No marketing Re-start would be complete without thinking about your PR efforts.  While PR isn’t going to single-handedly change your marketing success, it’s an important part of the mix.  And although PR takes time to make a difference, you can begin the process through planning.

Tip #23:  Identify 12 to 24 newsworthy things your company does in a year.  (New key employees, special events, new product launches, new locations, awards—winning or presenting, etc.)  Now identify 12 more you could create (seek a community board position, partner with a local nonprofit on a special product, hold a new event, etc.)  Match each PR idea to a goal and target audience.

PR isn’t a quick fix.  It takes time to work.  But like the rest of your marketing, effective PR must be tied to your business plan, goals and target audiences.

For more great ideas, get my free e-book, “154 Power-Packed PR and Marketing Tips” at www.GailMartinMarketing.com.

Time to re-evaluate.  If you’ve been working through this countdown of 30 of my favorite marketing tips, you’ve developed a matrix that links your business goals to your marketing target audiences, along with budget, priorities and key messages/vehicles.  Let’s make sure you’re up to speed.

Tip #22:  Now’s a good time to revisit the priorities and budget we developed a few blogs ago in light of new information.  It’s also a good time to look at your “orphan” list—the audiences, goals, messages and vehicles that don’t seem to fit.  Are they really misfits, or did you overlook an important connection.  Add, delete or reprioritize as needed.

For more stories from business owners who have bucked the odds and created successful companies, check out “Profit, Passion and Partnership”—my e-book—at www.30DayMarketingRestart.com

Let’s be clear about one thing: the first butt your book tour will kick will be yours.  Book tours are hard work.  It takes planning and effort to pull a tour together, and nowadays, it’s the author’s responsibility to orchestrate their book tour, signings or online events.  Publishers just don’t have the time, money or staff to promote every book in the way it needs to be promoted to stand out from the crowd.

With the total number of new book releases topping about 400,000 titles a year in the U.S. (including traditional publishers, print-on-demand and self publishing), your book has a lot of competition.  A great book tour can help you and your book gain essential visibility to boost sales, increase speaking engagements and help you sell the next book!

What a book tour is:

A book tour is a great reason to send out press releases about your book.  It’s a reason to contact media in every city where you visit book stores.  It’s also a wonderful way to connect with readers and to introduce your book to new people.  A book tour also increases your visibility as an expert.

Book tours are also great ways to get to know bookstore managers and staff, librarians, readers and book reviewers.  When a store schedules a book signing, it has a reason to order multiple copies of your book. Even if you don’t sell every copy at the signing, you can sign the copies that are left behind and the store has an incentive to hang onto those autographed copies.

Book tours scheduled for the crucial weeks right when your book first comes out can encourage early sales.  Rankings on bestseller lists usually measure the volume of sales in a book’s first few weeks.  Events backed by lots of PR and invitations to family, friends and clients/prior readers can boost those early numbers and help you land on the sales charts, which is at least good for bragging rights!

What a book tour isn’t:

Unless you’re already a celebrity or a big-name author, most book tours are not paid for by the publisher.  Your publisher may help out by posting the tour schedule you put together on their web site, posting a guest blog entry on their web site or sending you some free review copies to send to reviewers, but most publishers just don’t have the funds to do more.  If you’re really lucky, your publisher may negotiate front-of-the-store placement with the big bookstore chains (they have to pay for it) or send you a graphic of your book cover that you or the stores can make into posters.  That’s about it.

Book tours, alas, also aren’t major media events for the big-time TV and radio stations unless you are already well-known.  However, they CAN be a big deal for your hometown media, the local media in smaller cities and even your alumni publications from college or graduate school.  So while it’s unlikely that your tour will make The New York Times or The Washington Post, your hometown may run a nice interview or your local paper may feature your book.  You can also parlay a book tour into a reason to contact traditional and internet radio stations with a fresh new topic related to your book.

Book tours also aren’t a guarantee of big sales.  Unless you already have an established series (and even then, not always), a very successful signing in a bookstore for most authors runs between five and twenty book sales.  If you are selling your book in the back of the room after you give a presentation, sales can be higher than that.  Remember that the real payoff of a book tour isn’t necessarily in the sales, it’s in the exposure that leads to higher overall sales.

You’re also likely to find that your book tour doesn’t draw a big crowd.  Most of the sales you make in a bookstore will be to people who didn’t come just to meet you and have never heard of your book.  That’s OK.  You’ve now gained a brand new reader who has not only discovered your book, but they can also tell everyone that they met the author!

