Writers’ Marketing Mistakes (5) – Purposeless marketing

This marketing mistake is a real marketing blunder, but it’s a mistake that lots of writers make.

It’s often the result of that guilty feeling you get when you know you’re not doing as much marketing as you should. Therefore, you decide to do something. Often the task is chosen more to salve your conscience than to achieve any clear marketing objective.

That’s the point. Successful marketing will have a purpose. Many writers’ marketing attempts don’t.

What purpose could you set for your marketing?

Many people – including writers – don’t have a defined and concrete purpose for their marketing efforts.

Of course, they want to do more business or to sell more books. They want to make more money from their books. However, these are aspirations.

You may wish to sell more books, but there are lots of factors outside your control that help to make sales. This means that noting how many books have been sold each time you check your royalties doesn’t really help you to work out how effective your own marketing efforts are.

You need to set some objectives to give your marketing purpose. You could begin with statements like the following:

I’m doing this marketing activity (specify) to help me to get more people to visit my website.

I’m doing this marketing activity (specify) to help me to get more sign ups for my newsletter.

I’m doing this marketing activity (specify) to help to get me more speaking opportunities (and the opportunity to make back-of-room sales etc).

The above statements are quite different from vague statements about selling more books – even if a number of sales is specified. They are beginning to define a purpose to your marketing, but there’s still more to do.

How will having marketing objectives help?

Once you say that you want more visits to your website you can ask a very specific additional question.

How many visits do you want over what period of time?

When you come up with an answer, that’s the point at which you can congratulate yourself because you’ve set a metric for your marketing.

You can now measure what you actually achieve against a defined target.

To begin with you’ll probably pick numbers out of the air. Later you’ll know better.

After a while you’ll know how many visitors you need to attract before one of them takes the desired action. (This could be to click through to an on-line bookstore. It could be to read a review of your work. It could be to take a look at the services you offer. It’s your choice.)

When you know that you need twenty, or two hundred, visitors to your site to get one click through to the next stage of the sales process, you have a much better idea of the volume of traffic you need to generate.

This knowledge will affect the marketing activities you plan. It will help you to make your marketing more focused and more relevant. It will help you to judge the success of your marketing.

How do you give your marketing purpose?

To give your marketing purpose try setting objectives which it is in your power to achieve.

For example:

I want to sell five copies of this book when I speak at the ABC exhibition on Thursday.

I want to sell five copies of this book when I give a talk at the DEF writers’ group on Friday.

I want ten new people to visit my website each time I have an article published in XYZ magazine. (You can set up a special landing page for readers of XYZ magazine so you will know that only magazine readers are visiting your chosen page.)

What all of this means in that your marketing now has purpose.

Measure your marketing success

Now you can measure your success with your marketing and work out if it is worth your while speaking at exhibitions such as ABC exhibition and so on.

It really is true that if you can’t measure something you can’t manage it. In the case of your marketing, if you can’t measure the results of what you’re doing, you’ll struggle to give your marketing purpose.

So the next step is clear. Decide what you can control in terms of your marketing and see how successful you can be when you set yourself measurable objectives that you can monitor and review.

You’ll be more likely to complete your marketing activities if you work in this way because now your marketing has purpose.

See also:

Marketing Mistakes (4): Outsourcing marketing

Marketing Mistakes (3): Token marketing

Marketing Mistakes (2): Telling yourself that marketing can wait

Marketing Mistakes (1): Not doing any marketing