One of our associates at Authors On The Net asked the following question:

“How do you choose a select demographic or interested group to focus your marketing on without diluting your marketing effort so much that it is too broad to be effective?”

To prepare for this question, I consulted with Diana Derval, the marketing guru of wait marketing and author of Wait Marketing: Communicate at the Right Moment at the Right Place. This is her reply and my reply follows:

Prof. Diana Derval, President of DervalResearch, Author and Marketing Guru:

“The idea is to identify a group of customers with so similar behaviors and preferences that you know for sure where to find them and can deliver your message at the right moment while saving 30% of your communications budget- that’s the power of ‘Wait Marketing’ (see www.wait-marketing.com) . Apple for instance at the launch of iTunes posted banners on websites where consumers could download music illegally to tell this them iTunes proposes an easy-to-use and very affordable alternative - Apple sold 1 million songs in a couple of weeks.”

My answer is:

The way I see this question is that the key phrase is “how does an author select a target audience?” Deciding your target audience is complicated and frightening for many authors. But deciding your target audience is key to your success. Let’s say your audience is women between the ages of 25 and 40 living in suburbia driving SUVs, managing a career and have 2.5 children. Once you make this decision, all efforts need to be made to attract this audience - the title you choose for your book, the cover design, where you place your book both online and offline etc.

Most books will have other audiences, but most authors do not have the resources to go after all audiences. So you pick the one most likely to buy your book and then you hope for word of mouth to spread to the other audiences. You hope those suburbia women tell their husbands to read the book, for example.

We all want our books to go viral, which simply means to spread by word of mouth. Most readers will not feel compelled to buy your book until he or she has heard about it several times and usually not until he or she has a friend who says you have to read this book. But as resources are scarce, the best way to create word of mouth is to focus on the one or two target audiences most likely to buy your book. In addition, work hard to come up with the “stickiest” title you can and back that up with a professional title. Knowing your target audience will help you choose the right title, the right cover and it will help you write content that is word-of-mouth worthy.