The Higher Ed Podcast

How We Market Your Title

• Kendall Hunt Publishing

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Join the HE Marketing Team to get a behind-the-scenes look at how we market your title at Kendall Hunt! Find out about email campaigns, audience targeting, peer reviews, social media, and so much more. You’ll leave empowered to start an informed marketing conversation with your account manager. In addition, we’re sharing tips for what YOU can do to promote your title, which is the most important marketing of all.

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Contact Jen Lewis at jrlewis@kendallhunt.com

Jen Lewis:

Okay, welcome on in. This is an episode that I'm so excited about. If you don't know me, I am Jen Lewis, director of marketing for Higher Ed at Kendall Hunt. And today, we are talking about how we market your title, which is so exciting, because you've written the book...and now what, right? Question mark. How do we get people to find your book, buy your book, discover your book? So with me today - I'll do some quick intros. I have part of my team here. I have Ryan Brown, and I'll let him introduce himself.

Ryan Brown:

Hi, this is Ryan Brown. I'm Senior Marketing Consultant with Kendall Hunt Publishing. I've been in the industry for 23 years.

Jen Lewis:

So you know some stuff.

Ryan Brown:

I know some stuff.

Jen Lewis:

Thank you. Yes. Perfect. And then we also have Megan Peterman.

Ryan Brown:

Megatron!

Jen Lewis:

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Meghan Peterman:

Hello! I am a marketing communications specialist. And I am coming up on five years with the company now.

Ryan Brown:

Five already?

Meghan Peterman:

I know.

Jen Lewis:

Yeah. So we are excited. Because for anyone to talk about this, it should be us. Right? Because we do the marketing for titles at Kendall Hunt Higher Ed. So let's dive in. So I think let's just jump right into how we market these books for people. What are the strategies we use? And I think for me, I want to tee it off with what people want to know first, right? So they don't have to fast forward to the end of this episode. Ryan, I'm gonna throw it to you. What is the number one way - the most effective way - that you've seen responses to marketing?

Ryan Brown:

It's a great question. Several ways. Probably the most effective way, in my experience, has been email marketing.

Jen Lewis:

So let's walk through that so that the people listening can understand what what we do with their books, how we send emails, and what that process looks like.

Ryan Brown:

Yeah, yeah. So what we do is, we'll create a multi-pronged email approach, where we will create three email campaigns. The first one, we call a prospector, and that one gives a general overview of the book. And with that, we include links to the book's website, the cover's on there - they're very visually appealing emails that have evolved over the years. But I can can attest to some of our text-only... Aesthetically, up a little bit. Absolutely. And then from there, we do automation. So three days after that is our trigger email. And probably the number one thing, in my experience, is the importance of instructor resources to acquiring outside adoptions. And that's what that second email campaign is. We reply back with, "We saw you're looking at this book...here's some instructor resources to make it easier to access it." And then the third email is sent to anybody that didn't open the first email. And how these work is we will harvest a list of course instructors for the particular course. And the cool thing about what we do is authors have final approval on all the ad copy. They're the experts in that area. So we want them to make sure it flows using accurate terminology.

Jen Lewis:

We're marketing experts, right? We're not authors who know a lot about -

Ryan Brown:

Horticulture.

Jen Lewis:

Nor do I.

Meghan Peterman:

And I think the cool thing about the email campaigns is that our end-goal - like home run, yes, we have achieved it - is if the professor who's receiving the email campaign, he requested the book. And then that goes directly to our salespeople. And it's like, okay, we've achieved it. Boom. That's a happy day for us.

Ryan Brown:

Right. And the cool thing too, piggybacking on that, is the emails come from the editor or the sales rep. So it's just like, "Hey, I see you teach this course. Here's a new publication that's coming out." It's not a generic catalog email, it looks like it's personally sent from the sales rep or editor. And they're really targeted. So we get tremendous open rates, tremendous click through

Jen Lewis:

And I was gonna touch on that. I mean, for those who rate...yeah. don't live in the marketing world, you know, even before I worked at Kendall hunt, I would always say like, a great open rate for email campaigns is between like 18 and 20%. And on this team in particular, I mean, I see open rates above 40% - double the industry standard. So you know, great stats to backup the email campaigns that we're running. But I know people listening to this are going to be like, "Okay, well, who are you sending the emails to?" Right? Like, we're not just doing a random selection or pulling random lists. So I don't know who wants to talk about this, but I think it's important to talk about the market research and how we find people who truly might need this book or want this book. Right?

