Your Brand Your Message Deb’s Business – Talking Marketing with Deb Goeschel
A Smart Conversation with Deb Goeschel and Yvonne DiVita
Book marketing is a unique talent. Many authors know they need to market their books well before launch, but few seem to get around to doing it. Why? Because it’s a gigantic task, one my guest on Smart Conversations knows well.
Deb Goeschel speaks to: Your Brand, Your Message, Our Business, in her work as a marketer, for books and businesses. She comes to the discussion with an extensive creative background in writing, editing, acting (I am so jealous! I am just not brave enough to get on stage), photography, yoga, and graphic design.
I love the intuitive way Deb works. She brings her experienced creative energy and background to everything she does and helps people focus on branding (it isn’t just about the colors you like or you logo, it’s so much more!), messaging, and content strategy, creating, and marketing. Notice the word strategy. If you’re in business you need to understand how strategy works and how to make it work for you. That’s one of the things Deb can help with.
She also serves as Vice Chair of Marketing & Communications for the Connect 24 Business Alliance and Vice Chair of Marketing for the South Shore Women’s Business Network. She is also a wiseHer expert. Our conversation revolves around creativity, storytelling, and book marketing.
Deb’s backstory of how she got started goes all the way back to when she was a toddler and loved performing for her mom and other family members. We all have those memories, don’t we? It’s good to share them on your website and in your blog because it can easily bring you closer to your core audience – people who will be touched by that story of you as a child, and will relate to it because they, too, have those memories.
In our discussion, we talked about the dilemma I know faces many of you – how to be true to your life’s purpose and still make a living. It’s gets confusing, I know. And Deb knows. She faced this problem when she was a photographer, early on in her career. It wasn’t that she wasn’t making a living, it was that sometimes it was harder than she thought it should be. Sound familiar?
She had to make a decision. Keep eking out a living going from wedding to wedding, or find something that was both stimulating and exciting, something that could get her creative juices flowing, and more than just pay the bills.
So, she did the only natural thing to do. She went to grad school.
Once out of grad school, knowing she didn’t want to be a journalist, though that was what she studied, she got a job as a graphic designer. In the back of her mind had to be the recognition that story is everything. That design and story work together to engage audiences. That story is at the heart of all human communication. It had to be there because she slowly but surely got to where she is today – focused on story, for all of her clients.
Deb says everything is connected by story and you know I agree. If you work with her, here’s just a sample of what you get as you learn to tell your story:
In book marketing, there’s also a story to be told. It isn’t just the story you’re telling in the book (which I will help nurture out of you), it’s the story you’re sharing with your reader to create engagement. It’s about design, and fonts, and words and pictures. At about 14 minutes in, Deb tells a story about Zappos and how unique and innovative they were for the time.
At 17:00 minutes in, the talk turns to fonts and how some fonts work and others don’t, and why. Fonts lead us book launches, Zoom or otherwise (if it’s an in-person event, having snacks goes a long way to pleasing the audience, as they wait for you to read from your book), and how if you wait to market your book until the end, thinking your Zoom launch (attended by people from around the world), you’re going to lose out to folks who began marketing their books at the start of page one.
I think this blog post from her blog, about how one creates good branding and logo design, is very relevant to the whole discussion of fonts, launches, and just being in business on the web today.
Deb advises authors to engage your audience from day one. They are the best (and cheapest) focus group you will ever find! Use them!
At 35:00 minutes in Deb even tells a quick story about a woman client whose book is very popular with her readers, but almost never happened! Because the woman had never started out to write a book!
Take time to listen to Deb’s advice throughout this video. Write it down. Watch the video again. Then, if you’re an author in need of help with your book marketing, you know who to call. Tell her I sent you. (oh, p.s. Deb and I have something FABULOUS coming down the road! Stay tuned for a mini-workshop on writing and marketing your book! Tell all your friends!
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And now, on to the show!
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