Remember the Breck Shampoo commercial of the 1970s, where girlfriends passed along the news about how wonderful they thought the shampoo was for their hair? That classic slogan of word-of-mouth advertising was an early form of viral marketing. Today many companies and entrepreneurs use viral marketing ebook techniques to boost their profits.
Viral marketing aims to boost sales and increase customers’ awareness of your product or service. Ebooks work well to achieve these goals because they 1) offer customers valuable information for free or a low cost; 2) have greater staying power than emails or other contact forms and 3) make it easier for satisfied customers to pass along your message by sharing the ebook.
Ebooks have proven to be one of the best forms of viral marketing. They’re more effective than website advertising or emails because ebooks tend to be kept longer by users. The most effective ebooks contain information that the customer values, so they keep the file archived on their computers.
What’s more, ebooks provide customers with information that they find of value. Whatever the topic, a customer downloads an ebook because he or she already has an interest in the subject. People are always looking for new, practical information for commercial, social, educational or recreational activities. An ebook can provide this information at the same time it serves to promote a particular business product or service.
From a marketing standpoint, ebooks have the biggest return for the amount invested, because they’re easy to assemble and distribute. Typically ebooks are created from content that already exists. It may be a series of articles that someone has written about topics related to the business. It could be a compilation of informative enewsletters from the business owner. It might be a collection of public-domain information about a subject related to the vendor’s products. Wherever the content is found, it can be quickly and easily gathered and arranged into a text file that becomes an ebook.
Once your ebook is prepared, your important step is to be sure to collect the user’s contact data when they download the file. The best ways to do this are to require them to register as a “preferred customer” or to get them to subscribe to an e-newsletter about your product or service. This sets up another win-win: they get ongoing valuable information, and you get continued customer contact opportunities.
Clearly, one well-prepared ebook sets up a chain reaction of “wins” that benefit both the company and the customer.
Classic word-of-mouth advertising was an early form of viral marketing. Today many companies and entrepreneurs use Viral Marketing EBook Techniques to boost their profit margins. We’ve got the inside skinny on Preselling with free ebooks.