I’ve been publishing and marketing my books for more than a dozen years. I’ve had some successes and I’ve been ripped off a few times. In the last six months or so, I’ve spent a lot of time just think about social media marketing and how I’ve used it. I’ve come to a few conclusions that I’ll share in this article
Warning: my thoughts are a bit controversial.
How social media works
In the 21st Century, authors use social media to try and influence potential readers to buy a book. As an author, do you know how social media works? Probably not. I used social media for years to promote my books without much (or any) success. That got me thinking: Why am I spending all this money without getting any positive results?
This question led me to examine exactly how social media works and that led to this diagram.
What the diagram shows is that when you commission an ad on a social media platform like Facebook, you create a few lines of text, a graphic and a link to the book page (or the product you’re selling). If someone sees the ad and is interested, they click on it. This transfers the clicker to the book’s landing page. Usually this is Amazon or some other book seller. From this analysis it’s apparent that the book sale occurs on the landing page, not on the social media ad. Thus, the purpose of the ad (and social media marketing) is to deliver the clicker to the landing page, not to sell books.
Landing Page
From this, it becomes apparent that the landing page is the most important piece of marketing content that you own. If this page is lackluster or dull, the clicker will click again to leave the landing page site and the potential sale will be lost.
So it stands to reason that the landing page is where you have to invest your maximum creativity. If you have a publisher, it will create a landing page for your book. If you self-publish, the landing page is your job. You have to write the page elements before you upload the book to the packager. You can also strengthen it after it is published. If you have a publisher, you may want to see if your landing page can be improved and work with the publisher to do that
The vitally important question is: How to use social media marketing to get more visitors to the landing page?
Targeting
Another issue is targeting, an important ingredient in marketing. Promoting a book to the general population is a waste of money since around 98% or more of this population has no interest in your genre or product. To be successful a social media promotion has to be targeted to the tiny sliver of the population that reads your genre such as romance, or fantasy or mystery. But you can’t target that sliver using popular social media ads. Using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. you can’t come close to targeting your sliver. Consequently, the money spent on the ad is wasted on people who will never buy your book. This concept is depicted in the diagram.
To be effective, a fiction promotion must be targeted at your specific genre. For non-fiction, it must be targeted to the problem the book is solving, such as plumbing problems or modernizing a kitchen.
SEO
Let’s look at another important social media concept: SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a complex subject that requires a lot of study and work to master. Mastering SEO is not the stuff that authors want to do. Authors want to write books, not take college level courses to understand the intricacies of SEO.
If you do a web search on SEO, you’ll uncover a ton of articles “explaining” how to use SEO. Most of the articles will display a to-do list for effective SEO usage. Unfortunately, the to-do list will be exactly that: a list of items to work on without any clue as to how to implement each item. To implement the list an author will require a ton of research and a lot of time.
What the big kids do
Large companies spend millions of dollars on social media marketing and are successful at it. Why is that? Because they have SEO experts and social media marketing experts on staff and those experts make sure the campaigns are successful. Consequently, when these companies run a campaign, it precisely targets the customers, the SEO is exact and the copy and graphics are professionally created.
What authors do
Some of us authors may attempt to use SEO in our marketing but we know little or nothing about SEO and many of us aren’t really sure just what social media means. So all our promotional efforts are just a guess and are doomed to failure because we’re a bunch of amateurs who don’t know what we’re doing.
If an author wants to learn SEO, she’ll have to take college level courses. Will she do that or write another story? She’ll write the story.
The answer
So what’s the alternative? Hire an expert and let her run the promotions. This will undoubtedly be expensive, but it might be cheaper in the long run than dropping $50 or $100 at a time on useless promotions. And the results with the expert can’t be worse than doing it yourself.
Of course hiring an expert comes with risks. This is because some ‘experts’ are really scam artists who talk a great game and use marketing doublespeak to sound authentic. Thus, research is required to keep from getting rip-off.
So what are your thoughts on this topic? I’d love to hear them.