Meghan Peterman:

I can jump in here. One of our cool marketing superpowers is that we have data lists of all sorts of instructors. And so, Ryan, I'm going to steal your example, if I'm marketing a horticulture book, I can go and I can search for professors who are in the plant biology space, or I can search by courses that have horticulture or plant science in the title. Whatever is gonna pull me what I think is kind of the most effective list for that title. But something also that we can do is, if you know that there's a big competitor in that space, another widely-adopted horticulture book, then we can look up that book that ISBN, and we can kind of try to do some competitive marketing there and see if we can interest people who are adopting the competitor to actually maybe come over to team Kendall Hunt and adapt your book for you.

Jen Lewis:

Yeah, I love that. I think that's really well said. Ryan, do have anything to add to that?

Ryan Brown:

Another cool thing with our amazing vendors is we have the ability to search by state. I know we have an Oklahoma government text. So we can search government instructors strictly in that state, we can go Two-Year, Four-Year, private, public, or even rural.

Jen Lewis:

It's such a hard word to say, I'm so glad that I didn't have to say rural. And I think for me, I'm trying to think of what people want to know as we're having these conversations. So I think something important to know is what do you guys think, on average, how many people are we sending these emails to? What do you guys think an average number list looks like? I mean, ballpark, it doesn't have to be exact.

Meghan Peterman:

For me, I like to send it out to least a couple thousand. Sometimes it depends on the discipline. Some disciplines, everyone and their brother has to take the course. As you get to your higher-level courses, then obviously, fewer people are taking that course. And so I kind of take that into an account. But if it's like a big intro course, then it can be 5,000+, 7,000, something like that. And if it's like a smaller, more niche thing, sometimes I'm happy with 500.

Jen Lewis:

Yeah, and I think that's a really important thing for our current authors or potential authors to know is that the more niche and the more specific you get into courses like horticulture - man, this episode, we should just title this podcast episode, 'how to market a horticulture book' - the more specific you get, the smaller the lists are going to be, right? Like a business book versus a horticulture book, you know, that is going to look totally different. So we do our best in pulling data. So outside of email campaigns, what do you guys think are other effective ways to raise awareness and generate interest around new academic book releases?

Ryan Brown:

Okay, I started here in 2001 as a sales rep. And when I started as a sales rep, we did postcard mailings.

Jen Lewis:

I mean, I do love postcards, you guys.

Ryan Brown:

Absolutely. But we would send out postcards to instructors. They would sign their name, their information, and send it back, and then we would send them a printed book. This process took up to four to six weeks. We get the postcards and approve them, and ship out the book.

Jen Lewis:

That is so wild.

Ryan Brown:

It's so wild. You'd have trays in our offices, with all kinds of different books, different postcards. I'm working on this book today. So we put these postcards out and physically call them on - Oh my god. That's crazy. You're talking about the

Jen Lewis:

The telephone, on the telephone. Boy. Back in the 1900s. Did you guys know younger generations are calling it that 90s? Right, like younger generations now are calling it now? The 1900s. 1900s.

Ryan Brown:

Oh, that's funny.

Jen Lewis:

I mean, it is I mean, they're not technically wrong.

Ryan Brown:

But yeah, I remember calling cards, "Long Distance cards."

Jen Lewis:

Yeah. Gosh, that's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, obviously postcards are great. We still utilize them in certain ways sometimes. But, you know, kind of back to the question at hand is, you know, outside of email campaigns, I think, what do you guys think are some truly effective ways to raise awareness and maybe some other offerings that our team can assist authors with, with, excuse me to, you know, get people to either book?

