Written word media recently published a great post with ideas on how to take advantage of holiday marketing trends to sell your books. With Christmas fast approaching, I figured this is a great time to have a look at the main points:
1. Between mid-November and early January, everyone loves to shop
From early November through early January, everyone is in a buying mood, so this is the perfect time to sell more books. Here are a few noteworthy dates within this range that are significant online shopping days, with ideas on what tactics and messages will resonate with customers:
Info by Written World Media
Image: dailyfinance.com
2. Focus on Amazon
Focus on Amazon – over half the shoppers will use it for their holiday shopping. Emphasize links to your books on Amazon. Your prospective customers will already be shopping on Amazon, so make it easy for them to purchase your books by being where they are (on Amazon!)
3. Focus on Mobile
The majority of online traffic is from mobile devices and this trend will be highly evident this Holiday. Last year, Amazon announced that “nearly 60 percent of Amazon.com customers shopped using a mobile device this holiday. Mobile shopping accelerated as customers got later into the shopping season.” Target announced that “Mobile traffic made up 60 percent of Target.com traffic November through December.”
So, make sure all the emails you send are mobile friendly. Do not send traffic to your website if it is not mobile-friendly. Send them to Amazon instead. Even if your site is mobile-friendly, sending the majority of your traffic to Amazon over the course of the Holiday season may be preferable due to the stats above.
4. Facebook turns expensive
Photo: hubspot
There are peak times in the year when advertisers are flocking to Facebook Ads in droves—even more than normal. During these peak times, there will be more competition for ads, and you’ll pay more as a result. Big brands spend a lot, raising the cost of Facebook Ads for everyone. This not only causes a surge in costs, but also creates a problem of deliverability. This past November and December, the Facebook Ads community was flooded with complaints from small businesses unable to even spend their budget.
As a result, your Facebook ads will become more expensive as you compete with big brands for the same audience. You can mitigate this by:
- Monitoring your campaigns daily and reducing budgets when you see ROI decreasing.
- Targeting your ads to your own fans and lookalike audiences.
- Move your Facebook budget over to other book promotion services. See this year’s Call to Arms results to see which book advertiser offers best value for money.
- Use inexpensive holiday gift guides like this one from N.N. Light.
5. Use your Newsletter
With Facebook ads prohibitively expensive, you can use your newsletter for some free exposure. Email marketing is more effective during the Holidays because shoppers are looking for deals in their inbox. As shoppers are in a buying mood, they expect emails as a primary source of research and inspiration on what to buy. So, don’t be afraid to send emails over Holiday. Send up to two emails a month in November and December. Focus their content on your products (your books!). Readers are looking for ideas on what to buy and now is the time to put your books front and center.
If you haven’t got a newsletter list, you can always use book promotion services that leverage email marketing to capitalize on customer’s receptiveness to emails. Again, See this year’s Call to Arms results to see which book advertiser offers best value for money.
For more information, sources and stats, see the full post on the Written World Media.
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Great post, Nicholas. I’m going to follow your suggestions 😉
I wish you every success! 🙂
Thanks for sharing this! 🙂
A pleasure! Hope you found it useful 🙂
Thank you as always for sharing your great findings. I’m on it, as I’ve already scheduled 2 promos among those dates. Happy selling. 🙂
Yay! You too 🙂
Thank you! 🙂
Fabulous tips, Nicholas. 😀
Thank you, Tess 🙂
Great ideas. I hate to shop and forget that others love it 😀 <3
We buy almost everything online nowadays. That takes care of the crowds 🙂
Fabulous suggestions. I’m on it!
Go for it 🙂
Excellent tips, as always. I will definitely use the tip to send all of my customers directly to Amazon. 🙂 Also, thank you for mentioning our Holiday Gift Guide.
Authors, if you’re interested in being featured in the N. N. Light Holiday Gift Guide, send me an email (nnlight@outlook.com). The cost is $5 and each book spot contains the book cover, one buy link and a one sentence tagline. Hurry, because the Holiday Gift Guide goes live Monday, November 21, and will be promoted to over 40 million people daily.
Thank you, NN. I’ve already bought my spot 🙂
Interesting. Anything for twitter or is that not as useful as I think?
Use the dates listed in the post to schedule tweets promoting your books. Don’t buy Twitter ads, though, as they’ll be prohibitively expensive.
Looked into those and didn’t look that appealing to my thinning accounts. I’ve been doing well with the pinned tweet every morning. Depends on my retweeting throughout the day though. What about hashtags? Trying some out here for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and cyber Monday.
I could speculate, but I haven’t got any real data, so I’ll let you know when I do 🙂
Brilliant post. Thanks, Nicholas!
Thanks! Hope you find it useful 🙂
A gem of a post, and so well-timed for my marketing needs! Thank you, Nicholas! Bookmarked it and smiling :))))
Yay! I’m so glad it helped you 😀
If I was selling something, these tips would be perfect for the Christmas ‘buying season’. As a customer, I am a little different, as all my shopping has already been done!
Best wishes, Pete.
You’re several steps ahead of all of us 😀
Great post. Thanks, Nicholas. So glad I added your blog to my Feedly list. 🙂
Yay! Thank you 😀