Likewise, a book tour won’t make you famous.  However, it can raise your visibility, give you a great reason to get media coverage, be a fresh topic on your blog and web site, and add life to your platform.

View your book tour as a reason to create publicity, make personal connections and get to know bookstore staff and hear their feedback.  When you realize that the tour isn’t really just about selling books, you can relax and enjoy your moment in the spotlight!

I hope that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your loved ones yesterday.

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If you need to haul wood, you’d take a pick-up truck, not a limo, right?  And if you’re going out for a fancy black tie dinner, you’d want your slick sedan, not a panel truck.  When it comes to matching the right vehicle to the occasion, most of us get the idea.  But it amazes me how many people never give the same thought to their marketing “vehicles.”

One of my 30 favorite marketing tips involves matching the right vehicle to the message and the target audience member.

Tip #21:  What vehicles (think web site, newsletter, brochure, DVD, webinar, personal sales contact, direct mail letter, etc.) will get the right message to the right target audience?  How can you combine vehicles to add up to the magic seven to 30 touches?  Make sure you match your vehicles to the message and target audience member.

For more great ideas, get my free e-book, “154 Power-Packed PR and Marketing Tips” at
http://www.dreamspinnercommunications.com/page/page/5319972.htm

Most people look for information to solve an urgent need, problem or pain. Once you have written your nonfiction book and you understand the profile of your target reader, it’s important to figure out what you’ve written to meet people’s needs or solve their problems.  Think about this answer in the most concrete terms.  Is this book going to help them get out of debt?  Is it going to help them fix their marriage?  Is it going to help them fix their plumbing?  Is it going to help them buy a new house without making a disastrous choice?

No matter what your book’s topic may be, at the heart it exists to solve someone’s problem.  Think about those problems that are at the heart of your book and relate them back to that reader profile.  How does that target reader feel about that problem?  Does it really have them at the end of their wits?  Is it something that they only think about occasionally?  Is it keeping them up all night and driving them to distraction?  Are they scared to death or just mildly inconvenienced?

The other thing to think about here is what triggered the problem to get so bad that your reader is now willing to [gasp] read a book about it to find out how to solve the problem.  In marketing we call that the “triggering event.” People window show long before they buy.  We hear over 10,000 advertising messages every day.  We can’t possibly pay attention to all of them.  So we filter out everything except the things that are urgently on our to-do list or we’d never get anything done.

So if you’re not in the market for a car, you don’t listen to ads about cars.  If you have been thinking about buying a new car but you’re not in a particular hurry, you may have been paying a little bit of attention to car ads.  But the day that you go out to start your car and it won’t start, you’ve had a triggering event that makes you a full-fledged car buyer or prospect.

It takes a problem getting to a certain magnitude before people will swallow their pride and decide to ask for help, even if it means shelling out $20 dollars to buy a book. So ask yourself, what’s the triggering event that is likely to make your target reader buy your book?  What has to happen before your potential reader swallows his or her pride, shells out $20 dollars, and drives to the bookstore and buy the book?

Now there may be two or three or four life circumstances that are going to impel your reader to take action and seek your book.  If your reader is having that triggering event, they’re now much more aware of your book and much more aware of the need for something in that topic.  That’s a good place for you to be because now they’re paying attention.

Many people wonder about the next step once their book has been published.  How do you get it off the shelf and into the hands of readers? Is there something you can do to get people to pay for your book and take it home with them? Whether you self-published your book or have gone the traditional route with a publisher, there are effective marketing techniques you can use to start making more sales.

Your potential readers do many things other than read. They watch TV, play video games, go for walks, play sports, and do a huge number of things with their time including clean up their house and do the dishes. How do you get their attention focused on your book?

You need to break through the clutter.  And that clutter includes all of the other books out there and all of the other things that are clamoring for your reader’s time.

The first step that I suggest is to picture your ideal reader.  Even if you don’t write fiction, bear with me on this point.  I want you to take maybe 10 minutes and just sketch out who you think your reader is.  If your ideas are backed up by some research that you’ve done on who needs the information that you’ve written about, that’s even better.

I want you to write a kind of a short biography of your ideal reader to get it really clear in your mind.  Do you have an age, a gender, and a family situation?  Are they never- married, single, divorced, remarried, married for a long period of time, too young to be married, or too old to be married?  What’s their profession?  What kind of hobbies do they do when they’re not doing their profession or earning a living?  In sales, we talk about a “buyer persona”—a composite picture of the ideal consumer for a specific product or service.  You’re going to construct a mental picture of your ideal reader–a “reader persona.”

