that makes influencer marketing outreach stand apart from other forms of marketing outreach is that it helps promote brands, products and services without being overtly promotional. The other thing about influencer created content is the fact that there is a much greater chance of it being discovered by people who search for specific hashtags. This translates to a much enhanced reach for the brand in question.

Influencer created content can help with a business’s SEO rankings as well. This is on account of the fact that such content often finds mention at several places in the online universe. Many these could then possibly link back to the business website in question leading to higher organic traffic received by it.

Besides, influencers are the right medium to engage with a brand’s users across popular social media channels like YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram with the added advantage of having the influencer in question become one’s spokesperson and advocate. This is by far one of the most effective ways of active outreach to a brand's target audience in a highly competitive market scenario. If done right influencer outreach cuts through the clutter and delivers quick and big results delivering big bang for every buck spent.

Why brands and businesses are better served by human-written content than AI-generated content

 

The advent of Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has seen brands and businesses worldwide turn to AI to create content.  The move seems logical as these seem to be able to create what appears to be extremely well-written content in moments, freeing marketing managers and business owners with the necessity of giving extensive briefs to their content writers, only to have them turn out content that often needs many iterations to finally reach a stage where it is ready for dissemination.

But are things really all that wonderful with using Generative AI to create content for businesses, or is this the entirely wrong way for a business to go about its business of creating content? According to Neil Patel, one of the foremost authorities on digital marketing in the world, human content performs better than AI content.[1] According to a study conducted by his team, human-generated content fared 5.44 times better in generating traffic than AI-generated content. It also found that every minute spent writing by humans received 4.10 visitors to 3.25 in the case of AI-generated content.  Patel attributed the superior performance of human-generated content on account of it being better with regard to emotion and context.

What is important to understand about writing great content is the fact that while Generative AI's ability to put across complex information in an easy-to-comprehend manner might be extraordinarily good, it is also important that it be done in the kind of language that resonates with the target audience in question. It is humans who are better at doing so, as unlike AI, they can truly know where their audience is coming from and contextualize the content for them. This is something that Generative AI struggles with as it is not adept at asking the right questions as it has lived experience and is totally bereft of emotional intelligence.

AI writing might be smart and efficient, but it lacks personality. It is more like the Nazi army’s blitzkrieg across Europe in the Second World War. Human writing on the other hand can be likened to Churchill’s, “We shall fight from the beaches--- speech.” We all know who finally won that epic war.

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[1] https://neilpatel.com/blog/ai-vs-human-content/

How to use content marketing to grow your business with a next to nothing budget

 

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Content marketing is a powerful and proven tool for growing your business, even if you’re working with a limited budget. By creating and sharing valuable content that resonates with your target audience, you can attract new customers and build stronger relationships with existing ones.

Here are some tips for using content marketing to grow your business on a budget:

1. Know your audience: Before you start creating content, it’s important to understand who your target audience is and what they care about. This will help you create content that they relate to as it addresses their specific needs and interests.

2. Create valuable content: Your content should provide value to your audience, whether it’s by educating them, entertaining them, or solving a problem they have. By providing value, you’ll build trust and credibility with your audience, which can lead to more business.

3. Leverage social media: Social media is a powerful tool for sharing your content and reaching new audiences. Make sure to share your content on the social media platforms where your target audience is most active.

4. Collaborate with others: Collaborating with other businesses or influencers in your industry can help you reach new audiences and grow your business. Consider partnering with others to create and share content that will benefit both of your audiences.

5. Repurpose content: Creating new content can be time-consuming and expensive. To save time and money, consider repurposing existing content in new formats. For instance, you could repurpose a blog post into a video or an infographic.

By following these tips, you can use content marketing to grow your business on a budget. Remember to focus on providing value to your audience and leveraging the tools and resources available to you to reach new customers and build stronger relationships with existing ones.

The Impact of AI on Content Marketing

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Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined and identified target audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action. It  can take various forms, such as blog posts, ebooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, webinars, social media posts, and more. Content marketing is essential for businesses to build trust, credibility, and authority with their target audience, as well as to improve their search engine rankings, generate leads, and increase conversions.

However, content marketing is also challenging and time-consuming. It requires a lot of research, planning, writing, editing, designing, publishing, and promoting. Besides, it  calls for a lot of creativity and innovation to stand out from the competition and keep up with the changing needs and preferences of the audience. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can help tremendously.

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AI is the ability of machines or software to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images, learning from data, and making decisions. It has seen rapid advances rapidly in recent years, thanks to the availability of large amounts of data, powerful computing resources, and sophisticated algorithms.  Notable among the applications of AI is something that has been a lot in the news recently- generative AI. This is a remarkable technology that can produce new content based on existing data or inputs.

Generative AI has had a paradigm-redefining impact on content marketing. Let us check out how-

• Content generation: Generative AI can automatically generate content for various purposes  across multiple platforms. This can be in the shape of articles, headlines, captions, summaries, slogans, scripts, and more.  A prime example of this is Chat GPT-3, a large language model that is known to generate coherent and fluent text-based  content based on a given prompt or context. Generative AI can help save time and resources for content marketers who need to produce a large amount of content regularly in a major way.
• Content quality: Generative AI can also improve the quality of content by providing suggestions, feedback, corrections, and enhancements. For example, Grammarly is a writing assistant that uses AI to check grammar, spelling, punctuation, tone, clarity, and style. Generative AI can help content marketers create more accurate and informative content that meets the standards and expectations of their audience.
• Content variety: Generative AI can also create a variety of content types and formats based on the same data or input. For example, Lumen5 is a video creation platform that uses AI to transform text into engaging videos. Generative AI makes a difference, as it can help content marketers to create more diverse and interesting content that appeals to different segments of their audience.
• Content personalization: Generative AI can also customize content based on the preferences and behavior of individual users. For example, Netflix uses AI to recommend personalized content to its subscribers based on their viewing history and ratings. Generative AI can help content marketers to create more relevant and valuable content that increases user engagement and loyalty.

  

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Generative AI is not in the least a replacement for human creativity and judgment. It is essentially nothing more than a tool that can augment and assist content marketers in their work. Content marketers still need to define their goals, strategies, audiences, messages, and metrics for their content marketing campaigns. They also need to monitor, evaluate, and optimize their content performance based on data and feedback.

Generative AI is changing the landscape of content marketing by offering new possibilities and opportunities for businesses and professionals. Content marketers who embrace generative AI can gain a competitive edge in the market by creating more effective and efficient content that delivers better results for their businesses and their customers. AI is an ally of human content marketers, not their competitor.