Insight informs all of our campaigns here at Rocket. No matter what investment is going into the campaign activity, understanding the target audience is crucial for success. Marketing to youth and parents changes so frequently, with the development of new platforms and changes in behaviour and attitudes.
For The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference back in September, we conducted some bespoke research with our Family and Youth Collectives, to share with publishers about how they can discover more readers.
By learning more about where readers are and how they purchase books, we can tailor campaigns to suit them. Some highlights below:
Youth Collective (13-25 year olds)
Younger audiences read for education and choose to read for pleasure, we asked them how many books they read outside of the curriculum each year. 64% of readers said they read 8 or more, meaning that publishers don’t have many opportunities to engage these audiences and convert them each year, competition is high.
We asked this group where they would be more open to seeing content about new books, so we can learn more about where we could place successful adverts. 29% said Instagram, followed by TikTok. Be Real was also featured at 8% showing that they would be open to seeing ads on new emerging platforms.
Interestingly, we found that 73% of this group do not listen to audiobooks. Let’s watch this space as we expect this to change!
Family Collective (parents with children 5-11 years)
In comparison to youth, parents said that their children read more than 25 books per books year (67%). There are many more opportunities for publishers to engage a child reader.
As an extension of this, 60% of parents said that their children read more during term time with teachers also being huge influencers of book choice. Timelines for marketing activity is crucial, to coincide with publication dates of new books, is this something they should be considering? We are working on more campaigns than ever that engage teachers, we expect to see a rise of this.
Another interesting finding was around purchasing books in key gifting periods such as Christmas. 73% of this group stated that they themselves as parents buy more book gifts than wider relatives. We know that gifting messaging is huge around this moment, and grandparents and relatives are part of that messaging, should we be aiming this more at parents direct?
Take-aways
We found across both groups that purchasing habits centre around where people usually shop. For those that love online shopping, Amazon is a popular choice. For those that spend a lot of time in supermarkets, purchasing here is reliable and easy.
If you would be interested in hearing more about our Youth and Family Collectives. Please reach out to sophie.thirlwell@wearerocket.co.uk.