Andrew Ferebee talked about "Case Study: How I used a book trailer, Facebook ads & a launch team to successfully launch my first book last week". [What caught my attention was the book trailer part, because I'd heard about this marketing strategy sometime back and was curious to learn more about it.]
I'm not going to delve in the why and how of his first book just published, The Dating Playbook for Men, but I will refer some of his interesting marketing strategies.
Andrew has had a blog and a podcast for a couple of years and has been building an email list that he used for the launch of this book. The interesting part is that he created a ViP Club*, a separate list of a couple hundred "guys" willing to write helpful reviews and share the Amazon book link and the book trailer with their networks and their social media platforms. All this in return for a free copy of the book and free bonuses such as videos and a private Facebook group where Andrew would answer their questions.
How can someone just starting out try to do something similar? All of us have friends, family, networks and PLNs. He thinks that with 25 committed people that you email and give free content to, you can do it. [I'm not so sure about this. I have family, friends, teacher colleagues who should be interested in my e-dictionary, my PLN, and I haven't seen the results I hoped for. Maybe I didn't start out on the right foot... I guess I still have a lot to learn and experiment with.]
Other marketing strategies he's used?
- a survey for people to write their biggest question and at the end of the day he'd answer them in a simple video [a big time-saver compared to keyboarding answers], thus providing value to these people
- a raffle contest where everyone who opted in would have their name go into the app. Andrew would send the person picked out randomly by the program a digital $100.00 gift card
- a free coaching session, if I understood correctly, also through the raffle system.
As he said, fun ways to get his audience engaged and growing, because this way they spread the word.
And now the book trailer, a great marketing idea he got from an article about a Tim Ferriss book launch where they said that when they used book trailers to launch Tim's books, sales increased ten times. He looked into this and decided to do a 60-second epic trailer for his book with stock footage and high-quality music that he bought. He then paid someone to edit the video. (A useful tip he gave is that you can put hyperlinks in these videos that people click.) The book trailer was great to kickstart the book launch to his ViP Club and he's also using for his main list.
Repurposing older materials, reusing content, but making sure that you change it a bit so it makes sense and the language is correct, is another win-win strategy.
Andrew also has an Amazon super URL (google it, as he suggested, and learn all about it) that he now uses for everything.
Andrew's parting tip: "When you're thinking about doing something, do it!"
Thanks for some great ideas, Andrew!
* Pat Flynn (previous post) calls it his "ambassador list".