Our prospects are bombarded with hundreds of messages daily, making it difficult to stand out and get the attention we deserve. As a result, many marketers see diminishing returns on traditional tactics like email, digital advertising, and eBooks. This is why we decided to shake things up and create a video book or vBook for short.
What is a vBook?
You read that right—vBook. A vBook (video book) is an upgrade to the traditional eBook. It replaces text-heavy pdfs with videos that educate the audience on a specific topic. vBooks are a more interactive way to share content, get the metrics you need, and connect with your audience on a personal level.
So let’s examine why the vBook is a better option than the traditional eBook.
PDF Downloads Are Only a Fraction of the Picture
Our typical eBook process is probably very similar to yours. Dedicating hours of writing, formatting, and design work to produce a PDF chock-full of helpful information for our audience—and the only thing really being tracked once it’s published are downloads.
Measuring your reader’s engagement with the content within traditional ebooks can be frustrating. Sure they downloaded it, but then what? You need to know how far they read, did they skip any sections, did they only read half of the book and never return to it? You can’t use downloads alone as a measurement of success.
That’s why we’ve moved away from the traditional eBook format and now focus on digital-first experiences for our content. A blend of text, imagery, and video content enriches the viewer’s experience. Still, our content is also now actually discoverable via search, and we have a better understanding of how our followers engage with our content.
Top Benefits of a Video Book
With a vBook, you unlock the power of video analytics and can track;
- If they pressed play
- How long they watched
- Which parts they skipped
- What percentage of the videos they completed
- If they re-watched certain parts (and how many times they re-watched it)
All of this allows you to have a clearer picture of how your audience engages with your content.
Use Video Book Data to Take Action
With vBooks, you can understand who watched what, how long they watched, and what they did afterward. As a result, you can then automate all this and pass it directly into your marketing automation platform (MAP) and CRM to effectively build a history of that lead’s viewership behavior.
And with that, your marketing team can start scoring the leads based on video views and pass the right leads to your sales team at the right time. When your sales team gets that lead, they can see the viewing data to understand their interest better, follow up with the right contact, and start the conversation.
vBooks can be a powerful tool for modern demand generation. They let you offer a more engaging and emotional way to attract, educate, convince, and convert.
Video Books Are the New eBooks
vBooks allow us to better connect with our audience and deliver a large volume of content in a format that fits their needs and attention spans. You can see exactly what sections your audience loved the most and which messages fell flat with them. With this intel, you can craft better content tailored specifically to the needs and wants of your audience.
So as you look for new ways to engage with your base, vBooks are becoming a better way to share content and get the metrics you need.
This post was originally published on March 1, 2018. It was updated on January 3, 2022.
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