If you read just one book on marketing this year, make it Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing. Seth gets what marketing means for those of us who are in business because we want to make change happen. Marketing, he says, is how you go about “sharing your path to better.”1
For the people in your target market, a free giveaway from your website provides a first step along that path. Sometimes called “lead magnets,” such documents also create great opportunities to rev up your marketing. Each time you add a new free download to your website, you can advertise it widely to your audience via e-mail, social media, your newsletter, and other channels.
In case you’re worried that sharing free knowledge and advice could undermine your ability to get paid for your products and services, let’s lay that fear to rest right now. Giving away valuable free information enhances your brand image in multiple ways:
•Creating authoritative content positions you as expert in your field.
•Offering that content for free associates you with generosity, a quality that fosters goodwill.
•Proactively serving your audience shows you have their interests at heart and deserve their trust.
Website giveaways come in many different forms. Your first step will be to decide which topic and form will best serve your audience and boost your brand image. Then, as you create your free content, you’ll want to think about how to create a strong emotional connection with your audience, fine-tune your writing style and visual design, and entice potential customers to take the next step along the path to better.
Choosing the Topic and Form
To quote Seth again, “Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.”2 A website giveaway allows you to show your target audience how clearly you understand their particular problem and how zealous you are to help them solve it.
As you brainstorm possible topics for your giveaway, you may want to create a sticky note reminder with these words on it: “Offering free help is NOT selling.” To earn the goodwill and trust of your target audience, the information and advice you give away must constitute a real gift, not a disguised sales pitch. If you want to present yourself as a disinterested guide, then you must maintain that attitude throughout your giveaway. Your closing call to action should invite your audience to engage in a deeper conversation with you about your products or services—but up until that point, stay true to your mission of providing the most focused, genuinely helpful content you can create.
Your ideal topic should target a narrowly defined problem, either a small problem that causes your audience great irritation or a particular aspect of a large problem. A tight focus allows you to deliver precise insights your audience can immediately apply. Think practical tips, not context or theory. The more laser-focused your topic, the easier you make it for your audience to experience positive results right away. Those results then generate trust in your brand and your offerings, encouraging prospects to explore other, more consequential ways you could help them with broader, tougher problems.
Here are some questions to reflect on as you consider possible topics for your web giveaway:
•What problem do your customers complain about most often?
•What small problem causes big frustration?
•What small problem is the tip of the iceberg (evidence of much larger, unrecognized problem)?
•What questions do they most often ask?
•What top-of-mind problem could you solve for a customer in a 10-minute conversation?
Once you’ve picked your topic, it’s time to decide on the form your giveaway will take. Here are a few possibilities to consider:
•Report
•How-to guide
•Checklist
•Training video
•Mini course
•Series of podcast episodes
•List article
•FAQ article
•Infographic
Increasingly, organizations are making their free downloads media-rich (e.g., a free e-course, podcast episode, or video). Whatever format your giveaway takes, your essential task remains the same: to provide valuable content in a way that builds emotional resonance and leads your audience to the next step in engaging with you and your sales process.
Creating Emotional Resonance
Emotional resonance happens when you tune in closely to the emotional reality of your target audience. When you express the feelings, innermost thoughts, and values that shape your audience’s inner world, they reverberate with the sentiments you share. Your language “strikes a chord” with them, and the resulting sense of harmony creates a deep connection with you and your brand.
Emotional resonance plays a critical role in building positive rapport with your audience. Even if the free content you’re sharing concentrates on technical information, make sure you connect the technical to the emotional. By doing that, you’ll come across as a helpful, caring guide people can admire, believe, and trust. On the other hand, if you stick just to “the facts,” you’ll run the risk of seeming impersonal, uncaring, and pedantic.
To create a sense of emotional sync with your audience, consider three aspects of their situation with regard to the topic you’re explaining:
•Current state—What emotions are they experiencing in their current state as a result of their unsolved problem? Common examples include fear, anxiety, worry, distress, confusion, as well as the longing for freedom from such negative feelings.
•Future state—How would they like to feel? How will they feel once their problem has been solved? Some examples of positive emotions associated with the “problem solved” state include relief, happiness, security, peace, and confidence.
•Ease of implementation—How will they feel while solving the problem in the way you’re suggesting? Consider ways to emphasize how simple, easy, and straightforward your solution is.
Fine-Tuning Writing Tone and Visual Design
Together, your writing tone and visual design help create emotional resonance and convey the strengths of your brand.
1. Writing Tone
Tone is the attitude you take toward your audience, and it will depend on the kind of role you construct for yourself as the expert behind the giveaway. What kind of helper do you want to position yourself as? A scientific expert? An academic authority? A friendly teacher? A peer mentor? A kindly professor? A trusted adviser?
Different helper profiles will resonate with different audiences, depending on their occupation, industry, and life experience. Be sure, therefore, to construct a writing personality that fits with who you are and also implies the kind of authority figure your audience instinctively trusts.
The tone of your giveaway will also result from particular choices you make about word usage and phrasing. Consider how a typical person in your helper role conducts themselves in a professional conversation:
•Do they use formal or casual language?
•Do they use contractions?
•What kind of slang (if any) do they use? How about jargon or shop talk?
•What style of humor do they favor?
2. Visual Design
The visual design of your giveaway reinforces the tone created through your text. When well-executed, it can also intensify emotional resonance.
For starters, make sure the visual design of your web giveaway aligns with the basic elements of your brand, such as colors and fonts. If you can afford it, you may want to hire a graphic designer to lay out your content professionally, inserting such attention-grabbing features as sidebars, enlarged quotes, and conceptual diagrams, maybe even an infographic. Aim for the kind of creativity and finesse you’d find in a magazine. Strong visual design provides an elegant showcase for your content, making it seem more credible and trustworthy.
Your visual style choices should align with the style choices that shape your written content. If you’re presenting yourself as a laid-back peer mentor, the visual design of your giveaway should signal friendly, lighthearted energy. In contrast, if you’re positioning yourself as a trusted business adviser, then your design should create a more serious, corporate look-and-feel.
But don’t let the challenge of creating an alluring visual design prevent you from getting your web giveaway to your market quickly. As we’ll see in the chapter on one-pagers, you don’t necessarily need a graphic designer to create polished electronic documents. With just a splash of color and one or two graphic elements—such as a focus box, side bar, or image—you can amp up visual appeal without stretching your budget. For example, Figure 5.1 shows a page from one of my website giveaways, an e-book called Clarity Without Compromise: How to Truly Connect with the People Reading Your Technical and Scientific Documents.
Figure 5.1 Page from a website giveaway with a simple visual design
Think also about the usability of your giveaway. For example, if you’re creating a booklet of worksheets, the visual design should make them easy to fill out; you might want to provide a printable option for people who like writing in longhand and a fillable PDF for people who prefer to write with a keyboard. If you’re offering a checklist, try to get all the items on a single page to simplify tracking. Or if you’re creating a series of videos, provide transcripts for people who prefer reading to listening. The more user-friendly your giveaway, the better it shows how intently you care about your audience and the problem they face. And the more successfully you communicate your care and concern, the easier it is for your audience to believe in your wisdom, trust your advice, and become curious about your products and services.
Practical Tips from a Skilled Simplifier
Anirudh Koul is head of AI (artificial intelligence) & Research at Aira, a California-based startup that has created a seeing-eye app for the visually impaired. Aira enables people who are blind or nearly blind to interpret and navigate the world by using the phone’s camera. The app interprets visual data from the camera’s video feed and conveys it to the user through spoken language. For example, Aira can read a menu, describe people sitting in a boardroom, and give the layout of a grocery store.
As you can imagine, the sophisticated AI behind Aira defies simple explanation. And yet Anirudh prides himself on explaining deep machine learning for mobile devices to a range of audiences, from novices to those he calls “ninjas” (expert practitioners) and “gurus” (researchers). Over the past decade, Anirudh has gained extensive experience as a public speaker, at a range of conferences, including Tedx Seattle. This exposure to live audiences has taught him a lot about how to communicate complex concepts clearly and concisely.
Here are a few pointers from Anirudh’s conference experience that apply particularly well to e-books and other resources you might create as website giveaways:
•Simplify your key message. Pare it down to “the essence of the message you want to pass through” and lose unnecessary details.
