Self-publishing your book means you’re in charge of the marketing process. You don’t have a publishing house or agent working on your marketing plan, so it’s up to you to promote and sell your work. Amazon presents self-published authors with the best platform for reaching their target audience.
Amazon ads for authors allows you to take the reins of your marketing campaign. Launching a marketing strategy on the site might seem intimidating if you’re new to the platform. Fortunately, it’s not as challenging as you think.
Consider these three things before designing your first amazon marketing campaign. They’ll help you better understand the platform and the objectives you need to achieve for a successful marketing plan.
#1 Educate Yourself on Marketing with Amazon Ads
Two primary considerations play a role in the success of your Amazon ads campaigns.
Relevance – How relevant is your ad to the search terms targeted in your campaign?
The bid – Amazon charges you when prospects click your ads. You won’t pay for the platform serving your ads to browsers, i.e., your impressions. So, the bid is how much you’re willing to pay for the click.
Conduct Keyword Research
You need to understand your primary search keywords to get the best reach for your target audience. Changes to the Amazon Ads algorithm in 2019/2020 saw the system placing more relevance on optimal keyword choices relating to your book.
Typically, you’ll choose anywhere from ten to 30 keywords to target in your campaign. So, knowing which keywords give you the best bang for your marketing buck is vital. Here’s a step-by-step process to uncover the right keywords for your campaigns.
Step 1 – Download the Amazon Ads Targeting and Tracking Tool.
Step 2 – Choose ten to 15 targeted keywords relevant to the theme and genre of your book and its content. Add them to the tracking tool. For instance, “American Crime Thriller.”
Step 3 – Choose ten to 15 more general keywords and add them to the tracking tool. For example, “Thriller” or “True Crime.”
Step 4 – Look for keywords with monthly search volumes over 500, don’t choose anything with fewer results.
Use Your Keywords in Your Targeting Strategy for Amazon Ads Campaigns
Now that you’ve inputted your keywords into the tracking tool, it’s time to build out the rest of your Ad. You’ll be creating three separate campaigns.
- Automatic Targeting Campaign
- Broad Match Campaign
- Exact Match Campaign
The Broad Match and Automatic Targeting Campaigns act as your discovery, and you use the Exact Match to scale your ads using the 80/20 rule (20% of keywords deliver 80% of results).
The Automatic Targeting and Broad Match and Campaigns feed into your Exact Match Campaign. We’ll add a fourth campaign targeting individual books (ASINs) after starting the initial three when we get conversions from the Automatic Targeting Campaign. Essentially, the Automatic Targeting Campaign targets ASINs and keywords.
If you need help following all that, it’s a good idea to research videos on YouTube to get a comprehensive understanding before launching your first Amazon Ads campaign.
#2 Build a Promotional Platform
Promoting your book is as important as running a successful Amazon Ads campaign. Follow these tips to get the best value out of your marketing budget and as many eyeballs as possible on your book and ads.
Social Media
Social media offers a fantastic way to promote your work online. Like Amazon Ads, Facebook and Instagram provide advertising models using similar concepts. Once you master Amazon Ads, you’ll find it easy to set up the same campaigns on FB and IG to promote your book further.
Twitter and Pinterest are two other important platforms for advertising and promoting your work. Create accounts on all these platforms and reach out to your target audience. Remember, engagement is everything on social media. Ensure you rely on every comment and like to get more eyeballs on your social post and your book.
Website
Every indie author needs a website. Your site forms a hub where you drive traffic from your social accounts to a blog and landing pages selling and promoting your book. Your website presents fans with a value offer, such as a lead magnet or opt-in page offering them a free chapter from your new book or something they’ll want in exchange for leaving you their name and email address.
This strategy keeps your email list growing. Your website should have an automated sales funnel where you feed the email list details and send an automated email campaign to your fans, asking them to buy your book. Pay attention to the email campaign and look at where your fans convert and where they drop out of the funnel. Keep optimizing the funnel until you see your conversion rate climbing.
Search email marketing tutorials on YouTube and the internet to uncover strategies to improve your email marketing and conversion strategy.
#3 Plan Your Promotional Strategy
Promoting your book requires an air-tight strategy. We’ve already discussed the benefits of implementing social media and email marketing, and now it’s time to harness the power of CTAs and ad reviews to supercharge your results.
Prior to launch
Before launching your book, research and reach out to 25 to 50 reviewers; these people can be individuals from your social circle or industry contacts. Send your book to them and ask them to leave you a Google and Amazon review.
If you send out 25 to 50 books for review, you can expect to get between 10 and 30 reviews. Only some people will be bothered to do it. That’s why staying in touch with them in the weeks leading to the book launch is important.
Receiving reviews on your book triggers the Amazon algorithm to recommend your book in organic search results to people searching the platform for your keywords. Reviews also establish credibility with prospective readers.
In Closing – Include a CTA
Include a call-to-action at the end of your book, asking the reader to leave a review of your work. Run a promotional campaign, such as a free signed copy for every user that leaves a review. This tactic might cost you a few bucks to send them the book, but the marketing advantage you gain is priceless.