When it comes to book marketing, you want your money and time to work for you, not against you, and the first place to start is to know your target audience and create ideal reader personas—descriptions of your target readers in as much detail as possible. First, let’s start with the importance of knowing your ideal readers and identifying your target audience.
Why You Need to Know Your Target Audience
As much as we wish everyone in the entire world would love our book, reality tells us that’s impossible. We live in a world of diversity, each human unique with a specific combination of life experiences, skills, education, interests, resources (time and money), hobbies, reading habits and preferences, and more. When we try to hit every one of these combinations with our marketing efforts, we miss the mark 99.99999% of the time, wasting our money and time. On the flip side, when we know who our ideal reader is—their demographics, other interests, reading habits, and as many other details as possible—we can target our marketing efforts directly to the people who are most likely to read and love our book.
Pay attention to those last three words: “love our book.” Because you don’t want just anyone buying and reading your book. It might sound counterintuitive, but when people outside of your target audience discover your book, buy it, and start reading it, there’s a good chance they won’t love it—because it’s not written for them. It’s not their genre, they don’t like the writing style, they have a narcissistic ex with the same name as your character, too much or not enough cursing or sex…there’s a number of reasons the book is not for them. And that’s okay. Remember, everyone has their own preferences and there are books for every reader out there. There’s a chance, though, that because they picked up a book not meant for them, they will leave a bad review and/or tell all their friends that they wasted their time and money. It’s nobody’s fault—unless you didn’t target your marketing. In that case, you paid for this person to discover your book and leave a bad review.
Yes, this can happen even with targeted marketing, and there’s also just as much of a chance that you gain a new super-fan not only of your books but of a genre they never thought they’d love so much. I’ve personally received numerous emails from fans who didn’t expect to love fantasy and paranormal romance but now do because they discovered my books. I didn’t specifically target them, though, and that’s the difference. These readers who are open-minded and explore something they wouldn’t normally read happen upon the book themselves, not because the author paid to advertise to them.
How to Research & Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience and really getting to know your readers saves you time and marketing dollars. You will need to spend time upfront to learn what readers who love your book have in common, but the payoff is worth it in the long run. This research includes identifying their demographics, such as age, gender, location, marital status, household income and disposable income, what kind of work they do and where, education level, etc., as well as details more specific to how they choose the books they read. Their favorite genres, the device(s) they read on, where they get their books, how they discover new books and authors, other books and authors they love, their other interests such as TV shows, movies, music, hobbies—however they spend their extra money as well as their free time—all contribute to what books they choose to give their time and money to and which ones they love the most.
Tips for researching your target reader include:
- Studying other books in your genre that are selling well and the readers who love them. If you’re a fan, too, join the author’s online community and get to know the author and the group. You not only gain insight into your own reader-base, but you can make good friends, too. Just don’t be a spamming jerk and actively market your book within another author’s community without permission. That’s a good way to get black-listed among authors and readers, which is the opposite of a good book marketing strategy.
- If you already have a group of readers, no matter how big or small, create a survey to learn where they hang out online and off, where and how they discover new-to-them books and authors, their other interests and hobbies, and other details mentioned above.
- There’s a lot of data available from booksellers that you can scour. This information often costs money, either in the purchase of the information itself or by joining the organization that collected and compiled the data. There are publicly available resources, though, so your favorite online search tool can be your best friend when researching your readers.
Crafting Your Ideal Reader Personas
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you want to segment them into reader personas–descriptive profiles that tell a story about your ideal readers. Did you notice the plural “personas”? You will likely discover you want to create more than one, whether you write in different genres, under various pen names, or it’s just you with one book. During your research, you may discover, for example, that women aged 40-55 and all genders aged 18-24 love books like yours, but how you market to them would be different. Each of those two groups hang out in different places, online and off, prefer different types of content, and don’t have the same reading and spending habits. By identifying these different target audiences and creating a reader persona for each of them, you can better generate the right kind of content (i.e., posts, videos, images, ads, headlines) that grabs their attention and piques their interest.
Be creative with your reader personas, giving them a fun name that distinguishes them from the others, and write a story about them, incorporating the details you uncovered. If you’re a visual person, you can even find or create an image that represents them. Keep these personas in your marketing folder so you can refer to the information when you’re working on your marketing.
Identifying your target audience and what they have in common, then creating a few personas that describe them to the T, will save you time and money from marketing to all the wrong people. The more detailed and accurate you can make your reader personas, the better decisions you’ll make when it comes to marketing your book, as well as writing the next one.