Marketing a book is like marketing for anything else. It’s important to spend the time and money in order to make your book successful in the market. Success means something different for everyone; it’s how do you define success that’s important. The goals you set in your marketing plan and follow through on implementing the goals determine the successful sales of your book. What type of marketing goals should you have? Let’ take a look at how to measure your marketing goals for this week’s #TuesdayTip.
Important Metrics To Watch When Marketing a Book
In the current marketing industry there are about as many statistics or analytics as you can imagine. When it comes to marketing your book it’s important to decide what matters most to you. Before you begin to market, sit down with your marketing team and discuss the important statistics for you and your book. Let’s take a quick look at a few stats you may use.
Revenue
This is probably the most important statistic you can track. When you are marketing your book you should set a revenue goal and craft your marketing to meet your goal. There are a number of things to consider when you look at revenue when marketing a book. For example, do you want to track your gross revenue or your net revenue? Maybe you want to bring in $500 each month. Can you sell enough copies of your book to reach your goal? If you are looking to meet a net revenue goal, are you taking into consideration all of your costs such as printing or advertising costs? It does not matter what your revenue goal is but it is important you have one.
Return on Investment
Once you have your revenue goal set you can start calculating your return on investment (ROI). I found a lot of great information about ROI on the Medium post I just linked to; I highly suggest taking a few minutes to read it! ROI is another accounting number to watch when you are marketing and this number may be more useful for some people than just straight revenue. Return on investment is a good way to see if your marketing strategy is working and can point you in the proper direction in the future. When you calculate your ROI you can see what makes the biggest impact on your overall revenue and you can place more marketing dollars in the places where they garner the highest ROI.
Subscribers or Followers
Another important statistic to know; how many followers do you have on your social media platforms or on your email marketing list? This one is easy to find. Log into your social media accounts and you will see the number of followers you have on each account. There is no perfect number of followers; each business and each book is different. Also, just because you have a large following does not mean those followers are spending money or even engaging with you and your content. Your subscriber count is a good baseline number to have, but there are other stats to which use your subscriber count and may give you better information. These stats include things like open rate, engagement rate, and more.
Miscellaneous Goals
I won’t dig deep into these other statistics today but I do want to at least bring up a few. You want to check your open rate for your emails; we use MailChimp and each email campaign we send out shows us the percentage of people who open the email. You can track the engagement rate of your posts, the number of likes, comments, and shares you have compared to your subscriber count. If you use Google Analytics you can track the number of visitors to your website or track specific goals on your website; for example, the number of visitors who read your blog. Another simple goal to track is units sold.
Your Goals When Marketing a Book
I have just mentioned a few marketing goals today. This is by no means an exhaustive list of goals or is it the definitive list of goals for you to use. Your book is unique to you and your brand and working with your marketing team is important in order to match your goals for your book. The most important thing to understand is having definitive goals when you market your book. What specific goals do you have for your book?
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