We’re getting our holiday giving started a bit early this year. Our first gift to you? This 12-day blog series designed to help you get through your seasonal marketing without a hitch. If you’re just joining us, you can start at the beginning here.
Traditional holiday gifting can get tricky and be incredibly cost prohibitive, especially if you want to extend your generosity beyond your current customers to potential clients, blog readers, social followers, etc. An ebook helps circumnavigate the limitations of a physical gift while demonstrating your expertise on a particularly important subject.
Similar to a holiday blog, an ebook can make a gift of your expertise, helping your audience overcome hurdles they’re facing as the holidays and new year approach. It could be a gift-giving guide, a year-end checklist as readers take inventory of their business, a step-by-step strategy guide for starting fresh on January 1. The possibilities are essentially as endless as your industry knowledge.
The gift of your expertise could also be used to make your customers look smart. Create a white label ebook with room for the recipient’s own branding. It could be co-branded with your identity or you could allow your customer to hog the whole spotlight.
For instance, if you’re a medical device company, you might develop a book about helping patients keep their new year’s resolution of making healthier choices. You may then choose to allow medical providers to add their practice information to the piece before distributing it to patients. The providers will appreciate how good you made them look, and you’ll both be positioned as experts.
Beyond showcasing your expertise, ebooks are a great way to generate leads your sales team can follow up on in the new year. Whether you decide to distribute the ebook under your own branding or in partnership with your customers, using a lead-gen form to gate the piece gives you the opportunity to collect more information from individuals in your audience. The ebook gift should be distributed as part of your comprehensive holiday campaign. Promote it through your social channels or offer a preview on your blog or in an email. You could even mail a printed copy along with your holiday mailer and send recipients to a landing page to get a digital copy they can share with coworkers or their own customers.
