The Gift That Keeps On Giving.

When is a book not a book?
 
When it is a Christmas Gift.
 
This blog may be a little late for you to do anything with the content right now, but we hope that by passing on its message it gives you something to think about when marketing for the next year.

​If you already have a marketing plan, this is something that you can add in and if you haven’t – why not? Those books aren’t going to sell themselves!
 
Fail to plan - plan to fail.

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​As regular readers will know, we are great advocates of advertising, both on Amazon and on Facebook, so we thought we’d like to share a bit of a success story with you. You could call this a “case study” but that makes it sound a bit fancier than it was.
 
We have one book in our catalogue that makes it ideal for a certain type of person. We’ll get to the details in a moment, but we’ll start with the “back story” first. We noticed back in December 2023 that sales of the book picked up quite considerably and we sold more copies that month than we had during the previous 11.
 
Being curious sorts of people, we wondered why.

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We had almost no data that we could analyse, because the growth in sales was “organic”.

​We hadn’t advertised the book and we hadn’t even promoted it that much, so we had no idea who had bought it. But we did have one very important bit of data. All the copies sold were in paperback, not ebook format. That was what gave us our biggest clue.
 
Asking a few contacts in the book marketing world brought us the suggestion that the copies were being sold not as books – but as Christmas gifts.
 
Yes, of course they were books, but that wasn’t why they were being bought. They were being bought so that they could be wrapped up in nice Christmas paper, to be given to someone else. The buyer had no intention of reading the book themselves, which is very unusual in the book marketing world.

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So, in our marketing plan for November and December 2024 we decided we would aim not at the book buying market, but at the gift giving market. Not all of it, of course. That market is huge and not everyone who buys gifts is going to buy a book as a gift.
 
But there was still quite a large segment of the market that we could aim at. We estimated the market size to be in region of 2 million people.
 
OK, so how did we arrive at that figure?

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The book in question is aimed at golfers, of whom there is an estimated one million in the UK. But we weren’t going to be targeting the golfers, we were going to be targeting the people who would be buying Christmas gifts for golfers.
 
That is likely to be a much larger figure, when you take into account spouses/partners, children, siblings and friends.
 
In creating our ads, therefore, we didn’t use our normal approach of saying “This is a great book for all you golfers”
 
We changed our approach entirely and said “This is the ideal gift for the golfer in your life”. That affected the way we targeted the book in our advertising.
 
We are looking primarily at Facebook and Amazon ads here.

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The crossover was in pricing. We reduced the book’s price to make it a little bit more attractive to gift givers who were on a tight budget. That would also make it more attractive for children to give to parents, uncles, aunties etc.
 
In our Amazon keyword targeted ads we also used keywords related to Christmas gifts. Christmas and Xmas were included in all the keyword phrases we put into the ads.
 
But on Facebook it meant we didn’t try to target golfers, as they weren’t the people we were trying to sell to. We left our targeting as wide as possible, so that anyone who was buying a gift for a golfer might consider it.

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In terms of the graphics and the advertising text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity. The image next to this para is one of the ones we used.
 
As you can see, we magnified the gift giving potential of the book as well as pointing out the price reduction.*
 
In the ad’s primary text, we also focused on the gift giving opportunity, making more of that than we did of the content of the book. Non golfers would hardly pay attention to the book’s content. They probably read little, if any, of it before they wrapped it up.

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So, to the results of the advertising campaigns.
 
Immediately after launching the ads at the beginning of December sales weren’t any better than they had been throughout the year, but they got better rapidly.
 
As the month progressed and people started to run out of time to buy gifts for their loved ones, sales started to accelerate. In week 2 of the month sales doubled. In week 3 they quadrupled and hit their peak over the weekend of 20th/21st December, which was pretty much the latest date by which delivery could be guaranteed in time for Christmas.
 
Part of the slow start to sales we experienced at the beginning of the month we think was down to the Facebook algorithm “learning” who it should show the ads to. After all, we hadn’t given it a target audience to work with.
 
From its scan of the images and text we used it probably thought it should be showing the ad to golfers. But it would then have learnt that the audience was much wider, which was when we started to see the acceleration in sales.

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So, the lessons we learnt:
 

1. 1. When selling books as gifts, don’t target the normal audience for the book (in this case golfers), target the people who will buy gifts for the main audience for the book. They are two very different groups of people.
2. 2. Make the ad copy explicit in terms what the book represents as a gift – and to whom the gift should be given.

3. Give Facebook time to “learn” who the ad should be shown to, because it won’t be so apparent from the graphics and text.
 
While this blog has mainly been about marketing for Christmas, it also suggests opportunities for selling other genres of books at other times of the year. For example, selling romance books in the run up to Valentines Day, or selling books as birthday gifts at any time of the year. There are many different days throughout the year dedicated to particular causes or events (Hint: May The Fourth Be With You) and many of those offer opportunities for specially targeted sales campaigns.
 
*Editor’s note: the book is no longer available at that price.
 
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