Since I started working with Peter McCarthy, he has been impressing me with the importance of publishers doing “research” in the digital age, by which he means “audience research” done with a variety of online tools. That audience research should inform what publishers do to market their books by identifying, segmenting, locating, and understanding the potential buyers for those books. That enables publishers to “aim” their marketing efforts where they are likely to do the most good.
Indeed, everything we do at Logical Marketing, the suite of services we have built around Pete’s unique knowledge and talent, is informed by the research we do. Sometimes it is clear that the deliverable really is the research itself. At one point in the course of my learning from Pete, we published a piece in this space suggesting that every publisher really needs to have a dedicated research function.
What we were already beginning to see then (and more since) is that many publishers, and by now most of the big ones, have created an executive position with the word “audience” in the title or job description. The responsibilities to address audiences required research as a prerequisite, but it has seldom been framed that way.
This week we were delighted to see that Sourcebooks, a legitimate contender for the title of “most innovative company in book publishing”, has created a “data and analysis” department. As reported by Shelf Awareness in its newsletter (and also reported by Publishers Marketplace and Publishers Weekly):
Sourcebooks has created a data and analysis department that brings together “experts from supply chain, editorial, and sales” to streamline data functions and offer a higher level of analytical support to departments, partners and customers.
The only part about this that is disappointing is that the word “research” is not in the department name or description. But the separate department to specialize in “data and analysis” is exactly what we were advocating when we called for creation of research departments.
It is important to keep the connection between “data and analysis” and “research” in mind because, historically, “data and analysis” in publishing have meant “post mortem analysis” of specific marketing efforts. Indeed, many publishers have “analytics” roles already, but they are not cross-functional and they tend to be focused on analysis of time-honored activities, not applying new techniques on audiences as is enabled in the digital age.
As an industry, we have usually used “data and analysis” to measure the effectiveness of prior activities rather than to understand what we’re aiming at in the future. Being explicit about the fact that “research” is the core function means you are also being explicit that the primary purpose of that function is to aim future efforts, not evaluate the successes or failures of prior ones. Research is seeking to be predictive as well as to inform rapid response to an ever-changing landscape. With most of their existing capabilities and activities, in Pete’s words, “publishers don’t look out; they don’t look forward; and they don’t look ‘big'”.
This is not to say that it isn’t worth knowing whether an ad or a promotion that was tried last week paid off. Indeed, knowing that could influence whether you try that same promotion again. But it is far more useful to be better informed before money and effort are expended than after. And what useful audience identification and segmentation research delivers is the knowledge that enables marketing efforts to be aimed at the right audiences and with the right messages to have a greater possibility of succeeding, and doing so more efficiently.
Publishers will always be interested in knowing whether the front-of-store placement they bought or the author tour they paid for moved the needle on sales. But it is actually more important to figure out before they spend the money whether the customers they’re looking at are good candidates for an impulse buy at Barnes & Noble or likely to be affected by the media exposure an author tour would bring. And the same research that will uncover answers to those questions will also tell the publisher what messages to stress on their cover copy or in media opportunities. And it will tell them which search terms are both revealing of “intent” (to buy, to learn, to know) and occur in enough volume to be worth going to extra efforts to rank for them.
We applaud the Sourcebooks approach to staffing their data and analysis group, which acknowledged that “editorial, sales, and supply chain” needed to participate. (We would, emphatically, add “marketing and publicity” to the list.) Audience research and understanding can be used productively across a range of publishing house activities: acquiring the rights in the first place; shaping the book from proposal to completion; creating all the marketing copy, from that on the book itself to what’s in the catalogs or ads; the geographical placement of physical copies in the retail channels; the timing of reducing stock levels in the supply chain; and the identification and execution of newly-arising opportunities on the backlist.
All this covers the “who”s (staff members with what skills and what in-house knowledge) and the “what”s (the tasks research can inform), but not the “how”s of doing this work. The research itself is done with a set of digital tools. Some — like Google Trends, Moz, SimilarWeb, and Facebook Audience Insights — are known to a lot of marketers and we could almost say they are “commonly” used. (They should be.) But a super-expert digital marketer — like my colleague, Pete McCarthy — work with many more. Pete uses over 150 tools that help him get insights from just about every platform and understand search in a highly nuanced and targeted way.
Educational seminars are a component of our Logical Marketing suite of offerings and we are comfortable introducing fledgling audiences to very sophisticated digital tools. But learning more than a 100 of them — that they’re there, what they do, and how to use them — is not something that is done quickly or casually. It might not require the 20-plus years of experience in the industry Pete has, but it’s not something you do in a month, or even a year. And then understanding how all these tools and insights are best applied to the book business is another important requirement that also takes time and application to achieve.
We’re delighted to see Sourcebooks taking the lead at recognizing the cross-functional requirement of data and analysis and we fully expect that effort by them to be a leading indicator of where the industry will go.
The Logical Marketing team has worked with just about all the biggest publishers and, of course, that includes Sourcebooks. We have done a seminar on how to think “audience-first” with them. Currently we’re working on a project helping them create landing pages to improve traffic to two of their websites. We had absolutely nothing to do with their decision to create a department for data and analysis, but we’re not surprised they’ve taken that initiative. We’ve seen up close how seriously they take both digital change and innovation. We’re proud of the fact that the companies we work the most with are the most sophisticated and advanced at digital marketing. Sourcebooks is a prime example of that.