40 Tips For Your Downloadable Content

Downloadable content is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Whatever your website’s ultimate goal, offering high-value content for your users to download can generate actionable leads and drive your email nurture campaigns.

This whitepaper scopes out the benefits of using downloadable content and provides 40 tips for extracting maximum value from your investment in it. Here is a taster:

Downloadable content and lead generation

The majority of users who hit your website every day probably won’t be ready to commit to making a purchase, speaking to your sales team or signing up to a free trial. These are primary goals and will only be completed by users at the bottom of the sales funnel.

Downloadable content makes an excellent secondary goal. Users who are higher up the sales funnel and still doing their research are much more likely to download a relevant, valuable piece of content. And while that won’t be as useful to you as your primary goal, it’s much better than them bouncing off the site without taking any action at all.

Downloadable content and marketing automation

If you’re spending money on marketing automation you absolutely need downloadable content to support it. Marketing automation platforms rely on email addresses  to identify users and track their activity.

Compelling downloads help you gather more email addresses, identifying otherwise anonymous users. And they help move users down the sales funnel by nudging them closer to your primary goal.

Downloadable content key takeaways

Our whitepaper includes 40 tips for making use of downloadable content, but here are just 5 to get you started:

• Put your downloads behind a form: even if you don’t plan to jump straight on the phone to users who download your latest eBook capturing some lead information is always useful. Once you have identified someone you can market to them much more effectively in the future;
• Include information about the author: downloadable content isn’t just about capturing leads. It’s also about thought leadership and brand building. So, tell readers about background and expertise of the author or authors who put it together;
• Check downloads for mobile compatibility: something that always surprises us is how often users download our content on mobile devices. Most downloads will be on desktops, but make sure your form and the download itself look good on smartphones and tablets;
• Get help from your sales team: your sales team spend their time talking to prospects and customers, so they know what questions they need answering. A beautifully presented, informative whitepaper on a hot-button topic can help them make more sales and drive your email nurture campaigns;
• Give each download its own landing page: downloads can be promoted on your blog and around your site, but you should also be pushing them on social media and in your email campaigns. For that you need a dedicated page to drive users towards.

We hope this intro was useful. To learn more please download the whitepaper using the form at the top of the page.