Book launch: Social media campaign

Professor Rohan Gunaratna

Controversy. Drama. Insight.

Our client, Professor Rohan Gunaratna – an expert on national security and counter terrorism, was working with one of the most reputed publishing houses of all time: Penguin Books on his almost 30th book.

The book was an in-depth investigative piece of journalism into the Easter Sunday terror attack that struck Sri Lanka in 2019. In compiling the book, our client had travelled across Sri Lanka and interviewed the perpetrators that remained alive in detention, their families, military, law enforcement, victims and survivors.

Creative Challenge

The challenge was that there were various conspiracy theories around the Easter Sunday terror attack. Politicians in Sri Lanka were using the attack and spreading misinformation. This resulted in the public being utterly confused about what this book was about. Exciting challenge for us!

Outcome

The outcome that we are extremely proud of is that in 3 months we managed to create and publish over 240 content pieces (mostly video) on the book. The highest retention rate spiked at 91%! We’re particularly proud of this metric as the goal was to get as many people educated as possible.

The Process

When we learned that we will be working with Professor Gunaratna and Penguin Books to market ‘Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre – Lessons for the International Community’ on social media we were thrilled.

We weren’t thrilled only because we would be directly working with a giant publishing house and a world famous Professor, we were thrilled because the book itself that we would be marketing was accumulating quite a bit of controversy due to the various conspiracy theories spreading about the terror attack.

While this was a significant challenge that required lots of brainstorming, we were up to it. We read the manuscript from start to end, contributed to its editing process, and then while Penguin worked on publishing it, we got started on the social media marketing plan.

The structure

We strategized for 7 different campaigns to market this book. Every single content piece we created would either fall into:

  • a launch event campaign,
  • an animated video snippet,
  • an ‘ask-your-own-questions’ campaign,
  • a text video snippet campaign,
  • a video reading by the author campaign,
  • an insights-by-the-author campaign, and
  • a reviews campaign

Each campaign contained 6 pieces of content, with a majority (90% of them) being short videos and reels.

All 240 content pieces were shared on our clients social media pages: primarily YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The result

  • Campaign with the highest average retention rate at 15 seconds: Text snippet campaign at 111% on YouTube
  • Total retention rate (at 15 seconds) for YouTube (all campaigns): 76%
  • Organic total reach across all platforms: 51,000

The highest retention rate videos garnered an about 85% rate, which means that these videos had viewers watch an average duration of 85% and above.

The book was launched in Sri Lanka by Sarasavi Book Stores and for the first couple of weeks they served as sole agents for selling the book in Sri Lanka.

Within a week of launch in Sri Lanka, the book was being sold in various stores across not just the island but the globe: Sarasavi Book Stores, Vijitha Yapa Stores, Barefoot Gallery, Penguin Random House SEA, Kinokuniya Stores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Inc. and others.

The 2023 Annual Colombo Book Fair featured the book as well, with thousands attending the festival. A year after launch, the Sinhala translation of the book will be published (July 2024) in Sri Lanka.

All in all, we’re stoked to have been a part of the digital marketing team for this resource of a book!