4 Steps to Selling More Books with Less Social Media. But trying to hit every social media channel is a poor marketing strategy. • Check your social media channel data. Most major social media channels will give you data about your followers. Audience Content Strategies Today, many of our marketing efforts are backwards. • Amplifiers are looking for content as well, but for their own audiences. They willingly give up their personal information for value. Audience Growth Strategies One of the most common mistakes authors make in social media marketing is not understanding how to use social media, websites, email, and other media to actually grow their audience, not just to sell to them. The best example of implementing this strategy is email marketing. In the next installment of this series, we’ll delve into how to find the best primary social media channel for sales and reader engagement.
Expert publishing blog opinions are solely those of the blogger and not necessarily endorsed by DBW.
When I ask new email subscribers to tell me their number one book marketing challenge, the answer is overwhelmingly the conundrum that is social media: it takes too much time, and the results are difficult to measure. I agree.
Without a solid understanding of how social media does and doesn’t work, authors resort to the splatter method. But trying to hit every social media channel is a poor marketing strategy. On the contrary—you can successfully sell more books with less social media in four steps:
1. Find, build and target your proprietary audience.
2. Choose a primary social media channel for engagement and selling based on five specific criteria.
3. Designate social media outpost channels to direct potential fans to your primary social media channel.
4. Create a content system designed to foster engagement first and sell books second based on authentic author interaction with fans.
Authors in my online classes are amazed at the amount of time this primary channel system adds to their writing schedule and how effectively they can reach readers on just one channel.
Step One: Find, Build and Target Your Audience
The first step to selling more books with less social media is finding, building and targeting your proprietary audience. Nobody writes a book for everybody. To sell effectively, you need to define your target before you shoot. In this step, there are three main strategies: discovery strategies, content strategies and growth strategies.
Audience Discovery Strategies
Finding your readers shouldn’t be like playing Where’s Waldo. Here are a few tactics to find out where your readers are on social media.
• Survey your own readers. If you don’t know the social media preferences of your readers, ask them. You can send out a free survey on Survey Monkey or Google Forms to all your readers via email and social media posts. Find out who they are (demographics), where they spend their time on social media, and what other authors they read.
• Check free general use statistics on Pew Internet and other free…
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