Public relations management
and book promotion are essentially ways to get free advertising. If you are
making a few dollars per book or less, you need to be frugal. I spent almost
nothing on advertising Ting and I. What
I did do was promote it on its own website, tingandi.com, and on Twitter and
through my blog, by serializing it, as described above.
As
a benchmark comparison, we’ll price Social Media (Facebook) advertising against
local classified ads. My paid advertising has been almost exclusively for my
coaching program, Write Your Book with Me, as each person who
enrolls will spend about $1000 on my coaching and editing, taking roughly a
year. Over the past few years, I have run a weekly classified ad in our small local
paper, The Wallkill Valley Times, at
the modest cost of $5 per week:
WRITE AND
PUBLISH YOUR BOOK
With my help.
Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D.
or
TELL YOUR STORY.
WRITE YOUR BOOK
With my help. Douglas Winslow
Cooper, Ph.D.
I got about one client per
year from these ads, at the cost of $250/year. Perhaps I picked up some
goodwill from the editor as well, as the paper ran a couple of stories about me
and my authors.
Accommodating myself slowly to
the twenty-first century, I sought and received some valuable free consulting
from SCORE advisor Edison Guzman, head of A E Advertising (aeadvertising.com).
As I described in a testimonial I wrote for SCORE and Edison [reciprocity, one
hand washing the other]:
“…and
Guzman SCOREs!” If
small business had a play-by-play announcer, that would have been his
exclamation, commenting on the help SCORE’s Edison Guzman has given me.
Edison’s seminars and counseling sessions have provided me the most value I’ve
received from my membership in the Orange County Chamber of Commerce, and I
have gotten a lot from being a member.
Edison
got my attention this April with his day-long free SCORE seminar, “Social Media Marketing Strategies for
Small Business Owners,” although I had already known, liked, and been impressed
by him during my four years in the Chamber. Not only did the seminar awaken me to useful Facebook strategies, I
found I was eligible and welcome to obtain free business counseling through
SCORE at the Chamber. Who knew? Sign me up!
I
really needed Edison’s help with advertising, in particular on Social Media,
like Facebook, Twitter, and my blog. His first counseling session started with
a discussion of my goals: I help people
write and publish their books---as a coach, editor, even co-author---and I
wanted another half-dozen clients this year.
Next
came his exploratory question,
“What is your unique value proposition? What sets you apart? Tell me about
yourself and your business.” As we talked, Edison grew even more enthusiastic. He quickly nailed it, a theme for me: “Why
would a former Harvard professor want to help you write your book for only $25
per week?” That became the basis of the Social Media campaign: on my blog,
on Twitter, on Facebook. In subsequent sessions, he then showed me in detail
how to use these tools successfully to recruit my next set of would-be authors.
The
difference between a lecture and an expert’s hands-on consulting, which is what
our SCORE sessions became, is the
difference between learning a bit about something and actually knowing how to
do it. I knew I wanted to advertise on Facebook as well as use its free
features, but I needed help in negotiating the various set-up pages, in
choosing my target market, my message, the optimal mode of delivering it, and even
the best titles for my ads. Edison helped me by a combination of “fishing” for
me and “teaching me how to fish,” so I could do it myself soon after. So many options existed, and Edison
explained each of them to help me make good decisions.
Discouragement
can come easily to the small businessman. Actually, I am of medium size, but my
business is small, and I don’t always persevere. Without Edison’s guidance, I might have given up on advertising on
Facebook, thinking the cost per response my ads were getting to be too
expensive, but he reassured me that my Facebook ads were doing very well. We
tweaked them, and they did even better.
Edison,
drawing on his advertising expertise, taught me some of the factors that help
motivate potential buyers to close the deal rather than procrastinate. We developed a campaign that reached
potential clients with attractive messages about becoming authors [they are
authoritative] or memoirists [they preserve memories], emphasizing the limited
number of candidates to be accepted [six] in the limited two-week enrollment
period. All along, we’ve had fun, as I
have been learning so many things I had not been taught as a physics major.
I am
looking forward to continuing to access Edison’s valuable expertise. The Social Media campaign he helped me with
has already brought me half my quota of new clients, and the enrollment period
has not yet begun.
I’d
say, we SCOREd!
As the testimonial attests, I
am high on advertising professional Edison Guzman and his help. I attended his
day-long seminar “Facebook Marketing for the Small Business Owner.” [He tells
me that these seminars net him 10-20% of the attendees as clients, even though
he does no self-promotion during them.]
In
April 2015, there were over 1.4 billion Facebook users. Almost 900 million of
them log in daily. Let’s see: if I got only 1% of them, I would have 9 million
clients. That seems optimistic. However, he reported that 42% of
marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business. Who
am I to argue with that?
There
are many ways to reach people via Facebook: Timeline, Like, Share, Chat,
Comment, Photos, Video, Tags, Groups, Lists, Pages, Events, Subscribe, and
Advertise. Edison focused on advertising, which has its own Facebook
sub-specialties: buying ads for the Newsfeed or the Right-Hand Column, or for
Mobile viewing; Boosting a Post, getting others to Like your page, etc.
