Social media & marketing
The power of social media is insane! For this reason, we chose it as our main channel for engaging with our customers and marketing our book. With the self-publishing route we went down, it was important that we put in place a solid marketing and social media strategy because we couldn’t rely on a publishing company to do this for us. So here’s how I went about the social media and marketing for Pass It On.
Instagram and Facebook
Visuals get more attention and drive engagement. Especially in this day and age where our minds are SO stimulated with information coming from every direction. It’s much easier for us to process and engage with visuals rather than words, which is why it’s so important to have a well thought out and curated Instagram and Facebook presence full of beautiful images and videos. As I went through the photography & editing journey earlier on in the book making journey, I made sure that I captured a range of photos so that I had a variety of content - not only to use for the cookbook, but also for the marketing. I also wanted to share behind the scenes content on social media to bring people along our self-publishing journey to make them feel involved. Based on this, it was critical that I thought about social media content early, well before I kicked off our Instagram and Facebook pages. This allowed me to build a backlog of content all ready to post, saving time and energy on creating posts now. This approach has also allowed me to think about social media holistically, making sure that everything I post fits together and all aligns back to our brand and social media strategy.
To keep social feeds visually interesting, it’s important to have a range of ‘post types’. I alternate these and post on average every third day to keep our followers as engaged as possible. These are the main post types I’ve used:
Food posts to give teasers of the recipes in the cookbook
Behind the scenes posts to provide sneak peeks of our journey to create the book
Quote posts designed by Jess to share some words from Mum and I about our journey. What I love about these posts is that they break up the photographs and weave our branded colours throughout our feed
Team posts to showcase the incredible humans who have helped bring our cookbook to life
All of the above displayed as a mixture of videos, still images and gifs to keep things interesting
Hashtags
As well as alternating these post types to create engagement, I also use hashtags. These are great on Instagram because they’re free. You can add up to 30 per post, and carefully choosing these can help your content be found by other Instagrammers. What I’ve learnt is that popular or common hashtags aren’t actually all that valuable. For example, you could attach a ‘#instafood’ to a post and you might get a handful of extra likes, but to me ‘likes’ doesn’t translate to good engagement. I’ve learnt that using hashtags that are more niche and relevant, for example ‘#nzbusiness’ or ‘#nzfoodies’, is much more valuable. You might not get as many likes as the ‘#instafood’, but when you do get engagement, it’s worth a million times more because of its relevance.
Paid ads
Paid ads are another great way to engage on both Instagram and Facebook - but of course as it says in the name, this comes with a cost. At the start of the journey I didn’t use too many of these purely because of the cost, but now that we’ve launched and we want to get as much engagement as possible, I’ve used these a little more. What I love about paid ads is that you can spend as big or as little as you like. You can also choose how long, how many people, and what type of audience you want your ad to reach. For example I could create an ad for my latest post for say $10 which can last three days, have an estimated reach of around 300 people who are located in New Zealand with particular interests in food, New Zealand business and cookbooks. My post can then appear on the feeds of these people, regardless of whether or not they’re following us.
If you haven’t seen our social feeds, find us on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s what our Instagram feed looks like which shows this variety of content, with an example of how I’ve chosen to use hashtags:
What makes certain posts more successful then others
After I’ve posted, I always reflect back and think about the posts that have performed particularly well. The analytic features that Instagram and Facebook have help me with this. Of course timings of posts contribute to what usually performs better - for example posts on a Sunday evening will generally perform better than ones that are posted on a Friday or Saturday night when everyone is usually out. Asides from post timing, there seems to be a trend that our most successful posts are the ones that showcase a human or share behind the scenes content. I think it really shows that people are interested in the story and how the book has been made, and this also makes them feel involved. It shows that people appreciate the journey that we’ve gone through, and this type of content makes it feel more ‘real’ to our followers as they don’t just see or know the surface level product.
Why we started our social media so early before we had the book
Through the discovery that the story, humans and behind the scenes content is what contributes to making certain posts more successful than other ones justifies the decision I made about when to start the social media. Initially I was going to do a big bang social media release when the book was fully complete and ready to sell. I thought this through properly, and after a lot of contemplating I had this epiphany that this would be a bad approach! I realised that no one knows us, other than family and friends, so if we went big bang on release day it would be hard to engage with people that don’t know us. It would have also been hard and a little too late to share our story and show what went on behind the scenes. If we were someone like Nadia Lim or Gordon Ramsay, this may be different as they’ve already built their brand and presence - but in contrast to us, we hadn’t. It was so important to realise this because it completely changed our approach.
I started the social media on Mother’s Day 2019 which felt very fitting with this being a mother daughter project. Mother’s Day was also 6 months before we’d get the books which was great because it provided us with enough time to:
create excitement and hype
build a brand and presence
start to attract and engage with potential customers early
engage and scope potential stores early where we could sell our book
share our story early and bring people on our journey
share what was going on behind the scenes to bring awareness of the journey of self-publishing
It would be tricky to do all of the above if we had taken a big bang approach and started social media on book launch day.
We didn’t stop at social media...
Even though social media is our main channel for engaging, we didn’t stop there. We had to consider that not all of our customers or people interested in our journey have social media, so it was important to think about how else we could market our cookbook.
Word of mouth has been pretty powerful. Everyday someone different asks me about the cookbook, and people are super interested in it! It’s really cool seeing this interest and people love chatting face to face - it’s personal and it’s real. Our story of the cookbook is a big part in why our project is so special, so for us to chat about it with other people is powerful because they can hear the story first hand. It reconfirms that people enjoy the human element.
Our launch party is going to be another big part of marketing our book. This will be the official kick-off for our book and a chance for people to hear our story. It will be one of first opportunities for people to see the end product and be able to buy the book which is SUPER exciting! More on that on our launch party blog here.
We’ve also been in touch with a range of different magazines, newspapers and other media channels to see if we can collaborate and get them to feature us. We’ve had some good traction here and have already been featured on The Breeze Radio Station. We’ve also planned to attend some markets such as the Martinborough Fair, and events with the Indian Association, so keep your eyes and ears peeled!
Keryn Kalyan