By Angeline Licerio
The internet is continuing to affect how people interact with products and services massively, and it is forcing companies to constantly improve their branding and marketing strategies. According to one of the leading e-commerce platforms, BigCommerce, over 75% of people are shopping at least once a month online. We see hundreds of ads every day, and they seem to be following us no matter what social media platform or internet browsers we use.
The convenience of finding everything online has also revolutionized the writing industry. Books are now easier to publish and market. Ebooks are now more accessible and easier to buy than physical books, and hundreds of books are now stored in just one application. If you’re just starting in the industry, you’ll quickly find that the market is oversaturated with other authors promoting similar works. The key to staying afloat? Adapt to the times and double down on digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing provides a way to connect with your target audience and influence potential readers in the online space. It’s an umbrella term that refers to any online marketing strategies, which are significantly different from offline and traditional marketing.
There are different types of digital marketing. A few key examples include:
Social media marketing
Having a reachable page on the most popular social media platforms can engage your audience and encourage them to interact with your brand. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram provide special user features if you register as a creator page. Built-in engagement metrics track your progress, showing how far your posts have reached by providing specific numbers on how many people shared, liked, or saved your posts.
Some people take advantage of these built-in tools because they provide enough information that doesn’t warrant other third-party software. Building an accessible presence to your brand as an author also improves engagement because your readers can now simply send a private message to the page for inquiries.
Content marketing
Content marketing is an integral part of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO refers to the practice of including valuable keywords and integrating them into your content, so that your web pages can appear in SERP when those keywords are entered in search engines like Google. Content marketing uses friendly, engaging, and relatable written or video material to connect with your target audience and entice them to buy your books and articles.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing model that lets you earn a commission every time someone buys a product or service that you are promoting on your website or YouTube channel. This is popular among content creators with huge followings.
It’s essentially another form of targeted marketing because businesses are more likely to approach these online personalities whose content is related to their products and services or whose audience overlaps with their target audience. Affiliate marketers can promote various ways, such as doing reviews and documenting their experience when using the product or service they purchased. In this case, content creators that discuss and review media and literature can promote your work.
The Benefits of Digital Marketing
Because of the potential it has to completely transform the way your customers interact with you and your work, digital marketing is the most potent form of marketing with the most return on investments. Once implemented, these are the valuable benefits you can reap from digital marketing:
Reach
Digital marketing can help you spread the word about your work way more than traditional televised or billboard ads can. People of all ages and nationalities interact online, so the chance of someone from the other side of the world coming across one of your listed works or referrals from happy clients or readers is not an impossible feat. Provided you haven’t placed any limitations on geographic reach, people can see anything you’ve posted online no matter where they are.
The online platform has greatly equalized the opportunities for authors in the writing industry. Books can be bought and downloaded with a few clicks, free of the hassle involving the transport of physical books. The playing field now allows smaller and more independent authors and journalists to be more competitive online by gaining more exposure. Book reviews are now also easier to see, which is a big part of convincing potential readers to buy your work.
Accuracy
Digital software makes it possible for you to complete zero in on your target audience instead of sending out advertisements into the market in the hopes that one of your potential readers might see. Social media has targeting features that personalize algorithms per user, so people with a digital footprint of being interested in the kind of things you write about can see your advertisements.
This doesn’t apply only to advertisements, either. Marketing strategies have also grown out of traditional advertisements and have branched out to different areas that yield more productivity. Instead of shoving products in your face, for example, websites can contain informative and educational blog articles, resorting to SEO strategies and incorporating specific keywords that relate to your published work.
Cost efficiency
Digital marketing has helped many independent authors to reach new heights with little cost. Traditional marketing strategies for new books such as radio interviews and local book signings can cost you more than what you can gain, provided these strategies don’t help much with reaching the audience you’re targeting.
With digital marketing, you can build your career with online resources and content management systems such as WordPress to build a website and create a platform just for you and your work. The software itself is free, and all you have to do is buy the domain. Once you’ve created the site, you can add a homepage to introduce your audience to you and your works, a list of your books, an about page, and your contact information.
Takeaway
To summarize, digital marketing boosts brand popularity and encourages brand loyalty by providing accessible resources to help your writing career survive the tough competition. Digital marketing strategies expand online reach, quantify results, measure and track progress, and customize according to your target audience. What makes all of it easier is that everyone is already online, so curating an online presence is easier.
Compared to traditional marketing strategies, digital marketing makes your audience come to you and is guaranteed not to take up most of your starting capital. Using different strategies to promote your business will assure a significantly higher chance of conversions and revenues down the road.
Angeline Licerio is a content writer for Elevate Corporate Training, a team of corporate trainers committed to improving performance of individuals and teams within organisations.