Meghan Peterman:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we do is - and it really all kind of depends on the individual book, the author, and what we think is going to be right for them - but one of the things we do as a company is we attend conventions. And we will take - if it's like a criminal justice convention, you know, we round up our criminal justice books, especially if you're going to be presenting at that conference, we want to highlight your presence there. We to do that through social media, we bring your book, but then also kind of what that does is twofold. That gives some recognition to your title, and your work as an author and as a professional in that discipline space. But then it also kind of allows us, your publisher, to be a presence in that industry, and get that name recognition.

Jen Lewis:

Right. And, you know, I kind of want to tie two things together here, when we were talking about email lists, and the data and research that we put behind these email lists...want to talk about webinars, you guys's favorite things? You know, I think webinars are really interesting, because I think if it's the right book, and if it's the right author, and they have a really great presence, you know, I don't necessarily think webinars are powerful the day-of, right? Isn't always what people want it to be. But the great thing about today is it's not sending postcards and waiting six weeks for a reply. The great thing about webinars is that we can record them, we can save them, and then we can send them out to those same lists, right, those people that we were talking about before that niche, you know, the horticulture or the government in Oklahoma, so we can save those videos, we can post them on social media, we can share links, you know, via email to these people. So, you know, I think webinars if people feel like they're a compelling speaker, they have compelling information to talk about, I think webinars are a really great option for the right author. So I would say that's my pick for another powerful and effective way to market a title. All right, so we've got our email campaigns, we've talked about conventions, we've talked about webinars, what the heck else do we do on this team?

Meghan Peterman:

Well, if we have a book that is amping up for a revision, something that we do, that's kind of like a sneaky backdoor sort of marketing strategy, is we'll run a peer review. And so what that is - you've heard about peer reviewed journals - how we do it here at Kendall Hunt, is we'll say, "Okay, this book is getting ready for revision, let's take a list similar to that, which we would market to, and let's offer them an opportunity to review the book, to give their feedback, to compensate them a little bit for their time, because they're busy too." And, you know, we appreciate the feedback. It's so invaluable. And then when we get that feedback, and we can share it with the author, they get a chance to see what other professors are thinking in the field, what their pain points are, so they can keep those in mind when the book is being revised. Those make great marketing points for the future. But then for now, we've actually gotten adoptions off of peer reviews before, because you're showing a professor a book that they've never seen before. And they go, "Oh, well, not only is this book answering some pain points for me, but also, it is being revised." And especially if you are really thoughtful about the process and are taking into account what people are saying, and then when your book comes out, we can come back around to those people who reviewed it and say, "Hey, thank you so much for being a part of the development process for this book. We would love to show you the revised version. Again, thank you so much." Then that is also a way that you can really get some name recognition. And then they feel special too, because like I said, they've been a part of the development process.

Ryan Brown:

And we try to have them acknowledged in the frontmatter of the book as reviewers. That's one thing. And a unique thing that we do that most other publishers don't is we have them review just one or two chapters, rather than the whole book. And that gives us a wider range of viewpoints. Reviewers can select the chapter or a topic that they're most passionate or are an expert in. And that really helps. We find the revision process and feedback for the author, and ultimately, the end user, the students.

Jen Lewis:

