You know that content marketing is important to develop and grow your business as a self-published author, but how should you go about moving forward with a strategy that really works?
The key is setting clear and purposeful small goals that move you closer to your ultimate goal of selling more of your books. That’s the way to develop a winning strategy that lets you build a booming business.
Aspects of your marketing plan should center on all of these five essential marketing goals for self-published authors.
- Attract new readers to your marketing funnel.
One goal that every self-published author should have at the top of their list is attracting new potential readers on an ongoing basis.
Running a successful promotional campaign for selling your books relies on creating a system that attracts well-qualified leads and guides them directly into your marketing funnel.
Content marketing is the perfect vehicle for every stage of the process.
- The first step is to develop content that your ideal customer actually wants to read. Through that piece of content, you gently lead them to a landing page where you can capture their email with the promise of delivering more awesome content.
- The next step is delivering more interesting content on a regular basis. This helps to deepen the relationship with your audience and lets them know you have their best interest at heart.
- The final step is using even more content to convert your prospect into being a buyer of your book. Once you’ve managed to turn a prospect into a loyal fan, the chances of them buying your previous and subsequent book releases rise exponentially and the conversion process becomes that much easier.
It’s important to remember to never hard sell or try to push your reader into signing up for your list or buying your book.
Content marketing is all about giving your prospect the right content and excellent information they can use to decide whether or not what you have to offer is a good fit for their needs.
Creating compelling content on an ongoing basis practically guarantees that you’ll keep your marketing machine well fed and humming along, which leads to more and ever increasing sales of your books.
- Get the attention of the search engines.
Every good writer knows that as you create content with the intention of wowing your readers, the focus should never be on search engine optimization.
In the past, keyword stuffing and unnatural sounding exact match phrases worked well to get pages surging to the top of search engine results.
Unfortunately, this lead to many people being severely disappointed by humdrum content that didn’t really answer their questions in an entertaining, educational and interesting way.
Today, the ultimate goal of search engines is to provide searchers with the best content possible, and they’ve made changes to ensure that’s possible.
This means that when you create content for marketing purposes, your main goal should be to ensure you meet and exceed your prospects needs.
The better you’re able to discover what your audience wants and deliver it to them, the more love you’ll get from the search engines. Over time, this translates to more traffic, more landing page conversions and ultimately, more sales of your books.
- Build rapport with your audience.
A fundamental truth of doing business in today’s world is that people by from those they know and like.
Consumers are now smarter, have more information to help them make decisions and have more purchase options than at any time in history. What this means is that traditional marketing has been turned on its head and the ball is now in your prospects’ court.
If they don’t know or like you, your brand and products you have a better chance of winning the lottery than you do of getting them to buy anything from you.
The simple way around this dilemma is to recognize than your prospects are actual human beings and not a nameless, faceless group who you just want to get to buy, buy and buy some more.
If self-published book selling success is your objective, a very important goal should be to steadily build and deepen the relationship that you have with your audience with each piece of content you release.
Empathizing, understanding their needs, delivering value and contacting them on a regular basis are all effective for getting it done.
- Discover new opportunities for future projects.
As an author, you’re always exploring new ideas for future projects and manuscripts that may just be your next bestseller.
The great news is that used correctly, content marketing can dramatically boost your inspiration and bring in a flow of new ideas and opportunities for developing future writing projects.
An important goal to set with your content marketing strategy is to experiment regularly, with a focus on finding out exactly what your readers would like to see more of from you.
You can also use the response to your content as a tool for research and for uncovering valuable information.
Pay close attention to your audiences’ reaction to different types of content and to various topics and discussions in your niche. Read through comments and measure likes, shares and click through rates.
After publishing several pieces of marketing content, you’ll begin to notice patterns and discover new opportunities.
Your content marketing efforts could also lead to new strategic partnerships for promoting your books along with other authors whose audiences are similar to yours and so would likely be receptive to your offers and vice versa.
So another aspect of this goal would be to keep an eye out for these types of collaborative opportunities.
- Build a loyal fan base.
Attracting a steady stream of new prospects to your marketing funnel should be a major goal of every self-published author who wants to see success with selling their books. However, putting your entire focus on pulling new prospects into your funnel means leaving a ton of opportunity on the table.
Countless studies show that when you’re selling a product (like your book), you earn the majority of your income from a relatively small percentage of your total customers. This is the 80/20 rule in action.
Over the long run you can expect approximately 80 percent of your sales to come from about 20 percent of your customers.
Another way to look at it is that it’s easier to get someone who’s already bought something from you to buy again than it is to convert a brand new prospect.
This means that focusing on deepening loyalty with people who have already bought your book is as, if not, even more important than developing content to attract new leads.
One of your content marketing goals should always be to provide existing customers and fans with an awesome experience that encourages them to seek you and your books out whenever they want literary stimulation.
An added bonus is that building a base of loyal fans makes it easier to attract even more quality prospects without having to do any extra marketing.
Word of mouth is the most powerful method of growing a business.
By delivering valuable content and products to your fans, you turn them into active ambassadors, promoters and champions of your brand.
Keep these five essential goals in your sights as you create and execute your content marketing plan and you’ll be well on your way to more prospects, more fans and more book sales.
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