The Building Blocks of Your Marketing Strategy Step 3: Discover Your Target Audience
How do you come up with the elements of your content strategy? To figure out your Five Ws, you’ll need to do some work that will include determining your goals, finding your key topics, thinking through your target audience or ideal reader, and more.
Note that building your content strategy does not begin by creating content. In fact, we won’t even get into actually creating content until the next section, because before you do so, you have to know what you’re creating, why you’re creating it, who you’re creating it for, and where and when you’re posting it.
Discover Your Target Audience
As literary folks, we tend to think about audience, because as writers, readers, and book recommenders, we need to think about “Who would enjoy this book?” If someone who reads almost exclusively non-fiction were to ask you for a book recommendation, you wouldn’t suggest to them the latest romance you read. Similarly, if a romance fan friend asked you for a book rec, you wouldn’t point them toward that new biography on a 19th-century politician.
Romance readers want to connect with romance writers or those who can recommend their next favorite read. Non-fiction authors want to connect with non-fiction authors or those who can recommend their next favorite read. Writer centers want to connect with writers. Book festivals want to connect with local individuals who want to attend literary events. Literary historical sites want to connect with fans of literary history.
This seems simple, but many times authors, businesses, or organizations skip over thinking about their target audience or target customer. Without knowing your target audience or customer, how can you expect to create content that captures their attention, draws them in, and gets them to buy your product or service?
Determining Your Target Audience
Your target audience is whom you’re solving a problem or addressing a pain point for. Writing centers are solving a problem for their students by teaching them writing. A university library is solving the problem for its local patrons of having access to books. Even an author is solving the problem of a reader finding their next favorite book.
But to attract and connect with your ideal customer, you have to get specific.
You may think, “Well, everyone would be interested in my book/product/service!” But your target audience will not and should not be everyone. If you’re a writing center, your target audience would not be non-writers in hopes that they’ll change their mind about taking a class. If you’re a university library, your target audience would not necessarily be children and parents. If you’re an author who writes literary fiction, your target audience would not be non-fiction readers, or maybe even beach readers or genre readers.
But wait — aren’t we cutting out a huge swath of potential customers or audience?
Actually, no. By narrowing down your focus, you’re actually creating more opportunities to connect with your target audience, which increases your chance of them purchasing your products or patronizing your services.
Let’s think about the target audience for the examples above:
Writing center:
Let’s say our writing center offers writing classes for adults in a metropolitan area. Our target audience then would be adults in that metropolitan area who have income to spend on writing classes, and who are interested in literary things — reading, podcasts, NPR — but who likely don’t have degrees or a background in writing.
Everyone in the world > adults interested in writing who live in the city
University library:
The target audience for our university library would be college students, either undergrad or graduate — so, highly educated — who live in a certain location and want access to scholarly material they can’t get elsewhere.
Everyone in the world > university students looking for unique scholarly material
Literary fiction author:
The target audience for a literary fiction novel will be readers of literary fiction, and likely fans of authors who write similarly to this novel’s style. The target audience can also be those who like to read novels about the topics, themes, or characters in this novel.
Everyone in the world > fans of literary fiction, comp titles and authors, and certain topics
This narrowing down gives us a better idea of who the target audience is for each of these entities: who will engage with what they’re doing and who are more likely to enroll in a course, patronize the library, or purchase the book. By narrowing down the target audience, these entities now have a better idea of who they’re marketing to. But let’s go one step further by creating a target audience persona for each one.
Creating a Target Audience Persona
A common practice in marketing that helps really narrow down who the customer is and how we create content that really draws them in is to create a target audience persona, who is a character who is your target customer. (We literary folks are good at creating characters!)
Let’s create a customer persona for each of the examples above:
Persona 1: Writing center target persona
Ava, age 42, married, two kids
Psychologist in city government
Gets her news from websites, newsletters, some social media
Enjoys in-person classes to continue her education
Has been jotting down ideas for a memoir for years, and finally wants to start writing it
Persona 2: University library target persona
James, 34, single
PhD student focused on queer history
Runs a website and social media featuring queer history
Loves to run marathons in his spare time
Likes to stay informed of and be involved in the local academic community
Persona 3: Literary fiction author target persona
Nadia, 28, dating
Project manager for an ed tech company
Lives in a big city
Reads character-driven literary novels on her commute
Follows current events and supports causes that mean something to her
Using your target audience to guide your content creation
This might be a fun exercise, but how does it relate to marketing? Because now, instead of just thinking about “my target audience” when you create content or marketing materials, you can think of your persona by name.
So, when the writing center writes its weekly newsletter advertising new classes, they can imagine they’re writing directly to Ava and what she would be interested in. When the university library posts Instagram pictures of its special collections, they can think, “Would James be interested in this content?” When the author talks about their new novel on Threads, they can imagine they’re writing that content directly to Nadia.
Thinking of your persona can also help you stay away from content that may not target your ideal audience. If you come up with an idea for a piece of content, you can vet it by asking, “Would ___ be interested in this?” “Would this catch ___’s eye?” “Would this make ____ want to learn more about my novel?”
This can also help you determine which channels or platforms to post to. For example, the writing center’s audience will likely not be on TikTok, while the university library’s audience may in fact be.
Your target audience may not be your current followers
I sometimes hear from authors that they already get engagement on their personal accounts and posts, so why do anything different? But are those people your ideal customers and will purchase your novel? Or are just people who like your pictures of coffee and travel and who will never buy your book?
Your target audience is who you want to be your customer — not who may currently be following you. You don’t want to do this exercise by simply analyzing who’s following you now because they may not be your target audience. Instead, imagine and target your ideal audience — and you may need to do some work to attract the right people to your content.
In the next step, we’ll look at how to build your brand.
Hi! I’m Jessica, and I help literary businesses, organizations, and authors build and execute their marketing strategies. If you'd like to learn how to do this 👆, come work with me!
