Tag Archives: marketing for books

Measuring Book Marketing ROI

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By Denise Turney

Staff at book marketing companies aren’t shy about telling self-published authors that they have the skills and experience to help increase, perhaps significantly, a book’s sales. In fact, if you’re a self-published author who has been publishing your own books for five years or more, you’ve probably crossed paths with book marketing staff members who tried to sell you on the idea that, by working with them, you could sell enough books to afford to write full-time.

Measuring Book Marketing Companies Work

If you believe the hype, you could end up plunking down several hundred or several thousand dollars for press releases, newsletters, brochures, websites and social media book marketing campaigns that don’t yield results. This is just one of the reasons why it’s good to do your homework (before you contract with book marketing companies) as a self-published author, to get references and check page rankings for websites and press releases book marketing companies have worked on.

To avoid throwing money away on book marketing campaigns, you can also start measuring book marketing return on investment (ROI). In fact, it’s a good practice to measure ROI on all marketing steps you take. Some tools you can use to measure book marketing ROI include:

  • Customer Surveys (be willing to accept feedback you receive from customers)
  • Statistics (i.e. website stats, email marketing stats)
  • Google Analytics (track where visitors coming into your website from, how long they are staying at your website, your website pages visitors click over to most, etc.)
  • Number of interviews you land following the publication of press releases, etc.
  • Google Feed Burner (use to monitor the impact of your blog and website feeds)

Tools to Measure Book Marketing Efforts With

Perhaps most importantly, you can measure changes in your book sales. For example, you could check your BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com book sales rankings. If you have an account with Ingram Books (a major book distributor), you could also check your monthly sales processed through Ingram.

In addition, if staff at book marketing companies run social media marketing campaigns for you, consider checking the increases in followers and social media comments and questions you receive. Dragon Search offers a free tool to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns. The tool measures factors like the cost per employee, social media marketing training employees have received and the amount of time employees spend on social media marketing.

Not only could measuring book marketing ROI save you money, it could also help you to spot opportunities for improvement and growth. It could alert you to areas of your book marketing campaigns that you should tweak, stop or focus on more. Measuring book marketing ROI could also keep you from deceiving yourself into believing that, just because you are working hard, you’re yielding good results.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com, or any other online or offline bookseller and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You! Consider Love.

Sources:

http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/marketing-sales/2012/07/09/7-tools-for-measuring-your-marketing-roi/ (Fox Business: 7 Tools for Measuring Your Marketing ROI)

http://www.smbceo.com/2010/12/16/social-media-marketing-roi/ (SMBCEO: 7 Tools for Measuring Social Media Marketing ROI)