Author Mary Weins
In the Summer of 2019, author Mary Weins released her first book, Letter from Paul: to the Church in Galatia … and Us! Excited to share her book with the world, Mary shared her new book with friends, family, and followers on her Facebook page.
Challenge
As a self-published independent author, Mary knew that public relations and digital marketing played a role in creating awareness about her new book, but she wasn’t exactly sure how.
In the first few months, she sold a few books here and there. After a few months more, book sales came to nearly a standstill. In the first three months of 2020, Mary sold a total of 12 books. Mary was dismayed by the downward trajectory of her book sales and knew she needed help.
Solution
Mary retained CPRA Strategies to devise a digital marketing strategy to build book awareness to support her sales efforts. Our first step was identifying her target audience and learning who bought the book.
Mary assumed that her ideal customer was a middle-aged woman struggling as a wife and mother, seeking support and guidance through scripture. Mary thought that more than 75% of her audience was the woman described above.
We gathered the demographics from her Amazon sales account, website analytics, and social media insights. What we learned over those three months surprised Mary (and us) – her audience was almost a 50/50 split between men and women, and her female audience ranged from 24-65. Mary had assumed that middle-aged women made up the core of her audience. However, it was much more diverse than that.
Next, we engaged in “copy stalking,” a process where we studied the author’s book and other written content to learn Mary’s voice. Then, we devised a three-month social media campaign to build brand awareness and gather data about her audience.
Result
Following the launch of the initial three-month marketing campaign, Mary’s book sales started to skyrocket. In those first three months, Mary sold just over 400 books.
Mary retained us for an additional three months, during which time she sold 250 more books for a total of 650. She also experienced a 112% increase in new and organic social media followers, and her website traffic has grown, on average, by 12% per month since our initial engagement.