The demands on consumers' time are only increasing. From new TV shows streaming now to that super hyped video game your entire timeline is talking about, entertainment brands are constantly battling for their audience’s time and attention.
Penguin Random House employs around 10,000 people globally, publishing books across a range of genres. We interviewed Jimena Diez, Product Manager at Penguin Random House Spain, to gain a better understanding of how they’re using audience intelligence to build global author brands and create laser-focused marketing campaigns.
Here are four key takeaways that publishers and non-publishers can apply to their own campaigns!
Define clear campaign metrics
With such high volumes of books published every year, it’s unrealistic to expect each and every one will become a number one bestseller, even if that author is already incredibly popular in other territories. Jimena works across a number of genres including non-fiction, romance, historical, science fiction and crime and thriller. Jimena’s primary focus is to bring English-speaking authors into the Spanish market, running campaigns for authors such as Stephen King, John Grisham and Ken Follett.
Each campaign is approaching with a clear and realistic goal, to reach the right reader. Through this single focused metric, PRH Spain is able to assess priorities to help them achieve their ultimate goal of growing their author’s international presence and build their fanbase in a new territory. Using this as the foundation for campaign planning, Jimena is then able to overlay with more specific KPIs such as cost per click and sales volume.
Approach audience targeting strategically
One of the key challenges for PRH Spain over the last 12 months was to optimize campaigns to focus on conversion. This involved offering the right book, to the right reader, in the right place. How can you make all of these variables come together? Audience insights is the secret weapon to defining and segmenting these groups of readers. According to Jimena, audience intelligence tools have been a huge help.
With Audiense, PRH Spain were able to conduct in-depth analysis into comparative authors - i.e., other authors in the genre - and extract valuable insights such as what they read, where they buy it from, and what related media they consume. Using Audiense’s targeting, they’ve been able to successfully identify and cluster audiences that could be used to inform their paid social targeting and understand the types of media their target audience consumers, to reach them more effectively than ever.
Harness data to build better campaigns
Once upon a time, creating a marketing campaign for a book involved an awful lot of guesswork. Extracting consumer insight can be tricky, with third party retailers sitting between publishing houses and the reader, and it’s easy for publishers to get stuck in a rut when it comes to audience demographics. For PRH Spain, this is a thing of the past.
Thanks to the information and data analysis tools available in Audiense, building better strategies is easy, Jimena told us. Empowered by audience intelligence and the data within, PRH Spain are able to build highly targeted social audiences to be used in advertising across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Even better, they’re able to use insights into consumer behaviour, locations, and affinities to inform their media planning, ensuring out-of-home activity such as programmatic advertising and display ads are truly impactful.
Feed data into wider publishing strategy
Publishers don’t work in silos. PRH alone has 365 imprints globally and within these imprints, sales, marketing, publicity and editorial work collaboratively to get the best results for their books. That’s why audience intelligence needs to be fed into your wider publishing strategy.
For example, Jimena noted that Audiense’s segmentation tools had been extremely helpful for public relations, using consumer insight to build more effective publicity campaigns. Likewise, she suggested editors and publishers could use audience insights to identify the potential market for new books and acquisitions, particularly when it comes to more diverse publishing which may not have existing authors to compare to.
What does the future hold for book publishers and audience intelligence? As Jimena told us: “The future of audience intelligence in publishing is now.” If you’re not listening to what readers want, particularly with new generations entering the market thanks to BookTok and bookstagram, you’re at risk of becoming obsolete.
With tools like Audiense, conducting in-depth analysis and discovering actionable takeaways is possible for brands that want to approach their marketing strategy with confidence. Sign up for free and discover how Audiense can take your campaigns to the next level.