Right, you know, and I think something I want to address - because I've worked on a lot of places, I've done a lot of marketing for lots of different types of companies - but a general theme here that I love, is that we are very much a boots-on-the-ground type of marketing team, right? I think I've worked in enough places, and I've had enough experience to know that big advertising dollars don't always translate to sales, right? It's about the market research. It's about finding the right people, not a ton of people, right? So it's quality over quantity, which I think is what our marketing team does best. Which kind of brings me to the next point of social media, right? Everybody wants to talk about social media. I'll take this one because I you know, I feel very strongly about social media. We live in a time right now where it's a scroll, scroll, scroll, I do it, you do it. Everybody here probably does it. If you don't, kudos to you for boundaries, then. But social media for us, yes, we have a presence on lots of platforms. We do post when your title is out there, we do post links to buy the book. Is it the most powerful marketing tool? No. Is it because of Kendall Hunt? No, it's because social media now is, you know, not really a place- people don't engage as much, people don't interact as much, a lot of people scroll. So now, in the world of data and analytics, we look at impressions, right? We don't look at likes, comments, and things like that, we look at impressions, which means if somebody stopped to look at your post. So, you know, I think we have to get out of this narrative of, "Oh, my God, this post only got two likes," you know? I go to sometimes pages that I follow that have, you know, a million followers and one of the posts on their page will have like 27 likes. So I think we have to get out of that headspace where likes equal anything anymore. And so for our team, yes, we do have a presence on social media. I think something that we've been focusing on, and we'll continue to do a little more research on, is LinkedIn. I think you guys know, I feel very strongly about LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is kind of like the no BS social platform. It's for professionals. It's where we can find some really quality leads and candidates and people who would want to adopt your title. So yeah, I think as far as social media goes, you know, we make graphics, we post, we're active. But we want to make sure that you're using LinkedIn and your socials the best way possible. So that's my spiel on social media. I don't want to overcomplicate it. So yes, we can assist in that. But you know, the bread-and-butter of marketing your title does not come from social media. Unfortunately, people think that, so I just wanted to make that a point. Let's see, Ryan, you've been here the longest. Not to age you here, but can you think of any success stories? Or any marketing campaigns that generated exceptional results? For any authors in the past?

Ryan Brown:

Yeah, yeah. One that comes to the top of my mind is, it was a Lying-Deception book that one of our national editors signed, and we marketed it for a semester or two. And we were not finding any instructors of this course. And around that same time was the big lunch-and-learn boom. We get invited in the industry, we get invited to these Lunch and Learn seminars, brown bag lunches, where you can learn about a topic at hand over your lunch hour. And that's kind of how I came up with the webinar idea was kind of piggybacking on that. So what we did is - we couldn't find instructors of this lying and deception course - what we did is we created a webinar with the authors where they could talk about designing a course around this topic and how to design it. And it worked really well. We had educators that went to the webinar and then proposed the course with the communication department. They partnered with business, some criminal justice courses, and what we did is we kind of seeded some sales directly from this webinar. And and now you are seeing these courses a lot more places. We were ahead of the curve, we didn't have a good data source. So what we did is we hit department chairs, we hit communication instructors, and kind of went the back way of getting this, and it was a true success. That book's on its third edition now.

Jen Lewis:

Wow, marketing. Alright, so we've talked about webinars and social media, you've talked about conventions? What are we missing? I know, there's definitely something we're missing here.

Meghan Peterman:

I feel like one of the biggest pieces of this whole thing is what you can do, too. I think that the most successful marketing stories that we see are where there has been a partnership between us and the author. And I think that when you come at the marketing process with the idea in mind that you're your book's biggest advocate, and then you're present, and you're talking about your book, and putting it in places and networking and things like that, and then you come to us and you say, "Hey, I've got these, speaking opportunities, here's a good overview from my book," that puts us in a really great position to kind of build off of some of that forward momentum that you've already created.

Jen Lewis:

Well, I mean, authors are the heart and soul of their book, right? I mean, not that we're not as passionate as them about their book, but they truly are the heart and soul. You know, I think, to your point, when they go out there and want to market their title on their own, I mean, we can support that in several ways. We can help them make graphics for their own social media, we can help them make fliers or window posters or things like that, too. Business cards to support maybe a book signing, or they're doing a book reading somewhere. So you know, we can leverage our own tools to support their voice. So I think that's really important, what you said was the partnership between both. I think sometimes we see a lot of authors come in, and they're like, "What can you do for me?" And it's like, yes, these are all the things we can do as a team. But these are all the things you should be doing on your own as well, because what's going to be successful, coming straight from the author, is always going to resonate with people almost 100 times more than resonating with, you know, just a random email. So, all right, are we missing anything? I think we've talked about a lot of the different avenues that we can do to support authors and marketing their title. Do you guys have any other things that you think we should?

Ryan Brown:

Something as simple as just adding your book content to your email signature is really good.

Jen Lewis:

Yeah. And your LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn!

