My Marketing Playbook: Finding Customers
Finding My Tribe and Building the bebooq Community
Bebooq is now live! Everyone can go to bebooq.com, start their free trial, and then subscribe securely via Stripe. I’m sure there are a lot of people that always wanted to write a fiction book, that maybe never had time or didn’t know where to start from.
They’d benefit enormously from bebooq, I just have to:
Reach them
Communicate to them how bebooq can benefit them
Campaign Assets
Asset evolution
Campaign execution
Motivate some of them to start a free trial
Let them experience bebooq, and convert some of them to paying subscribers
Once I’ve reached a good number of satisfied customers I’ll move to the next phase: motivate as many as possible to spread the news! And yes, meanwhile improve bebooq based on my early customer feedback.
Easy enough, right? Just do 1, 2, 3, and 4, sit back and relax!
1. Reach them
Let’s start with 1: Reach them. Who are they? Where do they go, where do they hide in the social media universe, which is where I intend reaching them?
I want to start my marketing campaign softly, testing the waters, cheaply, and most of all by avoiding blunders. Since I’m investing my own funds, I want to make sure I’m not throwing money down the drain. Based on my A/B experience in Product Management, and working with Marketing teams, I know how important is to test what works before moving all in. On the other hand, I want to move fast and I don’t have time to overthink.
I’ve found Reddit to be a very passionate and yes, highly opinionated, community. There is less mindless scrolling of feeds or - worse yet - reels. Do I think Reddit users tend to react negatively? Yes, however it’s better to get feedback even if negative than no response. A big plus Reddit plus is that it’s community-centered. I can then easily identify communities that could be interested in bebooq, such as r/writing, r/CreativeWriting, r/FictionWriting and many others. To test the water, I use my personal account to post some feelers to see reactions and level of interest in these communities, asking questions such as what fiction genre a virtual ghostwriter would help the most. The reactions go from “Is this AI? AI is not writing” to “AI steals the IP of serious writers” or “writers should only write what comes out of their heads”, to being blocked in some communities because of some of the admin rules prohibiting selling anything, I guess even ideas.
Thinking that there are sci-fi aficionados that seem really concerned about how AI is going to change the world for the worse is kind of frustrating, but also enlightening: these are not my potential customers. I’m not interested in reasoning with them about change and innovation, whether taking ideas from published books should be considered plagiarism as well.
The last thing I want is to go on a crusade to defend AI. After all, they may have valid points, although that doesn’t really mean that with bebooq I intend defrauding current authors. I just want to help more people writing fun, exciting stories, help them grow stories into complete books, even if they don’t want to necessarily publish a book. I think about all the people that play with Wordle, and weather bebooq is a way to engage their creativity.
2. Communicate to them
2a. Assets
The idea for my first campaign then starts forming: target non-writers that would enjoy see their fiction story grow under their eyes, play with twists and turns, get new ideas from bebooq and apply the ones they like, then throw stuff away and change the direction of their story on a whim!
The first tagline that comes to mind is: “Death to the High Priests of Prose! May the New Fiction Creatives Win!”. OK, maybe too excessive, although I really mean no harm to anybody, I’m just being provocative. I settle for this:
ChatGPT’s image generation is really difficult to control: you ask to change something, and everything goes haywire, even if you select which portion of the picture you want to change. Text generation is pretty random. To get to the above, I’ve generated a few images with ChatGPT, then combined them together, and added the text on top. In half a day of work I generated something good enough for me.
In the weeks before the launch I had also created some videos that can help interested people understand how bebooq works, and posted them on a @bebooqfiction YouTube channel. It’s a well known fact that videos engage more than images, hence using in my ads some of the shorter (under one minute) videos that may become reels seems like something to try out.
There are the platforms I want to leverage: X, Reddit, Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and Google Ads. I’d like to use the same assets as much as possible, see which platforms works best and double down on them.
While bebooq works best on a computer, since you can more easily navigate book parts, chapters inside each part, and text inside chapters, most of the users on those platforms will see my ads and likely start interacting on their smartphones. I then have to pick formats that work across all these platforms. Video formats are particularly tricky, and while each platform has documented their supported formats, what really works for the different ways that each platform is using to deliver your ads is not obvious. I’ve spent a lot of time creating videos with a 9:16 aspect ratio, which works well for YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, Facebook stories and reels, but then discovered that a 1:1 aspect ratio is preferable for ads across all platforms. I’m using a combination of SnagIt to record and Final Cut Pro to edit my videos, and creating good level videos with captions and with a professional voiceover takes time, but it’s definitely worth the investment, both for marketing and for training/support. Bebooq may be easy to use but seeing it in action helps!
2b. Asset Evolution
Have you ever heard the stories of how small changes had a huge impact on marketing efforts outcomes? How DropBox increased signups by 30-40% by changing “Sign Up” to"Get Dropbox Free", or LinkedIn getting a major engagement boost after rebranding “Recommended Connections” to “People You May Know”?
My objective is simple: get prospective customers to click on my add and get to bebooq.com. I pay solely based on link clicks. If I get thousands of impressions but no one clicks thru I have limited advantage. Building a brand is nice, but my priority is building a customer base of subscribers.
At this point it’s all about trying, observing, intuition, and advice. At a presentation of her latest book,
, Marylene suggested a more explicit and clear message: you vs. them. I thought is was a great especially for people looking at their small screen on a phone.
The other huge asset is clearly the ad text. The “Call To Action”, or CTA, needs to be clear and enticing. I wanted to time the bebooq launch with Halloween, a good event to pique the interest of fiction lovers, which was also good timing to focus on another challenge on my calendar: running (and finishing) the Moab 240 Endurance Run. A catalyzing event is also an opportunity to launch a promotion: the first version of the text, to be then adapted to fit well within each platform, is:
Join the creative revolution! 🚀 The first 100 to use BOOBOOK100 lock in 3 months for the price of one—forever! 🎃 Full access to bebooq’s creative platform for just $9.99 every 3 months! 👻✍️ #fictionwriting #creativewriting
After running the campaigns (details below) and seeing the initial response, I have a few doubts:
Is publicizing the limited number of heavily discounted subscriptions effective?
Is “3 months for the price of one” clear enough?
Is asking to join the creative revolution too much?
Ideally, I should have run multiple test campaigns and see which one works (A/B testing) but I’ll change multiple things at the same time and see if things improve.
My latest version is:
🎃 Halloween Special: Bring Your Fiction to Life on bebooq! ✨ Start FREE 💫 Then get 3 months of full access for just $9.99 (60% off!) 🚀 Promo code: BOOBOOQ100 Pick any fiction genre - from thriller to sci-fi, not just horror! 📚
I align at the same time the bebooq.com home page, renaming the “Start Free Trial” to “Try FREE”. I also change the message on top of the page:
