We’ve been looking at the importance of crafting an approaching to public relations for your book that will help its message stick in the mind of not only an audience, but people who will write about or publicize your book.
Let’s look at three public-relations concepts here.
- The impact quotient measures how well your message convinces your target audience of what you want to people to believe, or how what you write or offer can serve their needs – in other words, pertinence.
- The share of voice is the percentage of a marketing message within a business category (that is, the frequency of your message).
- Share of mind combines these – the sum of the share of voice that you have and your marketing message’s impact quotient. Share of mind measures the percentage of the total awareness of your message within your target audience.
Your impact quotient will be very high – close to 100% – if people believe they risk death, grave injury or even eternal damnation if they don’t read your book. Pavlov used factors of both anchoring and frequency on dog. While the dogs were not in any immediate danger if they did not eat the meat, they are programmed to know that food is one of the main elements of their survival.
Pavlov anchored his message to a primal need, but he also relied on frequency to get his message to stick. Every time the dogs were to deceive food, the bell rang. Eventually, the dogs “believed” – physiologically, anyway – that the sound of the bell signaled that they’d be fed.
To ensure that your message sticks in the minds of your audience you have to repeat that message frequently. In some book campaigns my colleagues have run, the best success has come from reaching a target market with a message repeated a minimum of three times every five days for a minimum of 90 days. This translates into a minimum of 100 interviews or reviews every month for three months in the top 70 markets.
Of course, you might not be in a position to effect such a campaign (and it’s harder and harder to get that kind of coverage for a book, in any event). Still, it’s important to think in terms of frequency and repetition when getting your message out, regardless of the size of the market for your book.
In our next post, we’ll continue to explore this topic, and look at how your approach might work for the different market sizes for your book.