Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

Social Proof for Authors

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In personal branding and book marketing, one term keep cropping up, social proof. Let’s look at what social proof is and how it can best be used to accomplish an author’s primary goals on social media; creating awareness of his or her book and driving purchases of said book.

What is Social Proof?

Social proof relates to the number of followers, friends, subscribers and connections an author has on their social networks and website. It also relates to the number of social interactions one has on their various social profiles. Every platform has an algorithm that surfaces your posts to more people based on the volume and velocity of engagement. So a post that has 30-40 likes and 10-20 comments within a few hours will most likely be seen by significantly more of your fans than a post that gets 5 likes over 3 days.

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VIDEO: Facebook Call To Action Feature

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Facebook’s Call to Action Feature is a free, easy to use, under utilized, and extremely effective digital tool for creating more traffic to your website or sales page from Facebook.

Learn more about how you can leverage this feature in the video below:

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To Boost or Not to Boost a Facebook Post

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To boost or not to boost? That is the question Facebook page owners ask me when they’re struggling with decreased reach and no engagement. Is it better to boost a particular post, or to promote the Page for Likes? The answer, as in every marketing question, depends on your goals.

If your goal is to bring more visibility to a particular offer, sale or promotion, you might benefit from boosting an individual post that includes a call to action or leads people back to a sales page. Or, if your Facebook business page fans have not been engaging with your page and your reach has dropped significantly, you might consider boosting a post you know will have a high perceived value for the majority of your fans.

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How To Create A Marketing Calendar | Business Strategy

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Every small business, entrepreneurs, author or brand needs to plan their marketing in advance in order to budget their resources. But what if you don’t have experience creating a strategic, goal-oriented year-long marketing plan? No problem. You can use the tips and tools listed below to map out your strategy for the coming year and take advantage of the natural promotional cycles built into every business niche.

Create a Marketing Calendar Like a Pro

Creating a marketing calendar puts a brand or product front and center so the marketing efforts reach the ideal customer or client. A marketing calendar provides a blueprint for a product launch, helping you develop brand awareness and increase visibility and cement your position as a thought leader in your niche.

Time spent creating a detailed marketing calendar directly correlates to your launch rate of success.

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How to Market with A Facebook Personal Profile

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While I think every author, brand or entrepreneur needs a Facebook business page, there is still a great deal you can do, right now, to optimize your personal profile to increase your personal brand visibility – and use Facebook more efficiently for your business.

Facebook builds in some terrific marketing features for business pages and every brand, business, entrepreneur and author needs a business page to fully take advantage of the rich ecosystem where more than one billion people log in every month. But did you know that your personal profile also has some great hot spots for promoting your business – without driving your friends and family crazy? Here are my four favorites and you can start using them to increase your brand visibility, today.

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5 Promotional Hot Spots Every Facebook Business Page Can Use

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With more than one billion people logging onto Facebook every month, entrepreneurs cannot afford to ignore the marketing implications.  Custom designed apps serve as mini web pages on a site with more traffic than most websites will ever hope to have. The large cover photo at the top of every business page is a digital marketing billboard and key promotional hot spots can help convert fans on Facebook into visitors to brand websites.

Every entrepreneur, author, speaker or small business with a business page has several key  consumer facing hot spots to share sales, specials, invite opt ins and even promote events.

Is your business page using these five promotional hot spots? Take this checklist and compare it to your page to make sure you’re using every available promotional opportunity built into the Facebook business page model.

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10 Social Profiles Every Author Needs

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Every author needs a platform, a way to connect with readers and let them know when their next book is ready to be purchase. So what is a platform? A platform is simply the reliable ways in which an author can connect with fans and encourage them to buy books.

Bestselling authors have a history of bestsellers, creating a kind of literary celebrity. That’s a platform. Some authors have national television shows, magazine columns or are regulars on nationally syndicated radio. These are platforms too. An author might have a commitment from Staples or IBM to buy books and give them to employees. That’s a kind of platform, too.

Until recently, the average author was out of luck if they didn’t have a platform. That was before social media and the power it has to excite, engage, build community and create media for authors.

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The New Rules of Facebook Marketing

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Facebook moved your cheese. When Facebook began rolling out the new news feed algorithm, downgrading reach for business pages and making it necessary for brands, businesses, entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs to “pay-to-play” to reach more of their fan base, there was gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands and groaning heard throughout the publishing industry and beyond. People threw up their hands and declared they were leaving Facebook.

But is that really the answer for authors, publishers and booksellers who want to help readers find their next book?

Facebook visibility, in my opinion, is a math problem first and a content marketing strategy problem second.

Facebook Visibility is a Math Problem

More than one billion users log into Facebook every month. That’s an enormous ecosystem for authors. The average Facebook user sees updates from only a fraction of their friends or the pages they’ve liked.

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8 Tips to Get More Organic Reach on Facebook

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You’re not imagining things. Facebook reach for business pages has decreased dramatically and Facebook isn’t denying it at all. In fact, they’ve been transparent about the need to deliver a profit for their shareholders and the new reality that business pages will have to bring some marketing dollars to the table to increase their post reach. Authors, small businesses and entrepreneurs do have to add some advertising dollars to their monthly budget but there are still ways to increase reach organically to supplement an ad budget.

So instead of watching your Facebook reach plummet, try these 8 strategies from my Maximum Visibility Playbook. These are just a few easy to implement ideas that you can use to help the very people who want and need what you create, find you.

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Brand Building Strategies | Identify Your Social Media Goals

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When someone asks me what the ROI of social media is, I always tell them it depends on their goals. Identifying the outcome you want from the investment you’re willing to make is essential to determining whether or not the investment is worthwhile.

Every business goal requires a unique brand building strategy. Goals first, strategy second.

As authors, publishers, small to mid-sized companies, and entrepreneurs either jump aboard or ramp up their social media branding efforts, it is prudent to think old school while in the social media marketing planning phase.

If a business were planning to spend $10,000 in print advertising, they would go through the exercise of goal setting as they prepared a creative brief for the advertising agency. Borrowing from that model to plan a social media campaign makes sense in that some aspects of social media engagement are really a new form of advertising, albeit a very sophisticated new form with multiple levels of psychology and strategy.

When writing a creative brief for an advertising campaign, some common marketing goals might include:

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