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21 Bookstore Marketing Ideas To Boost Your Revenues

Reading has no age bar or limits. Therefore, a bookstore is prominent among everyone from little children to old people. There are all sorts of books for anyone and everyone. A bookstore is a profitable business to own and it can take a huge leap if proper bookstore marketing ideas are adopted. Similar to most other businesses, the competition in this particular field of business is also intensifying. But if marketed the right way, you can make your bookstore consistently perform well despite the growing competition. So here are some effective and constructive bookstore marketing strategies for you.

1) Get A Powerful and Attractive Website

One of the most fundamental requirements to market your bookstore online is to have a website in the first place. A website is your virtual bookstore and must be handled with the same level of significance as your real offline bookstore. Design your website in a way that makes it look more like a library than a webpage. Use splendid templates with remarkable fonts. Create a separate webpage for all the books you have at your book store with adequate description and pricing. Make sure that the website works easily on every device be it a laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone.

2) Make It Easy For Customers To Find You Online

No matter how outstanding is your website, it is of no use if your customers can’t find it online when they search for a bookstore in the same area where your business exists. To make it easy for customers to find you online, make sure to adopt the best optimization techniques to rank your bookstore for relevant keywords in Google, Bing and other search engines. Using SEO-friendly keywords on your website, getting high-quality backlinks and having great content on your website are some of the most influential factors to rank better on search engines. The better it ranks in search engines, the more will be visitors and sales. For SEO needs, you can get any SEO firm to handle the task.

3) Grow with Online Paid Advertisements

Platforms like Google, Facebook, etc., offer paid advertisement options. Paid advertising on Google is the most sought option by businesses owing to the quality of leads it provides. Paid advertisement makes it easy for you to reach your targeted audience as it increases your chances of appearing when the users search for relevant products (bookstore in this case). Trying out paid advertisements for promoting your bookstore is a fast and effective method to get more customers.

4) Blog Marketing

You can start a blog category on your website and can get engaging content in it like book reviews, best books of the year, most selling books, award-winning books of the year, award-winning authors of the year, etc. This will help in generating traffic to your bookstore website and will help to generate much more orders than you are getting presently. You can easily hire writers for this task or can outsource the entire task to any content marketing agency.

5) List Your Book Store With Top Online Directories

People generally use keywords like “book stores near me” or “book shops near me” online to search for bookstores locally. This is where enlisting your bookstore with top directories gets significant. Top directories like Yelp, Crunchbase, etc. rank very well in search engine rankings and as a result, your business listed in such directories can easily get more clients this way. “Google My Business” is a must-have business page to get additional traffic to your store. You can upload the pictures of your bookstore, provide the contact details and make the customers familiar with the timing of your bookstore.

6) Creatively Market Using Press Releases

Press releases need not necessarily be limited to making announcements. They can be used to rank your content in search engines for low competition keywords along with providing valuable backlinks to your bookstore website which will push your website higher on Google. They are also a great brand-building tool and can easily get your bookstore name to appear on some of the most prominent and popular news platforms in the world.

7) Offer Complimentary Bookmarks and/or Stickers

A simple and cost-effective way of promoting a bookstore is to offer complimentary customized bookmarks and/or stickers with every book you sell. Get striking and pleasing bookmarks designed with your book store’s logo and name inscribed. Make sure the bookmarks are of distinctive types for every age range and designed using amusing colors and animations. There’s nothing a reader loves more than being allotted a complimentary bookmark or sticker. Offering bookmarks and stickers will make sure that the customers return to your store. You can go for something different like 3-D bookmarks as well.

8) Introduce a Book Club

Another creative idea for marketing a bookstore is to introduce your book store’s very own, personalized book club. Ask everyone who visits to buy a book whether they are interested in joining a book club and record the name and details of those who agree. Organize a book club for customers to get together and discuss their favorite books weekly. Readers love to discover other readers with whom they can discuss their favorite books. Introducing a book club will provide them with the same and will help you market your bookstore more effectively. Customers will visit your book store more often for book clubs and will buy books from your store. They might also bring their friends and family which will surely increase your store’s popularity and sales.

9) Arrange Your Books In a Creative Manner

Something as simple as systematically arranging your books can help with increasing the sales of your bookstore. Surf the internet, initiate research, figure out what books are in demand the most, and arrange your books accordingly. You can also estimate the popularity of certain books from your sales. The books which are selling the most should be displayed more. Arrange the books in a manner so that the prominent ones are on clear display when someone visits or passes by. Make sure you include all kinds of books in your display to ensure that you have a diversity of books available at your store.