•Write the way you speak. “Most people,” says Anirudh, “don’t write the way they speak. They write the way they write.” In other words, they write in a style that’s more formal, and often more awkward, than their natural communication style. Take an easy shortcut to clarity by expressing yourself in a writing voice that echoes the vocabulary and rhythms of your natural speech.
•Keep your sentences short and your word choices basic. Whereas many communication experts advise writers to aim for a readability level of Grade 7 or 8, Anirudh goes further. He claims that his forthcoming book on AI is written in such a simple way that a fourth-grader could read it.
•Work with your audience’s agenda. Anirudh’s advice is to “Think of what the audience wants to listen to, not what you want to speak.” As a conference speaker, his goal is to connect with his audience’s interests so directly that they get excited and tell others about the ideas he’s shared. And that’s exactly what you want to happen when people read your website giveaway—you want your audience to find your resource so clear and compelling that they share the download link and recruit more subscribers to your e-mail list.
•Communicate visually. Anirudh’s conference presentations integrate plenty of visuals, including infographics. This approach enables him to teach new concepts in ways that engage his audiences, without burdening them with overly technical terms. “People appreciate that they are learning, not that you are an expert,” he explains.
A true expert doesn’t need to parade their knowledge; they demonstrate their expertise through their ability to make the complex accessible, and one of the best ways to do that is to make concepts and data visual.
Pointing to the Next Step
Creating a web giveaway requires an unselfish attitude, but it is hardly a selfless act. Your end goal, remember, is to turn web users into leads, leads into prospects whom you engage with regularly through your e-mail list, and prospects into customers.
To start that chain reaction, you need a strong closing call to action. Once you’ve enabled your audience to solve the particular problem your giveaway targets, it’s time to let them know about other ways you can help. You might, for instance, direct them to a sales page for a related product or service or invite them to a free consultation call or your regular Facebook Live video series.
Offer your call to action in the same tone you use throughout your giveaway. It should, like the rest of that item, sound natural and genuinely friendly. Ideally, it moves your audience one step closer to two-way communication with you. Through visiting your website and viewing your giveaway, they’ve passively absorbed a lot of information from you. If those activities have generated enough curiosity and built enough trust, then some of your audience may be ready to interact with you live. So your call to action could, for example, invite them to phone your 1-800 number, attend a free webinar, or meet with you for a free consult.
Enjoy dreaming up and developing creative giveaways for your audience. For innovators and change-makers, there’s no better marketing tool for sharing your mission and making a direct impact while you do it.
Examples of Creative Giveaways
Imagine you run a company that produces industrial-size batteries from sustainably sourced materials. Your customers and prospects are mainly manufacturers who must comply with new environmental regulations. They’re concerned not just about the batteries used on their production lines but also about sustainability issues in general. Here are some examples of intriguing giveaways that could offer value to your audience:
•Seven Little-Known Secrets to Sustainable Manufacturing (PDF)
•How to Green Your Production Line: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Sustainability and Cost Savings (e-book)
•Three Inspiring Case Studies in Green Manufacturing (video series)
•Green Manufacturing Mini-course (online self-paced course)
•Checklist for Choosing a Sustainability Consultant (PDF)
•Whitepaper: How to Choose the Best Industrial Battery System for Your Plant (PDF)
•Manifesto for Green Manufacturers (PDF infographic)
I’d encourage you to start a folder of excellent giveaways you come across through your Internet surfing so you can emulate particular elements of them in your creations. I make a habit of downloading interesting freebies, even when the topic is not directly relevant to my audience, so I can scrutinize different aspects of them and copy what works well. You never know where you’ll find inspiration for your next great headline, theme, visual design, or creative use of media.
Checklist for Website Giveaways
□Attention-grabbing headline
□Laser focus on a specific problem the target audience faces
□Practical information the audience can use to act on the specific problem
□Attractive visual design that complies with company branding
□Simple writing style that’s easy to skim
□Conversational tone of a helpful guide
□Positive, can-do attitude that emphasizes the value of applying the information
□Strong call to action
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1S. Godin. 2018. This Is Marketing (New York, NY: Portfolio/Penguin), p. xvi, Kindle.
2Godin, This Is Marketing, p. 2, Kindle.