Do you ever wonder why some of your marketing efforts fall flat?

It could be because you’re working from the wrong definition of marketing.

Effective marketing for writers

3 ingredients for writing

In order to do anything well, we have to know what is required. To make a bona fide Bolognese sauce, we need a definition, a list of ingredients, and step-by-step instructions. If we just start throwing together random ingredients from our kitchen cupboard, the chances are we won’t end up with Bolognese but some one-of-a-kind hash-up. Now, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. I do this all the time and my family are yet to turn their noses up at my cooking. Mostly! But I can do this because I’ve spent enough time observing, tasting and preparing meals to have a rough idea of what goes together and what doesn’t. I mean, there are more successful experiments than others, but you get my point.

If marketing is new territory to us we better start off by finding out what it actually is so that we can attempt to do it well.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Type ‘definition of marketing’ into a search engine and you’ll get around 418,000,000 results. Even if you narrow it down to the reputable organisations on the first page, there are several definitions out there. Add in our own perceptions based on discussions with business acquaintances over the years, and no wonder we don’t know where to start.

I think this is a major problem, and one that leads to writers:

  • Not knowing how to do marketing
  • Not knowing where to start
  • Doing marketing ineffectively
  • Damaging their brand
  • Giving up

Being the good scholar of the English language that I am, I decided to start with the Oxford dictionary:

“the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”

Right off the bat, there are so many terms here which I think put writers off:

  • Business – I don’t have an MBA
  • Selling – that’s just pushy, isn’t it? By the way, if you’re worried that you have to be pushy to sell anything, read my blog post about that here
  • Market research – now that’s just too much hard work
  • Advertising – that’s way too expensive for a writer

So, I went hunting for a definition which I felt bore out my real-world experience of effective marketing. I may be British by birth, and I may have taken the (British) Chartered Institute of Marketing’s courses, but I actually vote for this definition by the American Marketing Association:

“the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

This contains several concepts which I can get excited about as a writer. I’m going to pull out the three which I think make the difference between effective and ineffective marketing for writers.

CREATING

This is what us writers do all day. It’s our life-blood, and the fact that the definition positions this action so high up in the process delights me. If we want any of our marketing activities to be effective, we have to be creating. There’s a lot more I could say on this topic – the importance of investing in our craft for one – but I’ll save that for another post. Suffice to say, I have to dedicate a lot of time to the creating phase because at least half of what I write first time round ends up in the bin. I’d hazard a guess that’s the same for many writers.

EXCHANGING

[bctt tweet=”We’ve spent too long seeing marketing as a one-way street.” username=”SarahSambles”]

You’re not just asking for someone to part with money when you ask them to buy your book, or at least you shouldn’t be. You’re asking them to believe in your story, connect with a character, partner with you on your writing journey, buy the next book you write. If that’s the kind of exchange we want our readers to make with us, then we better be sure that we’re doing that creating, and doing it well! There are plenty of non-monetary types of exchanges, like experiences, knowledge, ideas. I believe we have a whole treasure chest to mine of how writers can engage in exchanges with their readers.

VALUE

Again, I’m not just talking cash here. The best marketing is when we try to provide something that solves a problem (perceived or critical) or enhances someone’s life. That’s real value. So, back to the creating thing. We’ve got to invest in our craft so that what we write is valuable to the target reader. But there are lots of other fun ways we can offer value – workshops, library events, readings, excerpts from our books, signed copies, deleted scenes.

These are the three watchwords I use when I consider any marketing activity I’m about to undertake, whether it’s for a client or myself. How have you been defining marketing? Try applying these principles to your next marketing activity and let me know what happens.