We’ve just come to the end of a six month project, promoting an ebook that one of our clients has written.  “There’s a gap in the market,” he told us, so he wrote an ebook to fill that gap.

The online marketing that we’ve done has created a lot of interest – we can see this from the increase in the number of hits to his website and the corresponding decrease in the bounce rate. The number of impressions (the times his site appeared in Google searches) has increased. The keyword phrases that visitors are using to find his website changed from his name and company name to the keyword phrases that we researched and put into the metadata on the site – these are phrases linked to the content of the ebook.

A successful online marketing campaign, then? No, because the number of ebooks actually sold has been disappointingly low. A number of free copies have been downloaded, but very few have actually been sold. Why is this?

We think it’s because there isn’t actually a market for what this client wanted to sell. When he was referred to us, he had already written his ebook and had it formatted, ready for distribution. He had already decided on a price for it and had a simple website set up to promote it. The problem, we believe, is that he didn’t at any time ask his potential customers if they wanted to buy what he wanted sell, for the price he wanted to charge.

When we started working on this project, the first thing we did was suggest a major price reduction for the ebook, to bring it more in line with the majority of other ebooks that you can buy on the internet. But as time went on and the sales weren’t coming in, we started to look at what else was available in this area. We realised that his ‘gap’ in the market was not nearly as big as he thought it was and that actually, there are many websites giving away the sort of advice that he wanted to sell.

I’m not saying that you should give away all your advice instead of selling it. What I’m saying is that you need to do some research into what potential customers actually want. We’re currently thinking about launching an email newsletter service designed specifically for coaches. To help us get it right, we’re spending a few months looking into it, to find out what people want, how they want to use such a service and how much they want to pay for it. This will help us shape the Marketing Plan that we put together and will help us sell more of what people really want.

Are you planning to launch a new or improved product or service? What research are you doing to help you develop something that will really sell?