E-Books, a New Marketing Tool in Business

by Sandy Marsico

One of the leading textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill, has invested $5 million in several companies that provide the software and applications to create e-books (Wired News, Aug 2000). From the success of e-books in the education industry, a completely new marketing tool has emerged. The e-book for business is not quite a brochure, nor a sell sheet or advertisement, but an informative, sales-driven resource.

Publishing an e-book allows a company to educate their clientele in a noninvasive way, to form strategic alliances with industry partners, and to open a dialogue with potential clients. Like a regular book, an e-book has chapters and pages of valuable information. As a marketing tool, an e-book reflects a corporate image, is distributed to educate prospects, and promotes an organization as the leader in their market for their product or service. "The strength of an e-book lies in its exploitation of the Internet to reach a specific audience interested in a specific topic," said Mary Bahr, editorial director of AtRandom.com Books. Because an e-book can be posted to a web site as a downloadable file, sell sheets and pricing can be updated frequently, technological advances in a specific industry can be addressed quickly, and new products and services can be launched in detail without the cost of shipping or printing the publication.

The trend of e-books in business is becoming a valuable, new marketing tool. Professionally designed and written, e-books can be integrated within a company’s marketing strategy and can reinforce a company’s corporate image. A prospect reading an e-book on a computer screen will do more than just read. Audio and video plug-ins can allow for video clips of product demonstrations and interviews with a CEO. Additional functions of a .pdf file enable prospects to highlight areas of interest, type notes in the margin of the text, and directly contact a company.

E-books can be a powerful sales and marketing tool to generate leads and increase brand awareness. E-books can be sold on-line or given away as a promotional tool. Don't wait for your biggest competitors to discover the value of e-books.

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