Solving discovery with better content marketing
Ask a publisher to tell you the biggest challenge they face today and you’ll get a variety of answers. I know because I’ve been asking publishers for quite awhile now. I also made sure I posed the same question to the 20+ publishers I met with at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair.
Although the answers vary there are a small number of popular responses. One of the most common ones is simply “discovery”. Publishers are concerned that their content will never rise above all the marketplace noise.
One of the keys to addressing discovery is to focus on where consumer eyeballs already are. Facebook is a terrific example. As the planet’s largest social media network it represents an enormous opportunity for content discovery and consumption.
But go to any publisher’s or author’s Facebook page and what do you see? Mostly timelines with tips, comments and observations. Many authors that I’ve spoken with tell me that they’re trying to quickly redirect Facebook visitors to their personal websites where they have more control over things like sharing content samples with prospective customers. These same authors tell me they realize they manage to get far less than 100% of those Facebook visitors to click through, so many visitors leave without ever sampling the author’s content.
Other publishers and authors tell me they love it that they have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes, but they don’t see any way to engage more deeply with those fans. As one author put it, “most people probably simply like my page and never come back.”
I’m pleased to announce that the Olive Software team, where I’ve had the pleasure of working since 2013, has come up with a way to help publishers and authors make their Facebook pages more engaging. And while it’s not limited to Facebook, let’s start there…
For a live example of this, check out best-selling author Valorie Burton’s Facebook page. It looks like a lot of author Facebook pages, right? One key difference is the “Read FREE Sample” button in the page’s nav bar. Click it and you’ll be taken to this view of her page; there the timeline has been replaced by a sample of her blockbuster hit, Successful Women Think Differently.
Rather than asking visitors to jump to another site or go through a multi-step process to download her sample, Valorie now lets them experience it right there on her Facebook page. And thanks to Olive’s SmartLayers capabilities, we were able to quickly add a call-to-action at the end of the sample where readers can buy the book from their favorite retailer.
I mentioned this capability isn’t limited to Facebook. Olive’s platform presents content directly in the browser, so there’s no app to download and no plug-in to install. That means the same sample widget you see on Valorie’s Facebook page can also be docked on an author website, on a publisher’s catalog page and even right inside the message body of an email marketing campaign. That’s right, publishers can now embed their ebook samples in email messages and not force readers through a bunch of multi-click gymnastics before they can even experience the content.
This solution goes well beyond samples, btw. A couple of publishers I’ve shown it to noted how they could resurrect some of their older, long-tail titles by publishing them in a serial fashion on their website, Facebook page and elsewhere. Their plan is to put the first chapter up one week, then replace it with the second chapter the next week, etc. They see this as a way of encouraging readers to visit their website or Facebook pages regularly, not just clicking a like button and never coming back.
It’s time for publishers to revisit the discovery problem, this time, applying tools like Olive’s Dynamic Book (ODB) application where content can be placed directly inside the pages and platforms where prospective customers are spending all their time.
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