Content Marketing: Power of E-books and Slidecasts

In a previous post, we presented six key content marketing considerations for technology marketers. At Technology Multipliers, we built our content marketing strategy around e-books and slidecasts. Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would achieve the results we achieved. We thought we would share our content marketing success story and prove the point that high-value content like e-books and multiple distribution tactics deliver results.

Our e-book development started two years ago. First, we picked six related subjects ranging from New Product Development and Product Management to Product Strategy. Then, we began the research and pre-writing process. It took  about 9 months, from the time we began the project, to finalize and publish six e-books on our website.

It took another 3-4 months to create five slidecasts and publish them on Slideshare. Slidecasts are slideshows with a synched narrative that summarize the textual content contained in the e-books.  At the end of each slidecast, we promote its corresponding e-book so an interested viewer can visit our website and download the e-books.

In a little over two years, Technology Multipliers’ slidecasts received 13K total views, made favorite 20 times, and have been downloaded 686 times! Digging deeper into the content consumption metrics, we see that the most popular ones are New Product Development, Product Management, and Product Life Cycle Management.

We staggered their publicizing and socializing processes even though we created the e-books and slidecasts within the same 9-12 month window. Each time we published an e-book and corresponding slidecast, we socialized it via Twitter and LinkedIn.

There is no question it takes time and resource to create quality content like e-books and slidecasts. However, once the content is created, it can be repurposed and leveraged in multiple forms. For example, we re-purposed the summary sections of the e-books in our Technology Multipliers YouTube channel. Those videos have been viewed over 500+ times.

Clearly, our numbers are small. Considering our topics are intended for a very specific target audience, and we are a small company, we are quite pleased with the results. More importantly, we are delighted with the lessons learned and look forward to utilizing the insights to help our customers and partners.

We’d love to hear your comments and questions about content marketing. Tell us what you think.