All of that research that you did about your market before you ever sat down at your keyboard to assure the viability of your manuscript, all of that research that you did on your market in order to be able to do your book proposal–tap on that information now and actually think about real living people with those characteristics.

Get this reader profile really firmly in mind.  In fact, if you feel like using your imagination, you can also have a mini conversation with this person on the topic of your book in your mind.  Ask him or her, “What would interest you most about this book?  What are you worried about that this book could solve?  What’s frustrating you right now?  What are the top three things that are keeping you up at night?”  A little imagination here goes a long way.

We’re two-thirds of the way through 30 of my favorite marketing tips, talking about how to “touch” your prospects frequently enough to increase the odds that they’ll buy from you.  Now if it takes seven to 30 touches, how do you increase the number of touches for your audience?

Tip #20:  Each touch should include one of the messages that is relevant to your audience.  Remember—your audience goes beyond the end user to include gatekeepers, influencers and decision-makers.  They all need seven to 30 touches with the relevant messages!  Your touches can include ads, product demonstrations, reminder cards, newsletters and follow-up calls, along with other online and offline contacts.  Brainstorm a list of five to 10 “touches” per audience member.

If you’re feeling mystified about marketing, join me on my next teleseminar conference call.  I’ll demystify marketing for you and help you save money, get results and create marketing programs you feel good about. Get the details at www.GailMartinMarketing.com

Knowing where else your reader goes in addition to bookstores is important for success in today’s book market.  Many books are sold in places other than bookstores: gift shops, children’s stores, pharmacies, grocery stores, sporting goods stores and hobbiest stores.

Think about your target reader and what else he or she likes to do besides read.  What are the hobbies and interests?  Where does your reader go in the course of an average work day or weekend?  Thinking like this can also give you a sense of what time of day they might be the easiest to find.  If your book has a business slant to it, think about what other companies touch their lives. You should also think about the possibility of packaging your book as a corporate gift or an incentive, a sales incentive.  If your book has an organization or time management focus, or has a motivational slant, those kinds of books can be very popular with corporations to give as a reward. Lots of companies give books at sales conferences, or as an incentive.  Best of all: when a company buys a large order of books, they aren’t returnable (unlike bookstores).

When you are in the process of promoting your book, you want to know the habits of your reader. For example, take some time and consider what type of magazines and newspapers your buyer is reading. Knowing where your reader goes and what else he or she does in his or her life will give you a feel for the media sources that are the best to target for book reviews, articles or ads.

Where does your reader go when they’re surfing the net?  What kind of other websites are they looking for?  Are they looking for sites related to their problem or to their life cycle stage or to their hobby?  Those may be also points of connection and can also be opportunities for book reviews, online articles, affiliate sales or guest blog posts.

The better you know your reader, the better your odds of finding new ways to gain exposure—and possible sale—for your book.

On our way to counting down 30 of my favorite marketing tips, let’s talk about “touches.”  A marketing “touch” is any message or connection you make with your prospect or client.  Experts say that it takes anywhere from seven to 30 “touches” to make a sale.  Think about that.  Seven to 30 touches to make a sale.

Tip #19:  Look at the grid you created in Tip #18 and add a column to show how often each prospect-type is exposed to your materials.  Do you come close to seven to 30 touches?

Marketing isn’t a one-shot deal.  The reality is that marketing requires an urgent need and repeated contacts in order for the prospect to give you their business.

For more great ideas, get my free e-book, “154 Power-Packed PR and Marketing Tips” at www.GailMartinMarketing.com.

One great way to get attention for your book is to write articles based on the content in your book. It’s kind of like a free sample of your book in or 500 to 600 words.  There are a variety of article directory sites where you can post your articles online for bloggers, newsletter editors and site masters to use for free.

You get exposure (they’re required to use your byline and resource box and are prohibited from re-writing your content).  They get content.  Everyone wins.  One of my favorite article directory sites is Ezinearticles.com, but there are others. Be sure to understand the target audience, rules and conditions before you post content.

In the resource box at the bottom of each of your articles,  you can include the following items: who you are, what your credentials are, the name of your book and your website.

I set Google Alerts so that I know whenever my name, the title for my book or my subject comes up online.  I can see where people are using my content in blogs and online magazines.  Because of this, some of my articles have even been translated into Portuguese and Italian and showing up in Blogs, newsletters and e-zines all over the world.

This type of marketing all comes back to the idea of direct-to-consumer PR.   I never could’ve found those people to pitch to them, but they found me because my article was out there on an article directory.

Try it and see what happens for you!