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!