Using Ingram Spark Reader Insight Reports for Book Marketing

Did you know that ingramspark has these robust reports available by genre that can give you a whole lot of reader data? If you didn't know about these reports or you knew but you weren't sure how to use the data they're providing, well then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the book Broad. I'm the founder of a fabulous self publishing services company called Book Launchers. Earlier this year we made a little discovery on the Ingram content website. They had these reports that that were just kind of hanging out bare site called Reader Insights. Turns out they have all kinds of reports in there. Check it out to get familiar with the data. We immediately bought their business report and dove in. The report was $50, which is not a crazy price point when you see all the information inside of this report. In Ingram's words, this report provides insight into the online behaviors of your target reader, where they're active, who they follow, and how they talk about your area of books and related content. Intended as a complement to traditional book sales data, this data can inform and guide your marketing, publicity, sales and overall publishing efforts. Our key audience characteristics are based on consumer use of social media, search engines, websites and media such as videos and podcasts. These data are indicative of the audience's online footprint, including demographics, psychographics, behaviors and affinity social. So the report is intended to help you sell more books. This is cool because you don't get a lot of information from your Ingram dashboard. I've often said it would be really nice to know what channels are selling the books so you can lean into those channels. But you don't get that kind of information from Ingram. But there is some really cool data in this report. We have a section on audience, a section on influence, a section on press, and a section on Consumer Insights which includes some keywords being used and hashtags for social media use. So let's take a look at some of the sections and discuss how you can use this report. Now my first caveat here is that this is general data. Business books are a big category so you still need to know your reader and none of this data is going to provide a magic bullet or a magical solution to your book marketing needs. But sa savvy thinking authors can buy their genre specific Reader Insights report and use what fits for them. What this report says about the business book audience is that it skews to males living in Chicago, Boston and Atlanta. Unless interested in where they live as the next piece of data, which is they follow Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Business News and New York Times business and many other brands and engage with podcasts like Yahoo Finance, daily media outlets like Forbes, the so now I might be thinking about writing articles for those publications or focusing some of my pitches towards the journalists that write for those outlets because that is a business book reading audience. They also give you some general demographic info around education and experience. Again, if you know your reader well, and I sure hope you do, this data isn't as relevant because you're more focused on the problem you can solve for your reader and selling the solution versus worrying if they have 20 or 25 years of experience. Now the report also has some more location information and that might be useful to you if you're planning a book tour or you want to line up local media where you're more likely to get readers. But again, I really want to emphasize knowing your reader, you are more solution focused than demographic focused and for most authors their first area of focus will be their local area or areas they frequent already. One of the sections in this report that I do really love is the social media Influencer accounts that list. Likely you probably know a lot of these already, but it gives you an idea of people or businesses or accounts you may want to actively engage with to help get in front of the biggest influencers in this space. They have four and a half pages of accounts listed here and they are all hyperlinked which makes it really easy to check them out. I'm going to link to a video at the end on influencer outreach to help you with that because once you have the list you still need to know what to do. They they also do something similar for podcasts and YouTube, so depending on where you are in the process, this data is useful for potentially sending out ARC copies of your book looking for endorsements or early support. It also might be useful to get yourself booked on their show or build relationships with them for future partnerships and collaborations. You can also use it to find places where you may want to sponsor and advertise, or just use it to get creative with we talked about how Carol Sanford built a relationship with Tom Peters just by engaging in a meaningful dialogue on Twitter, and now he's promoted her books. It's been a great relationship, but she didn't go into it thinking here's what I want. She engaged in a meaningful dialogue and discussion online and the relationship grew organically from there. So look at these podcasts, YouTube channels and social media accounts and see where you find synergy, opportunities to connect and see how ideas might spark for you and and your book to get in front of their audiences. A lot of the YouTube channels are big brand channels, so they will likely be harder to get connections with at first. So start with the smaller brands or the individual influencers and start commenting Creators notice and Brand Managers notice I've built relationships with brand reps by being active and supporting brands. You can also create content that supports what they're doing, or talks about their shows and episodes and messages and and that gets noticed too. If you're a genuine fan of someone's work, that goes a long way. So check out the list and see who you may already love or who you might come to love. This report also has a robust list of press, but most are major media. That doesn't mean you don't use it, but there's quite a few steps you have to take to find the right journalist and come up with an angle to pitch them. It takes research, but if you didn't know where to start, now you do. They also have a huge list of websites these business book readers follow. There's duplication with the above lists, but checking them out may uncover opportunities to post guest articles, build partnerships, find advertising opportunities, or you may even uncover affiliate relationship opportunities. This is where you can profit from building a relationship and sharing content, services or products your readers are likely to need, want and love. Okay, the final section I want to spend a moment on is this section Hashtags. We've talked about leveraging hashtags to gain some traction followers and maybe a few book sales on social media. If you didn't know what hashtags might be working and being used and searched, well, now you do. With this gigantic list that this report provides you all right, this is how Ingram describes their hashtag data. Hashtag data from Twitter and Instagram showing the most used hashtags among social media posters within this audience can be used to inform organic social media which hashtags to use on posts to garner more views, as well as advertising tactics where you may choose to target followers of a certain hashtag. I love that they have difficulty ratings too, with high, medium and low. Where do you think you should start? With the low ones of course, because they are telling you which ones are likely to be easier to be ranked and get attention for you. You also have data on the number of unique posts with that and your competition and the likes per post, so the popularity of a subject and how big the reach could be. The data is explained in the report and broken out for Instagram and Twitter. This is pretty cool data, especially for people who are using social media. If you're not already a savvy social media user, well, it might take a few more ideas to make it work, but at least you've got a great list to start from. Finally, they have a great section on keywords. This will help kickstart your specific keyword research for your book. Our favorite tool for that remains popular Publisher Rocket and KD Spy. But this is a great starting place and it could also be a great starting place to kickstart Amazon ad campaign keyword research. They give you some trending information on the words so you can see if a word is up and coming or on the decline. They also have pages and pages of keywords and most were high competition. Thus you're really going to have to dive into the data and research. But it gives you a starting place. And I really love seeing the trending data for each keyword because because keywords do change over time and that gives you some insights as to where that word is heading. We like to verify the data we've gotten from Publisher Rocket as well, and knowing that trending information really helps us kind of verify what we're seeing if it was just a blip or if it's actually something that is a stronger trend. This report ultimately is not going to sell your book for you, but it may spark an idea, help you take action, or give you some information that directs you towards an audience that ultimately becomes the very thing that helps you sell a lot of books for $50. This report is a small investment in data that can help you with your book marketing efforts. Now, how would you use this data? I'd love to hear from you below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you get entered to win some sweet no Boringbook swag or a copy of Self Publish and Succeed the Noboringbooks Way to write a nonfiction book that sells. Oh, and before you head out here is how to do that influencer research we talked about. And over here, well, that's the latest and greatest from the channel. Both are absolutely worth your time and I'm excited to see you there.