Plan Your 2024 Book Marketing Strategy
3 tips for getting the sales you want this year!
Ready for more sales in 2024? These tips can be applied to any marketing strategies, not just for authors and book sales! So let’s dive in and talk about 3 tips to help you get the sales you want next year!
Review your current strategy
The first step in your plan should be reviewing this year’s marketing strategy and figuring out what went well and what needs to change for next year. There are a few things you can look at to determine this:
Analytics - take a look at your posts and see what posts are getting the most traffic! By looking at the analytics of your posts, you can see what worked well and resulted in website clicks, profile visits, saved posts, new followers, etc.
Website traffic and tracking links - if you used traffic links from podcast episodes, blog posts, newsletters, you can look into where your traffic is coming from and put more focus on those platforms next year! For example, if a lot of your new followers find you from podcast interviews that you do, that might be a good sign to do more in the future, if you enjoy them!
Engagement and higher sales - if you had a spike in sales during a period of time, look at what you posted on social media between those dates and see if you had higher interaction on some posts more than others. High engagement can be a good indicator that you got sales from that marketing post.
What did you enjoy doing?
Of course, sometimes we have to make posts we don’t enjoy doing just for the sake of marketing and getting the sales we want. But, it’s also important to focus on what you enjoy doing. If you love being a guest on podcasts, reach out to a few and schedule an interview for the coming months! If you love writing guest posts for blogs, see what creators are taking submissions and reach out! Do you love social media and interacting with your followers there? Make that one of your main focuses for marketing and figure out new ways to do that!
It’s also important to look at what drained you this year when looking at marketing. Maybe there’s a kind of post that you really enjoy doing but it takes too much time and drains you. That post style may be something you have to let go of and do differently. Find your balance of doing content you enjoy, and content you need to do. Place focus on what re-energizes you when you can.
Set tangible, reasonable goals
Lastly, it’s important to set goals for yourself, and not just any goals. Make sure your goals are tangible and reasonable so you achieve the results you want. If you’re currently getting 100 sales a year, it may not be reasonable to aim for 5000 sales next year, and that’s okay! It will feel more rewarding if you make your goals reasonable and tangible, so what does that look like?
Maybe you want to set a sales goal this year. So how many sales are you aiming for? Again, make this a reasonable, achievable value, and work towards that through the year. Keep track of the sales you make in a list or a spreadsheet, or using tracking software like the Amazon KDP reports if you’re looking at book sales.
If you’re prioritizing gaining new followers, set a follower goal for the year! Look at the ways you gain new followers quickly, maybe the style of posts you’re doing, the content you’re posting, how you interact with people online, and do more of that to get your follower count on the rise! Remember, a high following doesn’t necessarily mean high sales, but it can be a good indicator that people are interested in your content, which you can work with to get those sales! It can also be tough to measure this particular goal because of bot accounts on many platforms, but if you put time into this, you could block/report those profiles, find a platform to remove bot followers, etc. Just make sure your goal is reasonable and put in the work to get there!
Set a date in your calendar each month and track your progress towards your goals.
By reviewing your marketing strategy and making changes, you’ll be one step closer to getting the sales you want!
If you’re looking for additional support in marketing, get on the waitlist for The Creative’s Content Club here, where you’ll get hands-on support plus done-for-you social media content to make marketing so much easier.