What if I told you that by investing a few hours and a few resources, you could have a dedicated salesperson on your website bringing you leads and closing them faster, 24/7?
You’d probably think I was talking about taking on an intern and working them to death. But the fact is that far too many B2B businesses overlook a low-cost source of sales and leads that they could create themselves: premium content, such as resource guides and ebooks.
What's "premium content?"
With a name like "premium content," you might think that it is something on your website that people have to pay to get. Quite the contrary.
Premium content is something on your website that has such value to your potential customer that they are willing to give you their name, email address, and phone number in order to download it for free.
Here are some examples of premium content:
- Whitepaper
- Research paper
- Product guide
- Ebook
- Video
- Checklist
- Infographic
- Calculator
- and the list goes on.
How does premium content online get you new sales leads?
Premium content does two important things for your business that will bring you more leads and close them faster, 24/7.
First, it establishes your business as an authority. You become -- literally -- the company that wrote the book on a given topic. If you write the resource guide correctly, you’re engaging the willing prospect with a conversation that highlights how skilled your business is at solving their problem and demonstrating that you’ve helped other companies achieve their goals.
Second, it activates your prospect’s deep need for a relationship. Reciprocity is a driving force of human behavior. Receiving free items -- even low-cost or virtual items -- activates the sense that we have received a gift and must reciprocate. And even if we don’t feel 100 percent compelled to reciprocate, the sense that we have a relationship with this person remains long after we navigate away from the website.
This reciprocity may play out when the customer first opts-in to your email newsletter, or it may activate when your sales team calls them up to say, “I see you downloaded our eBook - do you have any questions?” Either way, the relationship has been established.
How to write alluring premium content
Premium content is more than a downloadable blog post. Premium content needs to answer the burning question that keeps your prospect up at night without giving away your proprietary information or intellectual property. And it’s that fine line that makes resource guides and premium content worthwhile.
You need to create content that is alluring, exciting, and causes your prospective customer to think "This is what I’ve been looking for! I want this!"
Here’s how to pull together an alluring piece of premium content:
- Write the headline first. Think of the headline as your main topic, and make it specific to a concept that your ideal customer is interested in.Good headlines do not summarize content, they inspire action. If you aren’t 100 percent confident in your ebook title, do more research to find out what would be interesting to your prospect. Check out LinkedIn groups and forums for commonly asked questions. Use PPC research or customer surveys to find out how your prospective customers phrase their queries.Then craft those keywords into a title that your prospective client can’t refuse to click.
- Write and design with the customer in mind. Each resource guide needs to speak to a single buyer persona, so pull together your research. The information you have about this ideal customer will decide everything from the tone of your language to the layout of your content. Clients who love tech-heavy manuals, like engineers, likely want data. Use the right template for the right audience, and tweak the content to match.
- Write with a specific solution in mind. Too many companies write about themselves when creating premium content. There are more "we's" in the document than information that a reader can use. Rather than run through a play-by-play of information about you and your company, write out the specific customer benefits that your ebook will address.
- Nail the basics, then go crazy with added value. We recommend you start small with a simple, professional PDF ebook -- perhaps even a curated collection of already-published blog posts. But once you get comfortable with the process, there’s no limit to what you can offer your clients. You can add a helpful worksheet, or a private link to a selection of YouTube videos you’ve produced. The possibilities are endless.
- Add a call-to-action at the end. At the end of your e-book, be sure to add a call to action -- a "next step" -- that your customer might be interested in. This doesn't always have to be contacting a sales person, but could be a link to the next piece of premium content that will answer their next question. Put yourself in your customers shoes. What information would you want next?
If you want to generate new business from your website, you need to provide something of value that grabs buyers early in the buying process. Premium content is some of the best lead-generating material you could put on your website.
Don't have enough time to write your premium content? Having trouble knowing what your ideal customer would want to download?
