Tag: facebook

If your book’s topic is relevant to current news events, it’s the perfect time to plan a fresh book marketing campaign. For the most effective campaign, take some time to create a plan.

Begin your marketing plan by writing down these questions and your answers.

• What are my objectives in running this book marketing campaign?
• Who is my target audience?
• Which social media platforms should I use?
• When should I run this campaign?
• What tools will I use to track performance?

Objectives

Clearly defined objectives will help you plan a successful book marketing campaign. Is your primary objective

• book sales
• acquiring clients
• more website traffic
• new social media followers
• something else?

Objectives need to be specific and measurable, not vague. How many books to you want to sell? How many clients do you hope to get? How many website visits do you want? How many new social media followers?

Target Audience

Your campaign will be more successful when you target the right audience. Identify details such as:

• gender
• age
• location
• favorite social media channels
• interests
• challenges they have that you help solve

Identifying these details will help you craft messaging that piques their curiosity and convinces them to take action.

On Facebook you can learn more about your audience from your page’s Insights: under People find the percentage of your fans and followers who are male and female, and what countries they are from. On the Overview in Insights you will see which posts have the most reach and engagement and get a good idea of the type of content your audience is most interested in. In Facebook’s Ad Center you’ll be able to create an audience and choose specific interests, locations, age groups, and genders to find the right audience to engage with your ads.

Social Media Platforms

Which platforms you use will depend on several factors:

• Which platform are you most comfortable using?
• Where is your target audience most likely to be?
• Which platform referred the most visitors to your website in the past few months?
• What will your budget allow?

If your favorite social media platform is Twitter but you know your target audience is more active and engaged on Facebook, you may choose to use to use Facebook. You may choose to run the campaign on more than one social media platform. Don’t spread your campaign across too many platforms. You’ll have the best results when you focus on one or two.

Once you’ve chosen your platforms, you can create content that is best for that specific platform.

When Should You Run Your Campaign?

Create a campaign calendar to outline your content and note where and when you are going to post it. If you are tying in current events, you want to be sure to post while it’s still relevant. I suggest going through this process of planning a book marketing campaign now so that when an event comes up that you’d like to tie your campaign in with, you will already have many of these questions answered.

Tools to Track Performance

Tracking performance of your campaign helps you determine the measure of success of your campaign and shows you where you need to make adjustments for future campaigns.

The tools you use to track performance will depend on your objectives. If your objective is more book sales, you will track how many books you sold, probably through your Author Central account on Amazon. If you want more website visits, you are going to use a tool like Google Analytics to provide details about which social media platforms your visitors are coming from.

Each social media platform has a way to track insights. I suggest you keep a spreadsheet and update it throughout your campaign. If you use Hootsuite to manage your social media platforms, you can set it up to provide you with analytics reports also.

Now all that’s left to do is create your visuals and content!