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Authoring Marketing Success

February 10, 2009 In this space, we often write about successful marketing and promotional campaigns that encompass a wide variety of media and channels, and many are the brainchildren of large, multi-million dollar consumer goods companies or large ad agencies, all beavering sway using the latest cutting-edge technology. But I was at a Toastmasters meeting last week and the theme of the evening as “Marketing Yourself.” One guest speaker was a local (upstate New York) fiction author who shared his adventures in publishing and marketing his own books. After all, a book author is the archetypal “sole proprietor.”

Tom Schreck is an author who wrote a mystery novel about a detective who owns a basset hound. He is published by a mid-size book publishing house, so his assigned publicist does little more than send out review copies to a standard list of book reviewers (this is not appreciably different from how the average author is handled in a large publishing house like Simon & Schuster). So Shreck is generally his own marketer. He has a Web site of course, but also blogs both on his own site and on a Facebook page. He has hired a freelancer in India to spend eight hours a day adding “Friends” to his Facebook page (although there is software available that will do this much less expensively) and ergo his blog posts and other announcements about his books are instantly sent out to his network of thousands of friends. At the same time, the author is linked in with online communities of basset hound aficionados, who also hang on his every blog post. Thus, when a book comes out (and he has just published his third in the series), there is an extensive online audience that automatically knows about it. And you can bet that someone is on Twitter tweeting about it, too. (I should mention that he also does a lot of in-person events, too, such as basset house conventions—yes, there are such things.)
Remember when you could just take out an ad or send out a press release? Well, welcome to 2009.

As Heidi and I have mentioned ad nauseam in this space over the years, marketing today encompasses some combination of these items—probably not all of the simultaneously, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker. The key to marketing today is innovation. Who would have thought that a series of YouTube videos of various objects put in a blender (“Will it blend?”)—a $50 investment—would have resulted in a 40% increase in sales of Blendtec blenders? And these are high-end, restaurant-quality blenders!

And who would have thought that a bunch of active, tweeting mothers would have been able to use Twitter to get McNeil Consumer Healthcare to pull a Motrin ad because they deemed it offensive?

The idea is to think creatively and strategically about your business, and the business you want to be in, to understand all the tools available—and to use all the tools that are available and that make sense for your business. There is no straightforward strategy for success other than stay on top of the market—if not one step ahead of the market.

Posted by Richard Romano on February 10, 2009 | Comments (0)