Self Published Authors stand a better chance than Traditional Published Authors
How marketibble brought a Self Published Amazon Book from 100,000 in rankings to the Top 100 in 4 weeks
In our last blog, we mentioned how essential it is to have a product that is developed based on actual research and testing. When a product is developed based on testing and evaluation, we can get a deeper understanding of its positioning, the segment that is right to market to and the value proposition it can offer to its audience to successfully close a conversion.
We would like to share an actual case study of working with a self published children’s book author and her journey from not being seen on Amazon to becoming visible and having consistent conversions every week.
Our client published a children’s book on Amazon a year ago and it was a product that was on kindle only. Our client did not do any market research but performed some level of digital marketing and social media marketing for the book. After a year, she approached us to help her with getting her book more noticed, visible and in doing so help her sell more books.
Market Research (Data Science using R)
First of all, we did an extensive web scraping off on all her competitor websites and other similar sites that had products similar to her title/genre of book and thereafter data mined the keywords and phrases that people search for on Amazon and Google respectively. We realized that none of these keywords were even on her website landing page and Amazon page. But before we went ahead to make changes to the digital strategy and perform online advertising for her, we decided to take it a step back and to test her product against the actual audience she was targeting to get a sense of how well her product was received.
We bought an online panel from a renowned market research company of about 300 respondents with certain criteria for recruitment, and designed a study using R programming to churn a conjoint choice based design questionnaire. We programmed the questionnaire and tested her product against a couple of permutated conjoint fields and products to determine the ranking of her product attributes. We did it all for less than $500 from designing the survey, recruiting the respondents and administering the survey. We performed the conjoint analysis, determined the partworths utilities and performed kmeans on the utilities and then mapped the clusters against the demographic data on a side by side to get the full picture of the segment. And to her relief, not only did her book fit into the segment that had the most volume, but more importantly the segment based on the data analysis was ticking off on all the attributes to which her book was strong. We tested key attributes from the title of the book, the storyline, the price, the format and the author’s profile with different levels associated with the conjoint.
The above is the common step most marketing agencies and digital marketing services companies miss out before crafting the digital strategy for their client. After performing this segment analysis, we not only knew what keywords to focus on, who to target, but also which platforms to target audience effectively. We also knew, and what was confirmed in the market research, that her book was a winning product and was offering a value to a certain segment and that her price point was also spot on.
Digital Marketing Services
With the first half of the work done and validated, we were now left to start crafting an appropriate digital strategy including content marketing, social media marketing, online advertising and the marketing research and marketing trend data that we saw form the conjoint. We decided to map out a 4 week plan for her starting with the upper funnel strategy and followed by a lower funnel strategy. In the upper funnel strategy, we included the need for remarketing and in the lower funnel strategy, we included the need for retargeting respectively. The overall content strategy was advised as such:
Online advertising (Amazon Sponsored Ads and Google Adwords)
In the first 2 weeks, we had 3 sets of creatives and copy developed for the awareness and consideration stage. The 3 sets of creatives and copy were developed as an a/b/c testing and we optimized to the best performing creative. The copy and creatives were developed based on the data from the research and the competitive data keywords mining.
In the next 2 weeks, we had another 3 sets of creatives and copy developed for the intent and purchase stage. Again, 3 sets of creatives and copy were developed as an a/b/c testing and we optimized to the best performing creative.
We ensured we were targeting the segments based on the appropriate keywords and the appropriate segment(demographic/psychographic) that would drive the most conversion.
Search engine optimization
We optimized all the content on her Amazon KDP page as well as her Amazon Author page including optimizing the Amazon product html descriptions based on the keywords mining we did at the beginning. We also added her blog content and integrated her blog xml sitemap to her Amazon Author page.
For her webpage,we optimized all the content be adjusting and optimizing the meta tags (title, description, and keywords) and the h1-h6 tags with keywords we got from our Google keywords mining exercises earlier as well. We resubmitted her sitemap and developed content blogs that were laden heavy with the same keywords. We also added schema rich snippets SEO markups, a hrefs and optimized the speed of the page by removing unnecessary javascript. Her site’s seo-ability was up to 95% from 68%.
For the Search Engine optimization work, we did not make content, copy and keywords changes every 2 weeks instead, we allowed the content, copy, keywords to be up indefinitely. This is slightly different from the paid media strategy we took where we changed creatives and a/b tested creatives every 2 weeks. Instead, for search engine optimization it is like a layered process of galvanizing your website, therefore our process was instead to reinforce the content, copy and creative every 4 weeks.
KPI Measurements, Marketing Trend & Marketing Share
The next step was to ensure that we were tracking well against the marketing metrics particularly, conversions, advertising costs of sales, clicks, page visits, page duration, session cam UX data and churn rate. The tracking of the metrics was done in hourly intervals and we performed optimization to the ads and the site at tandem to ensure we captured and rectify any changes to provide a truly dynamic marketing outreach to her potential consumer.
Of course, this is not the end of it. The competition, the best internet marketing companies and the digital marketing agencies will continue to steal market share from her and her book. Therefore, we have asked that she continues to create a refresh and renewed digital marketing strategy every 2–4 weeks with new content, with new book launches, with new book genre and new segments and audiences to target. This is not something easy to do as it takes alot of discipline and consistency, not to mention quality in maintaining the results.
We have been working on her books for the last few months, and her books are doing amazing. We invite all self published authors who have not explored the strategy we have employed, to try it out and see the difference it can make. In fact, her books were doing better than books from the popular traditional publishing houses. Visit us at www.marketibble.com to learn more.
