A Year in the Life of a Digital Marketing Manager

When I first applied for jobs in publishing, did I actually know what the day-to-day tasks were? No, not really. I had done work experience, so vaguely knew what marketing and publicity entailed, but come and work with me for a year as a digital marketer in the book industry to find out more!

My first job in publishing was as a sales and marketing assistant, moving to children’s publishing as a marketing executive, and then onto National Book Tokens as a digital marketer. I’ve worked for National Book Tokens for over five years and my role is now Digital Marketing and Brand Manager. In short, it’s my job to plan and deliver the digital marketing strategy for National Book Tokens. I plan and build our newsletter campaigns; manage our two websites; monitor and analyse the performance of campaigns; develop relationships with partners, such as publishers; work on brand campaigns, new gift card designs, and marketing activity for e-Commerce campaigns; and ensure our brand guidelines are followed across all these channels. Lots of people think we’re a big company, but the whole team – including the managing director, customer service, marketing, and sales – is only made up of seven people, so there’s always lots and lots to do!

Before I talk about what I do, who and what are we? National Book Tokens began in November 1932 and was the first gift voucher in the world. You might remember us from the £1 book tokens you were given at school on World Book Day, or the gift you now receive on your birthday to spend on lots of lovely books! National Book Tokens are a gift card instead of the original paper voucher, with the addition of personalised gift cards and e-Gift cards. They can be spent in bookshops, from Waterstones and WHSmith to your local indie, and online. National Book Tokens is part of the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland, who provide support and advice to high street bookshops, and promote and celebrate them. They run campaigns such as Bookshop Day, Books Are My Bag, Independent Bookshop Week, Irish Book Week, and many more. I work a lot with my BA colleagues, as you’ll see!

In January… I have already started work on the Caboodle schedule, our website/newsletter for booklovers. I need to think: What is the aim of each newsletter campaign? What will our audience of booklovers like to receive in their inbox? What are the important brand points that I need to get across? I contacted book publishers before Christmas, so I’ve already gone through their submissions with Tara, our Sales and Marketing Administrator, and created a rough plan for the first few months. Now it’s time to confirm everything – from book recommendation lists (such as ’20 books to look out for in 2020′) to Book Doctor articles (where we ask a guest author or other book expert to write for us) to exciting literary giveaways and competitions. Tara manages our competitions and so contacts winners, arranges competition prizes to be sent out, keeps track of our competition stats, and helps me build the competition pages and promote them via social media.

In February… I’ve started work on this year’s gift card designs for adults and children alongside our MD. We have a team meeting, going over our existing designs and their sales figures, and discussing what could work this year. And then it’s up to me to get in touch with book publishers (if we want to feature one of their characters or artwork), brief our designer(s), and get the gift cards ready for print in the spring. This always includes our World Book Day Design a National Book Token competition winner and, in 2020, I worked on new designs with Penguin Classics, Coralie Bickford-Smith, and illustrator Risa Rodil.

In March… I work with World Book Day because we’re the official sponsor of the nation’s biggest celebration of books and children’s reading charity. As we’re a gift, I also work on our Mother’s Day campaign. For this, I put together a Mother’s Day-themed newsletter with lots of fun competitions and content, and work with our e-Commerce Manager to get the sales messaging just right – and maybe a fun campaign on social to get people thinking about National Book Tokens as the perfect Mother’s Day gift. At the end, I send round the campaign analysis to my colleagues. How did the newsletter do? How many people placed orders? How many engagements did our social posts receive?

In April… I have time to come up with content marketing ideas that aren’t for a gifting occasion, from fun children’s competitions for half term to content for adult bookworms. In 2020, I asked people on Facebook to share their ideas for clues for the upcoming Hidden Books Game. When I create content, I need to keep in mind our core audience – the people most likely to buy and receive National Book Tokens – but I also have freedom to create content that’s diverse and inclusive, because we’re a gift for everyone. I really enjoyed working on our ’18th century LGBTQ+ literature quiz’ with author Neil Blackmore.

In May… During the first few months of the year, we work on a lot of children’s campaigns – thousands of children receive National Book Tokens each year. We want to let people know that we’re still here and that we’re a great way to encourage children to read for pleasure, as well as a gift to help with learning and studying. In May, I work on our schools campaign alongside the Marketing Manager. For this, we give away £5,000 of National Book Tokens to one school. In 2020, we also ran a Create a National Book Token Design competition where children could put their artistic skills to the test to win a £10 National Book Token, designed by themselves, for each of their classmates. During lockdown, we launched the National Book Tokens x Puffin Big Dreamers Writing Competition, which I worked on with the Puffin Books team. This was my first foray into marketing our brand during a global pandemic, and we had to swiftly alter most of our marketing plans for the year.

In June… I get ready to support my colleagues’ Independent Bookshop Week campaign via National Book Tokens’ channels. In a world without COVID-19, we’d normally plan a bookshop crawl across some of London’s indie bookshops, with National Book Tokens in hand. I also work on our Father’s Day campaign, which is obviously a key occasion. As a team, we also need to work quickly and adapt to what’s happening in the UK and Ireland, so in 2020 we launched our ‘back to the high street’ marketing campaign when bookshops re-opened during summer.

In July… I have two months without a specific gifting occasion, so I work on lots of summer reading content (and plan for a busy autumn). I also build a survey to send to our website users and email subscribers. As you can imagine, digital marketing involves a lot of analysis to see what’s working and what’s not, and what we can do better. I write up the results, and send them round to my colleagues, highlighting key points. What do we need to improve? Do we need to make our messaging clearer? Do we need to talk about a specific book genre more? Which social media channels are our audience using – and are we making the most of them?

In August… I work with Edinburgh International Book Festival. National Book Tokens is one of their official sponsors. 2020’s festival went online due to COVID-19, but usually I write copy about National Book Tokens for their newsletters and printed marketing material, send bookmarks to give out at the festival, run a competition to win National Book Tokens for everyone attending the festival, and run a competition on Caboodle, promoting the festival and our sponsorship, to give away festival tickets. For the past few years, I’ve worked with London and Edinburgh-based publisher Canongate on editorial content and competitions to feature in our newsletter, such as a Book Doctor article with Scottish author Ambrose Parry.

In September… I launch our campaign for one student, or soon-to-be student, to win our Book Bursary – £1,000 of National Book Tokens! I create the marketing strategy, write social media posts, brief our media agency on paid advertising (what’s the aim? who’s the target audience? what our are KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)?), brief our designer on banners and artwork, and build the webpage. I particularly enjoy working on our book recommendations guide for students: ‘How to Crack University and Beyond: A Survival Guide in Books’ which I send to universities, bloggers, and publishers, other partners to share. I’ve also previously worked with Instagram influencers @juliasbookcase and @booksnest to promote the competition and reading guide to students. At the end of the campaign, I love to contact the winner to let them know that they’ve won £1,000, and feature them on our website.

This month, I also write a lovely newsletter for International Literacy Day, talking about how we support charities World Book Day, Read for Good, and Book Aid International, and what these charities do to support reading and literacy.

In October… We support our BA colleagues on their Bookshop Day campaign, including the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards, which is sponsored by National Book Tokens and the voting takes place on our website – you can win National Book Tokens just for voting for your favourite books of the year! As you can probably guess, I work on lots of bookshop and author-themed newsletters and social media content this month. I also attend the awards ceremony in November (and in 2020, it was a virtual ceremony), where my colleague Kara – Social Media and Community Manager at the BA – and I live tweet the awards announcement from @book_tokens and @booksaremybag.

In October, we also create marketing content to support Irish Book Week and Irish Book Awards.

In November… I launch the Hidden Books Game, our annual bookish brainteaser for booklovers, and the children’s version, the Book Island Challenge. I actually start working on these in May/June – we create a giant spreadsheet of clues for book titles before narrowing it down to our final 20 and send the illustration brief off to our designers. Once we’re happy with the final illustration, I brief our web developers. We test out the games in September/October (viewing it on difference devices, testing user journeys, and proofreading the copy), until it’s all ready to launch in November. For this, I’ll work on (even more) newsletters, social media and website banners, social media posts, paid social advertising, and emails to bloggers and partners. I need to make sure that everything is ready for our launch day, when we see thousands of booklovers across the UK and Ireland join in! It’s always one of my favourite days of the year (and every year I worry that no one will play it!).

In December… It’s all about Christmas. Christmas. Christmas. As you can imagine, Christmas is one of the most important times of the year for gifts, so this is when our media campaign runs – adverts in everything from printed copies of The Guardian and digital banners on bookish websites to our ad on video on demand websites, such as on catch-up TV (I got the opportunity to visit a sound studio for this!), and paid social media ads. As the Marketing Manager works on this, I’ll support by getting – you guessed it – newsletters, social posts, website banners, and the website all Christmassy. ‘National Book Tokens are the perfect gift for Christmas’, I’ll say!

2020 was, let’s say, tricky, and the whole team had to come together to plan what we were going to do and when – and it constantly changed as the UK and Ireland went in and out of local lockdowns.

Phew! And next year I’ll do the same thing all over again… hopefully improving on last year each time, and hopeful not having to deal with a global pandemic! I hope you enjoyed this little insight into my role at National Book Tokens. For more reading, check out A Day in the Life of an Assistant Editor.

Last updated January 2021.