When books receive glowing reviews and win awards it is wonderful news for everyone involved. The only challenge is to figure out how to tell your prospective readers about it when they shop online. And furthermore, it is important to find out if they really pay attention.
This short 90-second video shows how SmartSymbols visual marketing platform can help organize and showcase praise a book has received, as well as how to track the impact of sharing that praise with readers via “Reviews” icon:
A way to find out what readers are interested in is to look at the Icon Usage chart in SmartSymbols Analytics. (See picture below).
To get to the chart, simply login and then select the SmartSymbols set you are interested in.
Icon Usage Chart: January 2010, click to enlarge
(Click the chart to enlarge the picture)
This simple pie chart shows some pretty valuable information: people who were researching this particular sample book spent most of their time on Author Information (over 12 minutes) and almost equal amount of time on Social Networking buzz (about 9 minutes). The Book Content captured their interest for half the time of either Author Information or Social Networking buzz.
There is another interesting data point in the chart: people spent almost as much time researching the location of the plot of the book (Location/Compass icon - read more on Compass icon usage here) as on the contents of the book. In fact location seem to be of more interest then Reviews and News.
It could be that adding illustrations from the book to your SmartSymbols, as well as pictures of the places where the book is taking place could become a tipping point in the sale process of this particular book.
We all know that marketing campaigns consist of four basic phases:
1. Create/deploy
2. Analyze results
3. Adjust campaign
4. Repeat
Now, the critical part is the adjusting step, because the goal is to improve the campaign frequently and incrementally. Frequently, because it gives the most efficient path, and incrementally because it allows us to tackle one specific problem at a time, instead of boiling the proverbial marketing ocean.
The question is - how would I actually do the adjusting? Well, as Robert McNamara said in Lesson 6 - “get the data”, or, for our purposes, analyze specifically what customers are interested in. (Plug: SmartSymbols Analytics can help
A variation on this strategy is a successful implementation of personalization and segmentation approach as a multi-channel campaign. Petco implemented such a campaign and produced stunning results: 400% subscription increase, and 18 times (!) ROI.
My take-away is that we are receiving more and more evidence that “one size fits all” marketing approach does not work; and personalization along with segmentation based on permission marketing is gaining momentum at a record pace.
Where does this lead us? I don’t know of course, but maybe in the future every marketing “impression” is going to be completely segmented, personalized and permission-based. At least, given the business SmartSymbols is in, I certainly hope it would be so.
