As online merchants displace brick and mortar bookstores, the move throws publishers out of a business-to-business environment and into the arms of consumers. That paradigm shift from B2B to B2C is likely to see emergence of consumer-focused verticals in publishing, with dramatic implications for the way books are marketed.
Coming to New York City later this month, Reaching Readers is a conference devoted to book marketing that promises attendees they’ll learn in-depth about the trends, tools, and strategies necessary to succeed in today’s complex media landscape. Hannah Johnson, deputy publisher of the online trade magazine Publishing Perspectives, which is presenting the conference, joins CCC’s Chris Kenneally with a preview.
“Publishers are shifting their thinking from B2B to B2C and that’s not an easy shift to make,” Johnson notes “A lot of the structures that are in place were built during the B2B era, and even to change those around is really complicated. We’ve tried to put together a program that highlights people who are innovating and thinking about new ways to market books. We’ve got speakers from publishing, and people outside of publishing, to bring in new perspectives.”
For the panel, Marketing In Verticals: No Re-Org Required, moderator Pete McCarthy, founder of McCarthy Digital, expects a discussion with bites – and bite.
“You can’t, in my humble estimation as a digital marketer, really understand consumers today without employing sophisticated technology, and you can employ it in a lot of different ways,” he tells Kenneally. “You can do the big data thing, which is analyze how everything is being consumed, looking at everything from marketing attribution, what’s working, what’s converting. Or you can take a more tactical approach, which may work for a smaller publisher.
“You can have large, scaled systems that provide business intelligence and marketing dashboards and really pulling levers and understanding demographics and regionality and marketing accordingly,” says McCarthy. “Or, you can just have really smart marketers on the line. It’s everything from massive and scaled right down to small, targeted, and using publicly-available tools.”
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