Here’s what today’s most successful authors know about understanding their audience.
I work with authors to empower them to reach more of their ideal customers, so they can build their audience and sell more books.
The biggest mistake that I see, whether it is using Facebook ads, buying ads in newsletters, or doing email swaps is targeting the right audience.
Understanding who you are targeting and why is critical to your success.
The Audience
The most critical part of any marketing campaign is who you are targeting. If you target the right audience with an okay offer and okay creative, then you will have some success. If you target the wrong audience with an amazing offer and amazing creative, then you will not sell many books. The offer can represent between 40-60% of the success of a campaign.
The Offer
The offer is simply a value proposition for the exchange of something of equal value. It can be money, or it can be a name and email address if you are offering a lead magnet. The offer can be a book, a course, a workshop, a coaching program, etc. A compelling offer can represent 40% of the success of a campaign.
The Creative
The creative is how you are going to reach and deliver the message to your audience. Are you going to use Facebook ads, email marketing, a Facebook group, etc? Plus, the creative includes the colors, graphics, and words that you are going to use to communicate what you are offering to the audience? The creative can be the size of the banner ad, the words in a dedicated email, or how you describe your book being promoted in someone’s newsletter. The creative part can be responsible for up to twenty percent of the success of a marketing campaign.
Understanding your audience is the most important part of any marketing campaign.
How do you identify “who” your audience is?
Understanding your audience helps you with targeting Facebook ads and deciding on what newsletters to promote your book.
This is often the biggest mistake I see in Facebook ad campaigns. Authors target the wrong people.
Here are five ways to segment your audience so you can understand who they are.
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5 Types of Segmentation to Identify Your Ideal Customer
When doing research, there are five different ways to segment and identify an audience and your ideal customer. This is known as prospect and customer segmentation. Knowing these 5 ways to understand your customer will help you with your media buys, selling books and building a bigger audience.
Geographic Segmentation – identifying your ideal client geographically is by determining what country, state, city, zip code, neighborhood, block, or even street they reside. Identifying your customers geographically can help you target your marketing.
Demographic Segmentation – demographic segmentation is segmenting by age, gender, education level, income level, occupation, and type of housing. An example of this could be wanting to reach males between the ages of 35 and 44 with an income level of $85,000 or more.
Psychographic Segmentation– in the past psychographic segmentation was one of the hardest to identify. Today, because of the Internet it is one of the easiest ways to segment your ideal customers. Psychographic segmentation is identifying customers by lifestyles, attitudes, beliefs, value systems, activities, interest, and opinions. An example is wanting to reach people who own dogs, or people who own a specific type of dog, such as a beagle. Another example is reaching people that are interested in skydiving.
Social Segmentation– social segmentation is very similar to psychographic segmentation. It is looking at prospects and customers via culture, subculture, social class rank, and peer group reference.
Think of social segmentation as people or groups who have influence over other people during and after the decision-making process to purchase. Reference groups are groups of people that individuals seek out either before or after making a purchase.
Reference group individuals are individuals that influence people prior to making a decision.
An example of social segmentation is book clubs when each month a new book is read. The leader of the group may determine the new book each month, and thus each member of the book club purchases the book.
Another example of social segmentation could be a carpenter that builds decks. Once the deck is complete, within a couple of weeks, the carpenter sends direct mail to everyone else who lives on the same street as the person who just purchased the new deck. This is done because once the deck is complete, the home-owner is going to invite neighbors over for a cook-out to show off the new deck.
An online example of social segmentation is Facebook groups. Often the group is focused around a topic, and people join based on their interests. The person who started the group builds relationships with other group members and then suggests specific products to purchase.
Finally, the last example of social segmentation is celebrities. Celebrities are paid well for product endorsements. Social factor segmentation is why people will listen to celebrities and often purchase the clothes they are wearing, and the products they are using, etc. Today, celebrities often charge for endorsements based on the size of their social media followings.
Behavioral Segmentation– Behavioral segmentation is one of the most powerful because it is based on people’s behaviors. This can be transactional data, the time the transaction took place, the method of response, the location of response, types of products purchased, etc. It can be who is opening your emails the most, who is the most engaged fans of a Facebook group, or the customers who purchase the most books.
Behavioral Segmentation is one of the most powerful forms of segmentation. An example of behavioral segmentation is offering a high-end conference to your best customers based on their previous purchasing behaviors.
Combining the 5 Types of Segmentation for The Most Powerful Results.
What is even more powerful than segmenting prospects and customers with each of the 5 types of segmentation is when you can combine multiple types of segmentation together.
For instance, combining geographic, demographic, and psychographic segmentation.
An example is wanting to reach people that are interested in parasailing (psychographics), who are male and earn over $85,000/year in income (demographic), who live within the United States (geographic).
In this example, the prospect has been quadruple qualified prior to ever receiving an offer. They must meet each of the four criteria before they ever see any marketing communication. I call this pinpoint marketing.
The reason you prequalify and identify your audience and who you want to reach is because:
- You eliminate people who are most likely not going to respond to your offers. This means fewer marketing dollars wasted on people who are not likely going to respond.
- It gives you a better understanding of your audience and who you are targeting your offers.
- The results are often better offers that resonate with your audience, higher response rates, and ultimately higher profits.
This is the power of precise pinpoint marketing!
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According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing yields a 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States.
ExactTarget reports for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25.
One of the most profitable ways to build your audience is to increase the size of your email list.
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