A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO SELF PUBLISHING A SPIRITUAL OR INSPIRATIONAL KIDS' BOOK
STEP SIX: DEFINE YOUR TARGET MARKET
Before you start getting onto all the social media and other marketing forums that you will use to get your book out there, you need to define your target market. Now, you may be thinking that your target market is all kids. But no, you need to be more specific. You also need to be realistic about who will be purchasing the book – seldom the kids themselves.
A good exercise to do is to think of yourself, or your company, as a brand (like Coca Cola or Nike for instance) and write down the personality traits of your brand. Think of your brand as an individual. Who is this person who will be talking to your customers? Is it male/female? What age? Occupation? What traits do you associate with this “person” – kindness, professional attitude, perfectionism, fun, lighthearted, down-to-earth, excitable, cheeky, mystical, spiritual? The more clearly you can define your brand the better. This will then affect what you write about in your blogs and social media and ensure that you have a consistent voice for your brand. Your “brand” is how people will end up describing your company (or you, if you are promoting yourself as an author) and it’s important that you are consistent in your approach so that people are not confused about who you are and what you represent.
Once you have a clear idea about who “you” are, it’s time to define who you will be selling to. You already started looking at this when you set up your website, but now you need to get to the specifics of who you want to target so that you can find them on the vast universe that is the Internet!
Make sure you know all of the following about your target market (keeping in mind that this is the people who will be buying the books, usually the parents, and most often the mothers) and can narrow them down as much as possible:
Age
Gender
Religious/Spiritual orientation
Marital Status
Occupation
Geographic Area
Interests
Typical Books/Magazines they might read
Films they might enjoy
Places they like to go out
Places they need to go to (shops, school etc)
Where you might find them on the net (blogs they may read, forums they participate in etc)
Anything else that might help you to define them and find them where they already are is helpful. The better you get to know your target, the easier the next section will be when we start looking at blogging and social media networking.
A good exercise to do is to think of yourself, or your company, as a brand (like Coca Cola or Nike for instance) and write down the personality traits of your brand. Think of your brand as an individual. Who is this person who will be talking to your customers? Is it male/female? What age? Occupation? What traits do you associate with this “person” – kindness, professional attitude, perfectionism, fun, lighthearted, down-to-earth, excitable, cheeky, mystical, spiritual? The more clearly you can define your brand the better. This will then affect what you write about in your blogs and social media and ensure that you have a consistent voice for your brand. Your “brand” is how people will end up describing your company (or you, if you are promoting yourself as an author) and it’s important that you are consistent in your approach so that people are not confused about who you are and what you represent.
Once you have a clear idea about who “you” are, it’s time to define who you will be selling to. You already started looking at this when you set up your website, but now you need to get to the specifics of who you want to target so that you can find them on the vast universe that is the Internet!
Make sure you know all of the following about your target market (keeping in mind that this is the people who will be buying the books, usually the parents, and most often the mothers) and can narrow them down as much as possible:
Age
Gender
Religious/Spiritual orientation
Marital Status
Occupation
Geographic Area
Interests
Typical Books/Magazines they might read
Films they might enjoy
Places they like to go out
Places they need to go to (shops, school etc)
Where you might find them on the net (blogs they may read, forums they participate in etc)
Anything else that might help you to define them and find them where they already are is helpful. The better you get to know your target, the easier the next section will be when we start looking at blogging and social media networking.