Learn the Big 5 Publishers' strategies to direct market to your target readers on Twitter.
If you want to sell your book, you have to master direct marketing. This post covers how to do direct marketing through Twitter. Direct marketing means that you are reaching out and specifically inviting people to buy your product. Investopedia recommends using it to drive sales when working on a small budget. When you are marketing for self-publishers, strong returns on small budgets are ideal.
Business experts have a lot to say about direct marketing. A great example of relevant advice comes from Entrepreneur, who recommends establishing a “voice” for your Twitter. It’s fantastic advice, but it doesn’t tell us much about how to handle books. For that, we need to look at the Big 5.
The Big 5 publishers are Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. I took a random sampling of their recent Tweets, looking at the post’s content versus the shares and likes it got. Here are the main takeaways:
- Theming matters. When publishers bundled books together on storefronts with themed sales, the Tweet got more engagement than any other posts I looked at.
- Just posting a link isn’t enough. If all a publisher was doing was doing was putting a title and a purchase link in a Tweet, the engagement was below 10 likes and shares on a Tweet.
- Big publishers aren’t running giveaways on Twitter. Out of my entire sample, only one Tweet was promoting a giveaway of any kind.
- Get your authors involved. The average likes on any given post was barely over 14. This is too low to sell books. When you are marketing for self-publishers, make sure your authors are promoting their books as well. They have networks, too!
That’s really all there is to it! Direct marketing can’t be all you do on Twitter, but if you remember to keep things themed and to engage your authors, you can boost your engagement. Keep your content meaningful and you’re already doing well. Marketing for self-publishers isn’t always easy, but with a little foresight, you can market just as well as any of the Big 5.