How To Use Books To Extend Your Reach

Marketing Lesson of The Week

► Post-Pandemic People Want To Get Out And Travel

My husband and I love the diverse festivals and activities that New York City has to offer in the summer. I don’t expect other consumers to share our travel perspective unless they’re traveling to my home city.

After staying near home or at least in the US, many Americans are ready to break out of their pandemic shell and travel, both nationally and internationally. This is especially true for families whose children have summer vacations.

As I always taught my graduate marketing students, don’t assume your customers want the same things as you. This applies even if you are a consumer of your business’s products.

Overall travel this summer is projected to increase 19% over 2022 (Statista 2023). The travel categories expected to increase the most are:

• 23.8% for food and beverage (although many consumers see these increases at home);
• 19.7% for transportation;
• 15,3% for lodging (hotels and other options); and
• 10.3% for recreation.

If you plan to get away, expect all travel costs to be higher than pre-pandemic levels. While NerdWallet’s forecasts differ from Statista’s, their chart also shows increased travel prices but they don’t extend to the peak summer travel months.

Actionable Travel Marketing Tips

• Make your travel offering stand out from competitors where possible and appropriate. Assess what you can do to set your offering apart from other options in your consumer’s decision set. For example, breakfast or a bottle of wine may win potential guests over.
  
   
  Last year, my husband and I spent more to stay at lodgings inside Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon to avoid the additional travel time and lines to get in and out each day. In Monument Valley, our room had an amazing view of the buttes!

Content Communicates

► How To Use Books Extend Your Reach

Before Amazon transformed the publishing industry with expanded access to the long tail selection of books across categories as well as introducing ebooks, audio books and self published books, publishers spotlighted their newest offering with author tours. They stopped at major bookstores, universities and libraries.

I loved the small independent bookstores along the Upper West Side. They had knowledgeable staff ready to recommend a book that met your current buying needs. Something I find lacking when I look at reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. In addition, they hosted a wide variety of authors of fiction in a welcoming setting.

Now opportunities to hear authors speak are limited to special festivals and events. Unless you’ve got a household name based on past books or have an addressable audience so other media seek you out. Otherwise, publishers expect writers to provide their own marketing and PR to ensure their book finds its audience.

Recently Mark Schaefer worked with members from his Rise Community to write The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever. It’s targeted at marketing newbies and small business owners.

The combination of Schaefer’s experience self-publishing and marketing his own books combined with the efforts of 35 marketing experts drove the book to number 1 new release spot in the marketing/advertising category on Amazon. As a result, each of the contributors is now an Amazon author.

Actionable Book Marketing Tips

• Help authors to spread the word about their books. At a minimum, leave a comment on Amazon since it’s an indicator they check. For example, I interview marketing authors and Douglas Burdett runs The Marketing Book Podcast.
• Lend authors your stage whether you host a live event, a podcast or a videostream. For event planners, the best time to get a highly sought after speaker is when they’re promoting their latest book.

► Transform Your Content Into A Book

Last week, my husband and I attended a discussion about The New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick’s latest book, Holding the Note, at the main building of the New York Public Library. As we entered the beautiful room off of the 42nd Street side of the library, a table with a pile of new books stood ready for purchase and author signatures.

From a content creation perspective, David Remnick’s new book pivots from current events to his love of rock and roll, the music of his youth. In his opinion, this music genre lasted about 25 years even though many people still
listen to it. He focuses on musicians who were generally in their 80s since this gave them the perspective on their careers and early work.

While some of the profiles in the book started as articles in The New Yorker, Remnick extended and adapted them to become a single cohesive book.

Remnick pointed out that many concert attendees thought of their favorite musicians based only on their early work. Often fans were turned off by musicians’ evolution over time. For example, Bob Dylan plays a lot of his new work in concert. By contrast, Bruce Springsteen always weaves in a number of his audience’s favorites into every performance to keep them happy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuC7eibK_XQ

Actionable Book Marketing Tips

• Assess whether you can re-envision existing content marketing into a book. Understand that, like Remnick, you’ll still need to expand and revise the original content so it works as a cohesive piece. For example, Spin Sucks’s Gini Dietrich created and self-published The Communicator’s Playbook to the Spin Sucks 30-Day Challenge

Marketing Reads

► Summer Reading

I grew up in a home filled with books. In part this was attributable to the fact that my father worked for a Madison Avenue agency that handled the advertising for Viking Press. So I always had beautifully illustrated hardcover picture books and longer children’s books.

After I outgrew those books, I discovered Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe detective books. Dad had gotten the omnibus collections of 3 books from Stout’s Viking Press editor. The collections sat in the living room’s stately white bookshelves. They started my love of mysteries.

Now, I read mysteries and thrillers when I need a break from deep work. Earlier this year, I read a large chunk of books from Lee Child’s Reacher series. I plowed through the books to understand how he structured the story to keep the series going.

This summer I’m delving into fiction. I found Martin Amis’s Money among my unread books and decided to fix that
situation. It was as if I knew his days were numbered since he died while I read it. It ranked as one of Amis’s best novels in his obituaries.

Set in the early 1980s, many current readers wouldn’t recognize the New York City he describes. (Even as a New Yorker, I had to check the publication date to better understand the venues described since most no longer exist.)

John Self, the main character, talks directly to the reader. He goes into detail explaining his state of mind and decision making process. Interestingly, Amis puts himself in the novel as a writer and writes about himself in the third person as another of the book’s characters.

My next read is the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Sympathizer. Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American, wrote it. He instills it with a distinct point of view and uses descriptive
language better than any AI program can generate.

After this, I plan to re-read Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain, another Pulitzer Prize winner focused on Vietnam.

Unlike a formal class, I’m choosing the books as I go along based on whatever suits my fancy. My key objective is to learn more about the craft of writing and to let each writer’s prose influence my writing.

Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar

► CX Connect– June 13–15, Online via Zoom

CX Connect will feature three days of thought-provoking presentations from the leading experts in customer experience.

► The Conversation Design Conference – July 24th – 25th in London, UK
bringing together the leading thinkers and doers in Conversation Design

Organized by VUX World.

► Marketing AI Conference – July 26 – 28 in Cleveland, OH

Register now with the promo code: RAIMOND100  for $100 off of the purchase price.

► Voice and AI – September 5th to 7th in Washington, DC

► Content Marketing World 2023 – September 26 – 28 in Washington, DC

► MarketingProfs B2B Forum – October 4 – 6 in Boston, MA

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Heidi

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