eCommerce Meets Publishing, Part 3
This is a multi-part series of blogs detailing our own Sandee Hart’s experiences marketing her work as a writer. Part 1 of the series is an introductory overview of the series, and Part 2 takes a look at defining & building your brand.
Defining Your Target Audience as an Author or Business
When I finished writing the book with Bill, we both fell into the age-old trap, we believed our book Nighthawk, was “for everyone,” particularly since we can separate its components and find something in our book everyone could enjoy. But to be promote successfully, we had to forget the notion that we’ve written a book everyone will love and instead, maximize our promotion toward those most likely to become our audience.
Identifying your target audience is essential when you publish a book or start a new business. However, you must be realistic, you cannot afford to target the entire market, and even if you can, it’s not worth the time and money. As an author, you can compete with established authors, and as a new business, you can compete with the bigger companies; however, you need to target a niche audience.
To effectively define your niche audience for a book:
- Isolate what types and/or groups of people the content of the book would interest.
- Identify other books that are comparable to your book and look at the profiles of those books’ main buyers/readers.
- Pinpoint what is special about your book.
- Determine some demographics.
- Feed the previous four tips into each other to gain even more insight and narrow down who your target audience/s is/are.
Similarly, to define your niche audience for your business:
- Know who your customers are
- Identify other businesses that are comparable to your product or service
Pinpoint the problem that your product or service will solve for your customers by:
- Developing relationships with your customers to get more information from them
- Talk to them in person
- Call them to request a short customer satisfactory survey
- Email them
Once the problem is clearly defined, you will next figure out your target market.
Defining your target audience is much easier said than done. Many authors and start-up businesses end up skipping this step because they fail to recognize its importance in their marketing plans.
However, identifying and understanding what your ideal readership or customer wants, needs and desires can “make or break” your marketing strategy. By obtaining a solid grasp of what excites and motivates your readers and customers, and what they are truly SEARCHING for, you will be promoting to a real audience that is interested and engaged.
Whether you realize it, or not, there is a ton of information out there about each and every audience and sub-genre imaginable. From basic demographics like age, gender, location, income, occupation or ethnicity, to audience psychographics, like personality, attitudes, values, interests, hobbies, lifestyle and behavior.
There are a few steps you can take to simplify the process of defining your target audience:
WHO are you going to target your product or service to?
Use demographics such as age, gender, education and occupation of your most likely readers and customers.
WHERE can your readers of customers be found?
Include their zip codes, what size population they come from and their climate.
WHY learn more about your readers and customers personality and lifestyle information?
To help you to determine how often your readers of customers need your product and how much of the product you should provide. If you’re appealing to readers or customers at the right time, they will most likely become loyal to your brand. For our book, we knew right off the bat, holidays like Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, Independence Day, Patriot’s Day and Veterans Day would be perfect times to promote a military memoir.
HOW do your readers or customers fulfill their needs?
Research how they are finding out about your book or product and how they get their information so you can tailor your marketing efforts based on the most popular way customers come to know your book, product or service. For example, if you advertise heavily on social media, and you find out that most of your target audience is learning about your product through Twitter, you may want to take your focus off other sites and switch to Twitter advertising.
The best rule of thumb I have found for both the book and our clients is to analyze your customer’s social profiles to gain specific knowledge about their gender, where they live and their personality and interests. The more information you collect from your customers when they make a purchase, the easier it will be for you to nail down their demographics and identify your exact target audience.
Another free way to gain customer information is from the US Census Bureau. From here, you can learn about the geography and population density of your customers. You can also survey your customer to learn more about them. There are free platforms to use such as SurveyMonkey and Google Forms that let you create surveys and send them to your customers at no cost. If you choose this method, keep your surveys short, asking only a few questions to each customer. If you’re worried about not getting enough survey responses, you can offer some type of incentive such as a free preview of your book, or a discount.
Now that we are on the path to defining our target audience, next time we will look at how to use that target audience to actually sell books and/or your products.
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