Today, many entrepreneurs, business coaches, consultants, and experts from any industry commit to writing and publishing a popular science book. The benefit is obvious. Having your own book on an expert topic offers decisive competitive advantages over the competition – greater awareness, increased perceived competence, and the associated authority in the field of knowledge are particularly interesting for entrepreneurs who want to stand out with their own book and thus draw attention to their core business. Let’s look at your paid advertising opportunities and learn how to get more sales on Amazon.
Simply writing a good book is no longer enough to remain competitive in the long term. Ultimately, the effort that goes into conceptualizing, writing, and publishing the book must pay off. The competition, which also writes books, has to be outdone. This is where successful book marketing specifically geared towards Amazon comes into play.
Amazon, now the second largest search engine (measured in search queries) after Google and the largest bookstore in the world with over three million listed books, has become an essential sales platform for products of all kinds. Especially due to the temporary closures of stationary bookstores and retail stores in the course of COVID-19, Amazon was also able to record massive growth in the book retail business, as many readers have discovered the advantages of e-commerce for themselves and have now permanently switched to online shopping – also regularly Buy guides, novels, and reference books.
The American tech group was able to particularly benefit from this development. A study by Dr. Eva Stüber from the Cologne Institute for Retail Research (IFH). This results in high visibility for authors who are well-represented on Amazon.
Be it Kindle e-books, classic printed copies, or audiobooks that are distributed via the Amazon provider Audible – Amazon anticipated developments early on, created its own innovative offers and has not only remained true to its core business, the sale of books but has also distinguished itself here as a wide-ranging monopoly.
With Amazon-specific marketing strategies and modern sales psychology, even small publishers and new authors can achieve large print runs and sales figures that even one or the other large publisher can only dream of since they have neglected the potential of Amazon for a long time.
To ensure that your own book appears in the coveted Amazon bestseller lists and does not disappear in the nirvana of the search platform, a few points must be taken into account – before, during, and after the publication of the book. These include, among other things
1. an appealing design of the product page with crisp sales text,
2. an intelligent campaign structure of paid advertisements,
3. meaningfully placed keywords and
4. perfect timing when generating purchases and customer ratings to support the so-called bestseller ranking.
These are just a few of the criteria needed to market your own book on Amazon systematically and highly profitably.
We will cover these points in our article to create an overview of what is important to provide as many readers with books as possible.
Optimization of the sales page to get more sales on Amazon
The product listing on Amazon is the page where the product is displayed in all its formats.
Here you will find, among other things, texts that describe the product and images and videos that show it in use and graphically encompass the product.
Add to that related items, price, dimensions of the product, and of course – further down – the customer reviews. In this regard, a book is no different from other items offered on Amazon.
Customers get to the book, i.e. to the product page, via the advertisements sponsored by the provider (via Amazon Marketing Services). The listing must be attractive and ensure that prospects convert to buyers – that the product page converts. Otherwise, the campaign is not profitable and you burn your money.
Optimizing the sales page is one of the biggest levers for profitable book marketing. Due to arbitrary click price changes, supposedly revolutionary advertising strategies, and the search for increasingly mysterious tricks, many advertisers on Amazon lose sight of what is essential, namely the optimization of their product listings. This then leads to worse performance.
So that the book can be found more easily by customers on Amazon, it is best to include relevant keywords that are often searched for in the listing. This measure not only applies to the efficient sale of print and digital media on Amazon but is a universal law in e-commerce.
Another important argument: As the cost per click continues to rise, as many listing visitors as possible must buy to make the advertising profitable. It is best to use all available marketing functions from Amazon to optimize the listing and thus boost sales.
Although the use of the functions is free of charge, the creation of images and texts for the product page requires a certain amount of time and possibly also money, which must be taken into account.
Perfect the thumbnail
Before customers land on the sales page, they initially only see the title and the cover of the book. According to an internal Amazon study (available to the author), these two components alone are responsible for 80 percent of whether the product is clicked at all or not. Therefore, they should be designed as attractively as possible to increase the click rate and attract visitors to the product page.
Sometimes only the first words of the title can be seen. These must therefore be particularly good and as simple as possible. Since many products can often be seen in the advertising space, the cover should also stand out from the competition.
A large title on the cover is very well-suited so that it can be read clearly even in the small preview. Rich colors have also proven to be successful in practice, since a white cover, for example, would be lost on the white background of the Amazon marketplace and thus result in poorer sales figures.
As campaigns are scaled, the book accumulates up to five million impressions per month. With so many impressions, minor tweaks to the title and cover make a significant difference.
Creation of a logical and target group-specific campaign structure
When creating paid advertising campaigns, different campaign types should be created right from the start, which ideally target the target group. Especially beginners who place PPC ads for the first time should aim the ads to generate as many sales as possible.
The ACoS is a useful benchmark for a reliable assessment of campaign success. ACoS stands for “Paid Advertising Cost of Sales” and describes the relationship between advertising expenditure and income. The ACoS is given as a percentage. The total advertising expenditure divided by the revenue from advertising results in the ACoS.
If 100 euros are invested in sponsored advertisements and this campaign generates 400 euros in book sales, the ACoS is 25 percent in this case.
When it comes to paid advertising, the focus is on profitability, so the margin of the product needs to be compared to the ACoS. A lower ACoS tends to be an advantage.
You can use these keyword campaigns:
- Broad
- Phrase
- Exact Match
- ASIN
Broad targets all related keywords. The keywords can be composed differently and do not have to be identical (plural, synonyms). With this option, the ad is shown most frequently. However, the wastage is higher, since keyword variants that do not match 100 percent are displayed here.
Paid advertising and perfect phrase Here, the phrase must match exactly with no intervening words.
Exact Match High click rate due to the exact result. Gives the best performance.
ASINs Direct Bid on Contest Books.
There are professional keyword tools for Amazon sellers that help to identify suitable keywords and evaluate competition books. The provider Helium 10, which evaluates millions of data in seconds and can be used for market research on Amazon in various areas, is particularly recommended at this point. Also for books.
It is also advisable to work with product campaigns. This refers to the sponsored ads that run on competing products and related categories.
This type of campaign is essential for successful book marketing, as it allows customers to be picked up who were either about to buy from another provider or – as is often the case with information products – who directly ordered several books on the same topic. It is a special form of sponsored cross-selling that should be used by Amazon sellers if the focus is on maximizing profits.
Evaluate and improve campaigns
For the campaign management of the advertisements, there is a specific procedure for the best possible results.
Optimize
If keywords/ASINs/categories aren’t getting impressions >> increase the bid.
If keywords/ASINs/categories spend money, convert to sales, but return on investment isn’t there >> lower bid and switch off the campaign altogether if it doesn’t improve.
If keywords/ASINs/categories spend money but don’t convert to sales >> turn them off.
Evaluate and improve
For campaigns to be successful, the reports should be downloaded and evaluated regularly. It is advisable to create evaluations in pivot tables and to adapt the campaigns based on the data – as described in point A.
Respond quickly to adjustments to get more sales on Amazon
Since Amazon is constantly introducing new functions that affect the placement of advertising and the content of the sales pages, (book) retailers should not only be informed about such changes but also use them immediately to win the competition.
For example, one of the latest implementations from Amazon is the ability to use videos to promote books or make the product page itself more attractive (as of August 2021). Anyone who reacts quickly and adapts to the algorithm can benefit from low click prices and thus sell their products better, faster, more efficiently, and with more profit.
Here it is becoming increasingly obvious that large publishers are not doing this, and that small, agile publishers, or self-publishers in particular are benefiting from the latest developments. If you don’t keep up with the times, you keep up with the times.