In the age of social media, authors find themselves with a need to learn few marketing tricks just to keep up online. Even authors who consider themselves to be traditional have tried out what social media presence can do for their career.
However, most writers tend to focus more on building awareness and branding but forget one vital aspect: turning their fans into brand evangelists.
Turning your readers into brand evangelists is important because it helps your work significantly. Having all of your readers do their part as virtual word of mouth promoters pretty much puts your book marketing campaigns on autopilot after an initial push. But how do you get from point A to B? How do you turn your readers into brand evangelists? Here are some ways:
Always give your readers something to talk about
If your readers are going to promote your works, you have to give them something to work with. They can’t talk about your brand if they have nothing to say about it, so give them something they can share with friends and acquaintances. Create infographics, write trivia’s about your works, and find all sorts of interesting stuff related to your brand. Ideally, you need to come up with something that makes readers think “I have to share this with my friend list.”
It is best to remember that markets, by design, are essentially conversations between the marketer and the audience. You can’t be the clueless corporation that keeps pumping out information in a boring monotone voice that nobody wants to listen to. Give your readers something they find interesting, and something that they want to talk about with someone else.
Make things easier for your readers
The reason why the Internet (and social media by extension) became so widely-used is because it makes normally tedious activities easier to do – from finding content to socialization. So, if you want to turn people into proxy marketers, you have to go out of your way to make their work easier. This could be something as simple as including “share this” buttons to your websites or removing pesky content locking from them.
Satisfied readers are more likely to become brand evangelists
It is common sense with this point: only satisfied readers will go out of their way to promote your brand (unsatisfied ones will either be quiet or tarnish your brand’s name), but getting them satisfied enough to become brand evangelists is the part that stumps many authors. In an ideal world, simply writing a decent book should be enough. But we don’t always live in an ideal reality so you have to give it that extra push.
Give loyal readers rewards or extras. Some examples include exclusive content, early access to your upcoming releases, previews, and if you have the budget for it: freebies and merchandise. In rare cases, rewards actually trump content in the sense that readers will promote your works if you reward them, even if they didn’t really enjoy the content that much.
Image credit: Jon Evans on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]