Videos can drive growth. They can help you expand, sell and even generate revenue from them as a native source.
Just recently, we’ve discussed how you can take your YouTube video marketing to the next level through a coherent strategy exactly for that reason.
In fact, videos are so powerful that many authors have been using them to drive up their demand on social media.
And if you are an author looking to sell your book via new and innovative growth tactics, you are at the right place.
In this article, we take a look at how you can harness the power of video marketing to promote your books, get your name out there and sell more copies.
Create a Trailer for Your Book
First thing’s first, you need a trailer for your book.
The trailer acts as a synopsis to what your book is about and this applies to both fictional and non-fictional works. Filming a fictional trailer might be easy since you can just sew up the main parts of the plot together and shoot a montage – with or without live-action (you can use animation), but a trailer for non-fiction requires a different approach.
Think of a trailer for a non-fiction book as an infomercial that tries to attract people with the use of video infographics to buy it. Your aim is to tease them enough about the main body of the book that they will want to purchase it.
Get Interviewed
A lot of people get on interviews to promote their latest work and you can do the same thing with your latest literary piece.
One way to get started on a project of this sort is to connect with influencers that would be interested in your work and partner up with them to get featured on their YouTube channel or some other significant social media platform.
If you really can’t get on someone else’s channel, why don’t you open up a Q&A segment to your followers and answer their questions through a series of short videos on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube?
It could be simply be called “Author_Name Answers Your Questions”.
You can also build up your personal brand on LinkedIn or Medium which goes a long way if you want to keep writing and promoting your work in the future.
Create a Video Series About You
We’ve touched gently about getting interviewed on your own social media outlets about your book, but what you have to realize is that the author is part of the promotion as well.
One way that you can get the buzz going on for your book is to create a couple of videos that talk about your creative process or even just your life in general.
Here’s what.
People aren’t just interested in what you write, but they also want to know about how and why you write.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, you’re not just building up your books, but you’re building up a personal brand as well.
Use Snapchat, Instagram Videos, and Facebook for Teasers
You want to keep the buzz going and this is especially true if your book is just about to be released or is fresh off the mint.
This means filming small segments were you tease a chapter of the book on IG video or Snapchat, show off an interesting page or chapter, or even do a tiny book reveal of what’s in the middle of the book. These teasers help appease your audience while at the same keep them wanting more from you.
For Non-Fiction Books: Give Away a Chapter or a Main Concept Via a Video
We’ve been using lead magnets for years in getting leads for our businesses, but the same concept applies to the books that we’ve published in the past. People want free value first before they subscribe to what you are trying to offer them.
Here’s how you do that.
Take a chapter of the main point in your book and turn that into an explainer video, publish this explainer video or a series on an important point on your YouTube channel and presto! You now have infotainment on your platform.
People love explainer videos because it makes information easy to digest.
The caveat to this is simple: don’t make an explainer out of every single topic in your book; your goal is to tease your audience and make them purchase the book for themselves.
Get People to Review Your Book and Film Them
One way to get some user-generated content is to give a couple of noteworthy people a copy of your book and get them to review it in front of a camera. In this regard, you can get people to post about your book on their own channels and get the buzz going about your book.
You can use intuitive software such as Lumen 5 to edit your videos and get people to do testimonials about them.
Use YouTube SEO on Your YouTube Videos
Here’s a nifty technique that will work wonders for your video marketing campaign. Make sure that the videos that you release are SEO-optimized for keywords that have a search or buyer intent on YouTube.
Say for example you’ve written a book about motivation, your next goal is not to think of the most creative title for your video, but to think of a title that has keywords that people search for.
By doing this, you take advantage of search traffic to generate potential customers for your book.
Here are a couple of tips when you do YouTube SEO (check out our full article on the topic, if you haven’t, but here are some tips to get you started):
- Keyword research on YouTube is different from keyword research on Google. YouTube follows a different intent from its parent search engine.
- Conversion rate optimization is also important on the platform. You need to take into account the links that you’ll have on your video, the ending cards, and how you organize playlists on your channel. This will have an effect on how users interact with your material.
- Share the videos that you have on other platforms to get the power of link building flowing into the videos that you have on YouTube.
Video will remain to be one of the most shareable and powerful types of content that you can use to promote almost anything online.
And, if you play your cards right, you can use it to power up your book sales and provide an avenue for repeat sales for your other work.
So start filming and start growing!
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in writing your book? What’s the biggest challenge you are facing in trying to sell your book? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
