In July, Penguin Random House contacted the Head of Community with an opportunity to work with one of their authors, Marissa Mullen, who is a part of their imprint, The Dial Press. Mullen had written a self-help book titled That Cheese Plate Will Change Your Life that was doing well and they thought that Quilt would be a good place to talk about it and increase publicity. This was prefaced as being a “test-run”, and if it went well, Penguin Random House would continue the partnership with more authors.
I created three assets to make a carousel for Instagram and wrote a caption that announced the quilt, gave background on Marissa Mullen, and described what would occur during the quilt/how to participate.
The quilt was a success, with 4x the usual turnout, and Penguin Random House returned for a two-week partnership in September with seven more authors. Five of the authors had written books on relationships and intimacy while the other two had written theirs on parenthood, both of which are key conversation topics on Quilt. The team at Penguin Random House mentioned that they liked our “It’s Cool to Care Campaign” and wanted to do something similar with a theme for each of the two weeks. The first week would be relationships and intimacy, and the second week would be parenthood. We designed and posted the assets on our Instagram, and designed and distributed social assets to Penguin Random House and their authors as well.
I took my proven strategy from the “It’s Cool to Care” campaign and applied it to this project. To announce the partnership, I created an asset that listed the quilts, the authors, and the dates/times they were occurring.
Leading up to September, I created, designed, and wrote the copy for every asset and was responsible for distribution to our influencers and brand ambassadors. This included:
Posts for individual authors and their quilts
Video assets for reels using recorded audio from authors’ conversations
“Viral Attempts” and found posts to repost that fit with each week’s themes
Posts
Reels
Viral Attempts
The partnership was mutually beneficial for both parties. Penguin Random House reported an uptick in sales after each author’s Quilt, and we saw a topline increase (20-100% depending on the author) in new monthly users.