Edison
Guzman advised me that before we start an Ad Campaign, we
recognize that our efforts to get others to know, like, and trust [K, L, T]
should reflect an awareness that people are not on Facebook to be sold stuff,
but to connect with others and be entertained and informed. His five crucial
ingredients to advertising on Facebook:
You must create a Page specific to your
audience. [I set up Douglas Winslow Cooper with a link to my web
site writeyourbookwithme.com.]
You must target your audience with laser-like
precision. [Tricky, as a discussion of my subsequent efforts will
reveal. I did figure my would-be memoirists would likely be women over 50 and
my businessmen would be men over 50.]
You must have attention-grabbing images. [As a
writer, I naively put much more emphasis on words rather than pictures. Make
sure you have free images or pay the producer, or you can get sued,]
You must use logical headlines appropriate
to your reader. [See below, I thought to reach adults generally
with “Tell your story,” memoirists with “Memoirs preserve memories,” and
business folk with “Authors are authorities.”
You must have an appropriate Call to
Action. [What’s that? Click here to…go to my web site, go to my
blog site, go to my book site, Like my Page, etc.]
Edison
next discussed how to target your audience. Some of this targeting
is by demographics: geographical location, age, gender. Facebook also has
information on their interests, the categories and hashtags they like, their
friends and Likes and groups and …. Presumably the FBI has somewhat more
information, but Facebook may be close.
To advertise on Facebook, get
to know their rules, especially their taboos.
I already had a blog and a
LinkedIn account and a Facebook page with a business page having 50 Likes. I
had nearly 10,000 “Followers” on Twitter, about half of whom Followed me when I
started as a political Tweeter primarily, and the other half of whom Followed
me in my reincarnation as a writer-coach-editor.
I knew nothing about
advertising on Facebook, and this became my first priority. Edison showed me how to set up a simple ad.
First, we get attention with a headline: “Tell your story.” “Authors are
authorities.” “Memoirs preserve memories.” Then we follow with a sort description, such as “Write your book
with a professional book coach.” Don’t
forget your Unique Selling Proposition and your Call to Action.
Although
I got to it later rather than sooner, running a “Like” campaign on Facebook is
a good idea, because you can then target those who Liked you with your ads. [No
good deed goes unpunished.] Essentially, post stuff on your Page that
your target audience will Like, then let Facebook seek out people in the
categories you choose to induce them to Like it, using your ad and a Call to
Action of “Click on Like.” Well-performing ads will cost about $0.01/person
reached and about $0.50- $1.00 per person who Likes the site.
Edison
directed me to Create Ads on Facebook. What I wanted to do was get people to go
to my “lucrative” coaching writeyourbookwithme.com site, rather than my message
memoir site, as I make less than a dollar per book from
selling Ting and I. First, I ran a
week of ads which targeted men and women in the U.S. I chose the lowest cost,
$5/day. The goal was to get the readers to click on writeyourbookwithme.com.
The metrics we followed were cost/reach, usually around a penny a person who
saw the ad, and cost/click, which ranged from a half dollar to a few dollars
per person who clicked on the link to my website.
Ideally
we wanted people who clicked on the site to then fill out our contact form,
getting their email address and their expression of interest in writing a book.
I tried male only and then female only, with different pictures for each, and
used “writing” as an interest. I stuck with targeting people over 50 years of
age. I got much the same results with highly local ads as with all-U.S. ads. A Facebook staffer wrote me not to worry
too much about optimizing demographic parameters. I learned elsewhere that
Facebook does some dynamic adjusting of the targeting as the ad period
continues, so understanding exactly what worked and what didn’t is obscured
with this “black box,” while it does improve performance.
As
it has turned out, most options tried gave us reach at a $0.01/person, with 1%
to 2% clicking the site at about, thus $0.50-$1.00 per click. Spending $400
obtained about 4 new coaching clients, thus a cost of $100 per client. “About
4” indicates that how and why they found me was not always clear.
To put it into perspective, my
classified ads cost me about twice per writing client as did my Facebook ads.
My book site, tingandi.com, cost me only about $100 over four years, has had
about 4000 hits, and I have no way to know how many books it sold, but it had
to be at most 200.
I
viewed the advertising expense as partly an educational expense. Facebook let
me see how many potential ad viewers I had for a variety of demographic,
geographic and interest parameters. I experimented with different
photos [supplied by Facebook] and even different wording. The experiments had
to be set up carefully so that only one variable was changed as we went from
one ad to the next.
Edison
taught me how to add a sense of urgency to the campaigns and how to develop
attention-grabbing headlines. I also found on the Internet useful information
and tools for generating effective titles and headlines (headlinerr.com).
I
concluded that for high-value enterprises like coaching and consulting, Social
Media advertising is worthwhile. For indie authors with books to sell, the
price is likely too steep. Your experience may be quite different, and “past
performance is no guarantee of future results.”
###
Excerpted from my Write Your Book with Me, available from Outskirts Press and online booksellers like amazon.com and bn.com.
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