A campaign is an organized way to promote an offer over a specific period of time. In other words, you don't have put a book on sale or make certain price adjustments to call it a campaign. The purpose might as well be to draw attention to a particular author or genre, increase reach and awareness, or drive traffic to a website and promote sales.
Customize your campaign to the target audience and its channel
An important aspect of running a successful campaign is fine-tuning it to its target audience and the appropriate medium. Let’s say you want to promote a book about dogs – then you might start by considering the best way to reach the intended audience. Are they on Facebook? Or are they in a forum for dog owners and devotees? Perhaps you want to place a campaign ad in a dog magazine, or start a collaboration with a dog organization. There are no limits to what you can do really. If you can define the target audience and its medium, you're well on your way to launching a successful campaign.
Plan ahead
A good place to start is creating a plan for the campaign. Start off by defining the purpose and objective: What do you want to accomplish? Perhaps you want to bring attention to one of your authors, launch a new headline or sell a certain amount of books.
But without measurable goals and objectives, you will have a hard time evaluating the result of your marketing efforts and what you might have done differently in order to achieve them. Do yourself a favor and set goals that are easy to measure, and compare them with past goals after the campaign has ended. An example of a measurable goal is selling 100 books through a widget shop in September.
Don’t worry about setting goals that seem farfetched or unachievable. A goal that wasn’t achieved is not equal to failure and does not mean that you've hit a dead end. On the contrary, you can direct your attention to it and look at what you might have done differently. Is there a reason for why it didn’t work as expected? Try to find patterns and see what you can learn from them – is there anything you can change that would make noticeable difference?
When you’ve got your purpose and objectives set, you can start to think about what your campaign will look like and where you are going to place it to reach your target audience.
Evaluate your campaign: How did it go?
Marketing is essentially campaign driven, and running a campaign is very similar to carrying out a highly organized experiment centered on analysis. Evaluation is necessary to assess your sales efforts with existing customers and channels, to be able to try out different offers aimed at new readers and channels.
Does that sound complicated? Once you get the hang of it, it’s quite simple really. It all boils down to a few key components: gaining insight into the effects of each marketing campaign, striving toward the best possible outcome, staying organized throughout the entire process (from planning to completion) and understanding ways in which you can improve.
By using Publit’s campaign tools, you can compare and analyze the results of each campaign in their respective channels. Compare sales from a widget shop that you placed on a Facebook page to sales from your website or one of the online retailers. The possibilities are endless!
After all, you just want to make sure that the right book is available at the right time and the right place. No matter if you choose to create an offer for a book release, draw attention to your website or to a book within a very niche genre, you'll need a great tool to run your campaign. Creating campaigns using Publit reduces your time spent on administration and gives you the freedom to focus on the things you do best – like selling and marketing the book!