Promoting your publishing company can be a harrowing task, especially if you’re just starting out and have no clue where to begin.
But you needn’t worry too much. This handy guide contains 5 of the latest marketing strategies to make your business boom. We’ve got you covered!
Read on to learn more about how to make your publishing company a success.
Table of Contents
1. Social Media Marketing
It is impossible for you to be living in 2022 and not appreciating the power of social media marketing, as you probably see it all around you. Fortunately for you, this also holds true for your publishing company.
There are quite a few ways in which you can use social media to your advantage when it comes to your publishing business.
- Flyers. Although print flyers are considered traditional marketing by most, you can create beautiful digital flyers on your own via easily accessible services like PosterMyWall, which offers templates for many small business flyers that you can choose from. You can use flyers to advertise book launch events, online workshops, special offers, etc, and then circulate these on any social media platform of your choice.
- Facebook. This platform in itself contains many opportunities of growth for your publishing company. Apart from using Facebook to make announcements, and publicize your flyers and other promotional materials, you can utilize features such as Facebook groups to build a close-knit community of readers, writers, publishers, and other stakeholders.
- Instagram. Video marketing on Instagram is an exceptionally innovative feature that is bound to show you results. Go live on Instagram to showcase your publishing events as they unfold, or to hold live Q/A sessions with rising new authors about their work (Penguin Random House often holds such sessions on their Instagram). Post short fun videos on Instagram stories that give people a look into how things work at your business. This will cultivate a strong sense of community within your audience.
The best thing about using social media to market your business is that you’ll get the hang of it in no time, and the returns on investment are great most of the time.
2. Inclusive Marketing
While we’re on the topic of the latest marketing strategies, it’s worth mentioning how traditional marketing often used to leave out certain groups due to its very structure, and its culture of cut-throat competition.
Dr. LaTracey McDonald, the founder of Black Authors Rock, LLC., is changing that via her adherence to inclusive marketing.
Inclusive marketing involves the entire community with the aim of being collaborative rather than competitive. As the name suggests, this includes a wide variety of potential partners who are invited to share their wisdom with your audience, or even to participate in your own events.
For you as a publishing company, inclusive marketing is the kind of modern, conscientious method of marketing that you should definitely take note of.
3. Drip Campaigns
This is yet another brand-new yet hugely effective marketing strategy that you can use to elevate your publishing company and help it achieve success.
The way drip campaigns work is via sending automated emails to people based on certain actions they have taken or not taken on a certain website, online course, et cetera. These emails can also be based on a schedule you set.
For example, online shopping websites often send an email if you have left something in your cart but have not checked out yet.
In the context of publishing, you can utilize drip campaigns to:
- Create hype around the publication of a new book by sending out scheduled emails to your mailing list.
- Recommend books by the same author or similar authors once customers buy a book by a particular author.
Drip campaigns give you a great opportunity to reach out directly to new and return customers, and if you play your cards right, this can be one of your top marketing strategies.
4. Benefit from Seasonal Campaigns
Dr. LaTracey McDonald also made use of seasonal campaigns for promoting her publishing business. Taking a leaf from her book will surely be helpful for you.
Seasonal campaigns are pretty simple to understand. These campaigns are run seasonally according to certain recurring events that take place at particular times every calendar year.
For publishing companies, apart from the regular seasonal holidays such as Christmas, New Year, Halloween, and so on, there are also specific seasonal events you can keep a lookout for and benefit from.
Some of these include:
- Women’s Day. This would be a great opportunity to highlight women authors specifically or give discounts to women authors in your clientele. You can even take this a step further by amalgamating this strategy with inclusive marketing, and inviting acclaimed women authors to speak at certain literary events arranged by you, or inviting a new woman author to do a book launch event.
- Famous authors’ birthdays. Since there are so many to choose from, this can be a fairly frequent seasonal campaign for you to run, with a chance to appeal to a new audience each time, given how everyone has a different set of favorite authors.
- International Book Day. You get the idea. Need we say more?
5. Email Segmentation: Taking Your Email Lists to The Next Level
We discussed email lists in the drip campaigns section. These are lists of people or existing customers or return clients whom you routinely send emails to.
Useful as they can be, there is one drawback to email lists: they can be too broad and general. This has the disadvantage of alienating those who do not relate to most of the email content being sent their way. They may, as a result, choose to unsubscribe from your emails, which would of course be a shame.
How can you prevent this? By using this cool feature called email segmentation, of course!
The way this generally works is by categorizing your email list into smaller, more focused groups based on age, gender, location, et cetera.
But you, always the savvy publishing marketeer, can go two steps further, of course.
You know that most of your customers will either be looking to read or to write. It makes sense, then, that one of your most useful categories could be genres of books, instead of the typical demarcations.
Thus, you could ask your customers to select their favorite categories of books, or even favorite authors on your website or via an online form that you circulate. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, classical literature, children’s literature, and the list goes on.
Now your emails can really hit the mark, and strike a chord with readers every time. Email segmentation for the win!
Conclusion
Having reviewed our 5 top tactics which hold the potential to turn you into a publishing company marketing expert, what do you think? Do you have what it takes to engage in the newest marketing strategies and join the ranks of Penguin Random House and Knopf? We think you do!