10) Offer Some Customized, Creative and Memorable Merchandise

Free merchandise has been a long-term marketing strategy for businesses. Offering your customers more than they expect doesn’t only enrich the buyer-seller relationship but also makes them feel more cared for and appreciated. Get some merchandise like carry bags, pens, diaries, etc customized for your bookstore with its name, logo, and contact details inscribed on them and offer them to your customers with the books they buy. Customers carrying around bags and diaries with your store’s name and logo will increase the chances of other people noticing and remembering your business name.

11) Complement With a Side Business

There’s nothing more joyful than an intriguing book and a delicious cup of coffee. So why not provide your customers with a serene experience? Opening up a small coffee shop along with your book store can help boost the publicity of your book store. While customers stop around to have a delicious cup of coffee, they can take a look at your books. You can also offer discounts on coffee (or can even offer it for free) if a customer shops a book along with it. This isn’t only innovative but a wise marketing idea for a bookstore. Once your coffee shop works out, you will have not one but two businesses to earn from.

12) Allure The Kids

If you are looking forward to growing your bookstore business, then kids should also be your target customers. Kids love beautiful books with animated pictures and fascinating stories and parents also believe that reading books is a healthy habit for their kids. Keeping this in mind, make sure you make all the story books, fantasy books, and color books available for the children and keep them upfront so all the kids passing by or playing around your bookstore can see them. This will help in bringing more parents into your store along with their kids. Further, this can also lead to the friends of these kids coming to your bookstore along with their parents.

13) Increase Sales With Home Delivery

Not everyone has the time to go to the bookstore every time they want a book. Such people usually go online and place orders to get home delivery. To make sure that you do not miss out on such customers, have a home delivery option ready for your bookstore. Also, many customers who come across your website might be interested in buying books from you but might not have the time to visit the store. Ease out this process with a home delivery system. This will make your business an easily accessible one and will add to its advancement.

14) Utilize Local Schools And Libraries

Pairing up with local schools and libraries can help you out in promoting your bookstore business. You can make a deal with these institutions to supply their required books. You can also reach out to these local libraries and schools and can finalize a date on which you can display your book collection to the children at schools and the people at the library. This will increase your sales and make people aware of your store. Do not forget to hand out your business card so that the people and children interested in visiting your store can easily stop by.

15) Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest is great to share book titles and covers. Oftentimes, Pinterest pins and boards rank in Google for low competition keywords. This means that for book titles that have low competition in Google, you can easily secure top 10 results by pinning such book images along with providing some basic description of them. You can also provide incentives to your customers to share your recommended pins across their boards so that your shared book images would get more eyeballs and sales.

16) Collaborate With The Big Names

There are several influencers providing book recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You can collaborate with such influencers to advertise your bookstore. You can ask them to visit your store (or simply vouch for your store online) and record a video in which they can display your store followed by recommending your bookstore to their followers. This will influence their fans to visit your store (or place online orders) and buy the books recommended by their favorite influencers.

17) Grow by Integrating Customers’ Inputs

Do not forget that your business can take the support of your existing customers to get recommendations on some great books which they would like to see at your store. Ask your frequent customers for constant feedback on new trending books and their interests to generate new customers. Keep these recommended books in-store so that you can attract a new audience along with maintaining your existing one.

18) Hold Book Giveaway Contests

Announce that you are giving away a certain number of copies of some famous/new book with the condition that the participants must share this contest on their social network profiles. This method will allow your bookstore to be known to the close friends and relatives of interested participants too thereby raising the brand awareness of your bookstore. It is a simple and creative bookstore marketing idea.

19) Get an Affiliate Program

Open up an affiliate program for books available in your bookstore. There are many free tutorials online that teach how to open an affiliate program. Since you will award a percentage of revenue to the affiliates promoting your bookstore through their referral link, you will start getting more sales at the cost of the work of your affiliates. This way you can create your own network that will work to make sales happen for your bookstore.

20) Try Tested Offline Marketing Methods

By placing billboards near schools, colleges and other student areas, your book store can get publicity among a targeted population. To ensure that your ad-spend on billboard advertising is fruitful, offer discounts and other incentives through billboard advertising. Apart from this, distributing flyers, and brochures in such areas can also be a worthy effort.

21) Always Look for Maintaining Healthy Reviews

With the online spread of information, negative reviews of your business can cause a serious dip in sales from customers who search for bookstores online. Therefore try to address any negative reviews as early as possible.

The above-mentioned bookstore marketing plan will assist you with getting more clients and growing your business revenue. In case of any queries on this topic of marketing a bookstore, you can write to us below.

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