All this information is great, but how do you build your promotional and marketing plan? Well, here it is in brief.
Promotional Plan Development Steps
1) Decide what your promotional plan looks like in terms of the sales funnel and awareness with reference to your brand and business objective
This might mean taking out author interviews if you are focusing on your work, or adding that in. This might mean looking at beginning to build a newsletter list early because you are looking to launch regularly and need a way to drive Advanced Reviews, etc.
2) Build your promotional calendar around releases
As an author, your biggest promotional months will be when you have a release. Those are the first things you should plug in.
3) Input your minimum promotional work with the tools you have (website posts, social media post, newsletter mailings, etc.) into the calendar
Some of this might not need to be recorded if you are going to be doing this regularly and are able to handle the workload. But, if this is the first time you’re building out the calendar, it’s useful to input all the different ways you’re already marketing.
This can also make you think about what works or isn’t working if you’re an experienced author. If you spend 90% of your time on Twitter but aren’t seeing anything happening in terms of sales, perhaps you should consider shifting your time allocation to some other social media.
Or just adjusting how you interact.
4) Work out what additional promotional tools you intend to use, weighing what capital you have to spend.
When thinking of capital used, consider it both in terms of money and time you spend. This includes the amount of time you spend learning how to do social media or joining a community or working out how AMS works, etc.
Remember, you are an author. Writing the next book is often your best marketing for your other books.
5) Add this to your promotional calendar, working out the when and how. Add sales promotions (see pricing) on top of that.
Often, adding sales promotions to a newsletter blast or a FB marketing campaign can boost the conversion rates and elicit interest. Planning when you are doing these sales promotions (during non-launch months, etc) can also smooth out your revenue and keep interest in your work high.
6) Revise the calendar when you realise you either spent too much or are committing to too much work.
I’m not joking. You’ll find you want to do everything. You can’t. Especially if you are learning something new (like Facebook, or how to build a website, etc.). Try to only schedule one new thing a quarter unless you’re very experienced.
7) Print or reference work as the year goes along, recording what works and what doesn’t.
Remember, it’s always good to have goals that you can track and record against. Not knowing if what you are doing is working or not can be really tough.
8) Revise the calendar when required as results come in if necessary.
I’d look at it every 3 months or so for a revision. Maybe more or less as your writing schedule changes too.
And that’s it. Questions? Comments? That’s the 4 P’s.
After this, I was probably going to write a few examples based off fictional people to show how this might work. And then I really am done with these posts.
Like the business blog post? Want to support me writing more of them? Want to read ahead (2 weeks) of others? Become a Patron and choose the $2-tier to be able to read the business posts only and ask questions about the business side of writing.
Recent Comments