On Tuesday, our Consultant Chelsea Vernon attended The Bookseller’s Marketing and Publicity Conference 2014 at the trendy Southbank Centre. The day was jam packed with excellent speakers providing a glimpse into the world of publicity and marketing as we heard about innovative campaigns that have achieved success, big ideas about how to engage your audience and call them to action as well as how to drive creativity and practical tips that could be applied immediately, if desired. We could span pages and talk for hours about everything that was said but for brevity’s sake, we wanted to share our top highlights of the day and favourite moments: 
- The morning focussed on social media and how to improve your strategy. Daniel Dalton, Staff Writer at Buzzfeed really stood out with his talk ’14 Social Content Tips You Can Use Right Now’. Most interestingly, Daniel is obviously not from a publishing background, however, his ideas could be applied to social media strategy’s within any industry as well as you have to know they work – I think we would all agree Buzzfeed has very quickly become so pervasive in our society! Of the 14 tips, share the responsibility, tell stories, rinse and repeat and lastly, be emotional (not rational) were particularly compelling – and being emotional brings us to the next point…
- Emotion is more important than reason, at least when it comes to writing good copy according to Andy Maslen, Founder of the Andy Maslen Copywriting Academic. In his excellent presentation, Andy not only gave the room advice that could be immediately applicable, but a science lesson as well to prove his point! Andy explained how in humans, our brain is wired so that our limbic system, the part of our brain which controls our emotions also controls our decision making – not the frontal cortex which is the part of our brain that is logical and uses reason. For this reason, if you want to make someone do something, call them to action and make a decision, you must appeal to their emotional side, not the rational!
- Next up on our favourite moments is Crystal Mahey-Morgan, Digital Account Manager at Random House, and her case study for a Digital First approach. Crystal explained how they had a business book from the founder of SBTV they wanted to deliver, however, they realised its target audience was NOT made up of readers. Therefore, their challenge was to figure out a way to engage them. They decided to deliver the book in 5 separate sections, which they called levels, and price each of these at £1.99 on the Apple Store. They found if they matched the price point and delivered the content in a manner that was familiar and comfortable to their target audience, not only could they engage them, but it was a resounding success and it was the first business book to reach number one on the paid for Apple charts.
- Finally, Preena Gadher, Co-founder and Managing Director at Riot Communications (a specialised arts and publishing PR company) spoke to us about how to get creative and foster this in our own lives as well as create a culture of creativity. Her top tips? Carry an ideas book around, go analogue, get out of the office with your colleagues – go for a coffee break and a chat, and create your very own ‘creative board of dreams’ – this would be the people or companies you find most creative and inspiring and then when you’re stuck, look to them and think about what they may do!
This is by no means a full report on what was an extremely interesting and insightful conference but just a quick snapshot. This day provided us here at Inspired Selection with not only invaluable information to help us understand better our client and candidates’ needs; but also fantastic tips for how we can improve our own outreach and communication programmes!
Did you attend this year’s conference? Do get in touch, we’d love to hear all about your highlights!
Here at Inspired Selection, we are passionate about the publishing industry; we talk about publishing, read about publishing and attend all major publishing events like the one you’ve just read about. We would love to meet you at events so do feel free to come up and introduce yourselves! If you’re interested in opportunities within publishing do keep in touch and register for our Vacancy Update Service as well as keeping up to date with us on Twitter.
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