Buyer's Guide: Marketing Automation Accelerates D2C Efforts

Publishers happen to have good content at their fingertips. By creating auxiliary content—blogs, video, social media—centered on their books and authors, publishers can establish a presence in the constant flow of information, fight for mindshare, and extend consumer interactions beyond just the purchasing and reading of books.

It's up to book publishers to get themselves in front of consumers using all the channels available to them. Doing that efficiently means reaching audiences anywhere, assessing behavior patterns in real time, and then responding immediately to changing consumer desires.

Extending the Experience with Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools (such as HubSpot, Marketo, SilverPop, Eloqua) simplify and automate online marketing tasks. Basically, you set certain criteria and the system responds according to the rules. For example, you might have a rule that sends a follow-up email to people who have abandoned a shopping cart. Or your email newsletter program might tag individuals who read a specific article and follow up with similar content or a product suggestion.

Audience development and marketing automation tools can provide greater efficiency, agility, and insight by combining capabilities in analytics, multichannel distribution, and automation. These capabilities allow book publishers to optimize their marketing platforms to move faster and more responsively to market nuances.

Marketing automation tools can help you manage a plethora of content channels, including email, websites, and social media, all on one platform. Most tools allow you to automate repetitive tasks and include analytics features that can track and measure channels against one another, in one view.

For example, you might view how your website traffic increased or decreased due to Twitter activity around a book release. More sophisticated tools, particularly those geared toward B2C segments, are distinguished by their ability to manage huge databases of customer information such as purchase history, demographic information, online behavior, and social media activity. A publisher might want to look for regional or cultural similarities among its most active buyers. Book publishers can then orient specific content or campaigns toward individual segments, large or small.