Ryan Brown:

Yeah, and just using your connections in industry and groups to spread the word. And rather than self-promoting, maybe identifying a problem, a common problem in the industry, and a solution. People don't like being sold to. So that's why these webinars, any kind of promotion, you do identify a common problem, which is why you wrote a book to begin with, right? There was something lacking in that market that made you decide, "I'm going to give up a year of my life, two years of my life, to write a book." So you're solving a solution. So trying to find a problem in the area and then your product, solving the solution. You're helping everybody, and it doesn't feel so sales-y.

Meghan Peterman:

And jumping off of that a little bit, I feel like I've talked with authors who are kind of on both ends of the spectrum. You've got some who are really, really amped up to get sales and they're excited, and they're ready to go, and they're ready to jump into the marketing. But then I've also seen some who are just- they're so philanthropic about the book that they've created. And it's so sweet to see at the end, like, they just care so much about the students, and the other person does, too. But the philanthropic guy - I'm just calling him that - is kind of more like, "It feels wrong. To promote my title - I am starting to feel kind of like a snake oil salesman or something, but it's like no, like you created your book, to to help students learn better. And so it's - I love what you said, Ryan - it's not like you're promoting yourself. It's that - again, you are kind of being the advocate for your book, so that it can get to more students so that it can create the impact that you want to see it creating. And then, to the person who's really, really passionate about sales, I would say, "I love it. Keep being passionate." But then also remember that if people only feel like they're being sold to, they're gonna sense that really, really fast. And so to to the sales-focused person, you might want to kind of take a page out of the book of the philanthropic guy and kind of focus your online presence and your efforts on, "Here is the benefit that this book will bring to students and educators" and have more of a benefits focus rather than"Buy the book, because it's amazing." Which we know it is, obviously. We're here talking about marketing. So we agree with you, but sometimes, just kind of being self-aware, and knowing which end of the spectrum you stand on and where you might need to balance out can be really helpful.

Jen Lewis:

Right. But I think the most important thing to know is that you can be salesy, but it's just about the language. And I think that's also like leaning on us or your rep, you know, someone to get feedback or, you know, asking us to review your copy. You know, we're always here for stuff like that. Because, you know, to your point, saying, "Hey, buy my book," right? There's no value in that, right? Somebody's chasing dollars. But I mean, I think we go after that in our in our language in our email campaigns, too, is we try not to be overly sales-y. We try to make sure we're presenting value, like, what is the value prop for these people? So that's one of the main things, but the other one is like, you have to find the people. Again, this goes back to quality over quantity, you have to find people who are genuinely interested in these topics, right? We're not going to market a title to a hoard - ecology to business comm majors - that doesn't make any sense. So it's finding the right people, it's having the right voice, and truly being passionate about what you're talking about. I think if that if you can translate your authenticity, and your general love of what you're talking about, I think the right people are gonna buy into you. And that's not icky selling. That's just passion. So I think there's a big difference there. All right, I think we can wrap this up, I'm sure we could talk about 500 other things. But just for the sake of time, maybe we can do a part two someday. Because there are a lot of emerging trends and technology. And I think we could do a whole other episode down the line about AI and all the other things that are, you know, going to cause them some bumps in the road for I think, just the publishing world and marketing titles. So I would say unless you guys have anything else, I feel like we kind of said everything we needed to say right now about how we market your title.

Ryan Brown:

I would like to just add, thank you to all the educators out there.

Jen Lewis:

Oh my gosh, yes.

Ryan Brown:

I know, times can be difficult, but you do make a difference. You make a tremendous difference in society and in kids lives. And I'm just grateful for what you guys do. And I encourage you to keep refining yourself, and know that you are making a giant difference in society. And I truly appreciate it.

Meghan Peterman:

Yeah, second.

Jen Lewis:

Yeah, I mean, third, but also, you know, thank you to our authors. We are very much a team that is behind the scenes. We don't get as much author face-time as a lot of our reps do. And so we're kind of this mysterious team that people hear about and maybe work with via email. So, you know, from me and my team, we genuinely appreciate you guys and we're always here to help.

Ryan Brown:

We're always in the Batcave.

Jen Lewis:

All right. Well, thank you for listening to today's episode of our Kendall Hunt Higher Education podcast, and make sure you check out all of our other episodes. Talk to you soon.