by Penny Sansevieri
If you’ve ever done Google Ads, Facebook ads, or Twitter, you already know you don’t get a lot of room to work with in terms of ad content, so keep it short and sweet.
Statistics like percentages, and numbers like “top 5,” are great attention-grabbers, so if you can find a way to work them in, and they make sense for your topic, do it.
I find it also helps to link the ad content to keyword strings you plan to use, if and when at all possible. By linking keyword strings to ads, you’re also giving them the best chance to be seen, since the keyword strings match those in the ad.
For example, I linked an ad with keyword strings like “book marketing,” “book promotion,” and “book success,” and the ad had the same keyword strings in it. Essentially, what happens when you do this is that Google sees the ad with all the keyword strings supporting it and gives it more visibility because there’s more of a match. For more on keyword strings and how best to use them, read this piece.
If you are truly stuck for books, authors, and keyword strings and barely made it to 200 or 300, you may be stuck and unable to do a variety of ads. But that’s okay. This isn’t a deal-breaker. Your ads will still work well enough to make this worth your while.
Further Customizing Your Ads
If you do come up with a ton of keyword strings, or want to explore more areas, let’s take a minute to discuss customizing ads to specific topics, specialties, or areas of focus.
Let’s say your book fits into several areas, which most books do. For example, you might have a book about growing a new business, gluten intolerance, food allergies, or even a genre fiction book. Each of these titles has a subset of interest that you probably found in your book research.
For the small-business book, you might have found strings of keywords about the importance of promoting your business in social media, and maybe even found a whole bunch of great social-media books. Or maybe there’s a chapter or two in your book about business accounting, and you found a whole slew of books about setting up accounting procedures for a new business. Each of these areas of focus likely brought up a whole number of keyword strings, as well as book titles and authors. I recommend grouping some of your ads to serve a particular market segment, if you have enough keyword strings and a big enough ad budget to do so.
What you’ll do next, to use the business-book example, is use words like “social media,” if you’re tying into your string of social-media and marketing books. Or “simple accounting,” if you’re after business owners who need to focus on this.
Writing Your Ad
If you’re doing ads based on keyword strings, you’ll want to include some of the keyword strings in the ad itself. If you aren’t, and you are not sure where to start, do a search on Amazon in your genre, niche, or subject, and see what kinds of sponsored posts get your attention. The ads are all pretty short in terms of word count, so you don’t have a lot of room to work with.
Something I’ve also done is create two identical campaigns using the same keyword strings, only with different ads—especially different ad copy—to see which gets a greater number of impressions. Keep in mind that 1,000 impressions means they showed the ad to 1,000 customers.
Practice Makes Perfect
I know this is a lot to consider and sounds like a lot of work, so I want to encourage you to test different strategies. Maybe try a couple of ads using statistics or numbers, and then try a couple of ads using keyword strings. If you have more than one buyer market, you should test ads that use specific sales angles for those markets.
Nothing is always going to work all the time, but you will learn a lot more from testing different approaches than you will by spending all your ad budget on a single ad.
To learn more ways to promote your book and boost your sales, check out my newly released book, How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon – 2020 Updated Edition! Learn how to turn Amazon into your 24/7 sales machine!
Penny Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME) and an adjunct professor at NYU, is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns.