Bright Line Eating

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

Digital Marketing Ad Campaign, Strategy

Challenge

To help Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, the founder of Bright Line Eating, make the New York Times Best Sellers List.

To hit the NYTs Best Sellers List, you must sell 15,000 books within 30 days. If you’re an established author with a good following, you are almost guaranteed to hit it each time you release a new book.

However, if you are a first-time author, it is an entirely different story. Only a small percentage of new books make the Best Sellers List, and even fewer from first-time authors.

To make that story even more challenging was the fact that with 20 days left in the campaign, Bright Line Eating realized the publisher had only sold 827 books through their email list — far shy from the 7,000 that they were counting on.

Strategy

We developed an aggressive Facebook digital ad campaign — first targeting everyone that had been on the Bright Line Eating website or interacted with them through social media in the previous 100 days. This research would cover individuals that had previously shown some interest in what Bright Line Eating is.

With the foundation of that warm market covered, we knew we had to attract new people into the mix who had never interacted with Bright Line Eating.

To do that, we created a Facebook Video strategy: Dr. Thompson hosted a series of Facebook Live video events that were each 20 to 30-minutes in length.

Video is a very attractive and sticky medium, but anyone can sit through a video that is 2-minutes long. Only the most interested, qualified people will pay attention to a 20–30-minute long video.

We then created new ads that retargeted people who had watched at least 50% of a video and channeled them into the book’s sales funnel.

Results/Impact

By the end of the month, Bright Line Eating had more than enough sales to qualify for the New York Times Best Sellers list. The book debuted at #5 on the list — just a few slots behind Tony Robbins’ latest book.

Although the goal of the project was specific to the New York Times, Bright Line Eating also debuted #6 on the Wall Street Journal’s Non-Fiction Best-Sellers list and spent several weeks on USA Today’s Best-Sellers list.