Do you HATE marketing your content? Does drafting Instagram posts and writing email copy have you questioning why you decided to pursue creative endeavors?
Worst of all, do you feel like the laborious marketing efforts aren’t actually helping you earn new readers or more sales?
This situation is not uncommon for fledgling creatives. For most writers and creators, the solution lies in planning and preparation. More specifically, they’re struggling to market because they don’t know who their content is for.
The answer lies in a common marketing construct called an ideal reader persona.
What Is a Reader Persona?
A reader persona (or a buyer persona) is a detailed profile of your ideal reader. If you have multiple reader types, you might create a few reader personas, which will allow you to define a target audience for your content. Your reader persona is similar to a character sketch a fiction author might create, only this is for the real people you think will enjoy and engage with your content.
By developing an ideal reader persona, you can further understand who you should target with your book marketing efforts. Personas will help you with more than just targeting potential readers, though; you can use this information to tailor your content to speak to the real people your persona represents.
For fiction authors, this is like creating a character sheet for the players in your story. You’ll imagine backgrounds, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and more to develop a holistic ‘character’ to represent your readers. Nonfiction authors need to do the same, though they will be more likely to draw from their peer group and contemporaries to define their persona rather than creating one from scratch.
Why You Need a Reader Persona
Okay, you don’t need a reader persona to write, publish, and sell your books. Maybe you already have an audience or perhaps you’re just incredibly lucky. But for the rest of us, reader personas are vital to understanding our ideal customers, their media habits, and how we should speak to them.
Developing a reader persona leads to a deeper understanding of our readers. That understanding will help you develop marketing content and meet their expectations, ultimately turning potential customers into true fans.
Having well-developed personas will also ease the burden of marketing your book. When you’re not sure what to post on social media or what to add to your next email, look to your personas to inform your digital marketing efforts.
Reasons to Create a Reader Persona
The most essential reason to develop an ideal reader persona is to help you understand who reads your books and why. However, many other benefits aren’t always so obvious.
- Save Time – You don’t need to scramble for content ideas or waste time drafting multiple pieces of content when you know what your readers want.
- Save Money – Being intentional with your marketing spend is easier when you know who you’re speaking to and what they want to hear from you.
- Save Frustration – If you’re creating social posts, blog content, videos, or emails for your audience without understanding who your audience is, you’ll end up frustrated by the lack of engagement and interest.
Personas are a potent tool for your marketing plan that primarily saves you time and informs your decisions. This is a lot like another popular tool you may have been hearing about lately: Artificial Intelligence.
Using AI to Craft Your Reader Persona
If you’re not already using or learning to use AI to aid in your marketing and creative efforts, you should be.
I’m not advocating using ChatGPT to write your books or even your social posts. Where AI shines is in viewing and summarizing a lot of information quickly.
AI will save you a lot of time and work when creating your reader personas. I’m going to outline some prompts, but you should read Andy Crestodina’s guide if you want to dive deep into using AI to create a persona.
Step 1: Document What You Know
I read a description of AI recently that I love: they’re really, really complicated auto-complete machines.
The most powerful AIs all need a prompt to do anything. With that prompt, they scour their databases looking for ways to answer your request. To create an accurate reader persona, you must put in information about yourself, your books, and your average reader.
First, go to a bookstore (or Bookshop.org). You need to find some comp titles. You need authors with successful books writing in the same genre or about a similar subject matter. Add a list of about ten to a document or spreadsheet.
Now, go read the best and worst reviews for all of them. Make notes about what people liked and what they didn’t. If you have the time, I recommend reading all these books too.
Here’s an example worksheet you can use to create your personas.
The worksheet includes an example reader for a fantasy author. We’ll use this example for the next steps.
Step 2: Create Your Prompt
Now that you’ve gathered the information you know or can surmise about your readers, you’re ready to develop that into a persona. Here’s a sample prompt using the example in Step #1 as our target customer:
Create a persona for a reader of fantasy books. List their profession, budget, what they look for in a book, and other interests, and include their preferred social media platforms.
Take the results (which are likely to be rough, if not downright bad) and compare them to your worksheet. Look for similarities and differences, paying extra attention to anything on your worksheet you know applies to your readers but the AI missed.
Make a list of everything you think the persona is missing. Now you’re ready for your second prompt:
Create this persona again, this time including the following characteristics: [paste your list here].
You can (and should) edit these prompts to fit your needs and expectations. For example, ChatGPT insisted on giving my reader persona example a new name each time despite my providing one. So, I edited my prompt to instruct the AI to use the name I provided rather than a new one.
Step 3: Refine Your Reader Persona
After working and reworking your prompt and the output, you should have a rough persona that encompasses basic demographic information and personal likes and wants that reflect the type of person who will buy your content.
The final step is to refine that persona into a short list or blurb. Here’s my final version of the example:
John is a developer who spends 8 or more hours a week reading and budgets about $50 a month for books. He enjoys worldbuilding, complex and conflicted characters, and well-developed magic systems. His other hobbies include tabletop gaming, designing graphics, and spending time with his pets. John frequently spends time on Goodreads to track his reading, Reddit for suggestions and to get answers from real people, and Discord to find and build a community.
This short description paints the picture of an avid reader who is likely to enjoy a specific type of content. Now you’re ready to put your persona to work!
Is Your Reader Persona Accurate?
AI tools are awesome but not 100% accurate or honest.
For example, my persona claims to enjoy spending time with their pets. I’m unsure how ChatGPT could know that, but there it is.
I need to review my data from existing customers to see if it aligns with my new persona. If I was interested in whether or not my readers like pets, I could use Sparktoro to get a sense of other sites they visit. Maybe these fantasy readers really are pet lovers. That’s valuable information—perhaps the next book in the series includes a prominent animal character!
If you’ve already published some books or built a following with other content, you’ll also want to use tools like Google Analytics to understand the facts about your audience. How much do they spend per month? Which books are they buying? Which social platforms are they coming from?
Your persona might say your ideal reader is on Reddit, but you might see that you’re getting better returns from Facebook ads. In that case, you might want to experiment with Reddit to see if you can find where your ideal audience lives while maintaining ads and posts on Facebook.
Again, this information should be applied to your persona, giving you a great snapshot of your audience members, their demographic data, and the social networks they frequent.
For most creators, this exercise should be repeated three or more times, and a few different personas should be created to encompass all of your consumers—from the casual reader to the die-hard super fan.
Using Your Reader Persona
I know I promised this would save you time. Following my instructions above, you likely spent many hours developing and refining your personas. I promise you, it’s worth it.
In the long run, all the information you’ve gathered about your ideal customers will serve you and save you time. Thanks to the research you’ve done, you’ll be answering questions about where to advertise, what to write next, and how to craft compelling emails.
So, how do you use your reader persona now that you’ve done all this work?
There are three key ways, though you should always be looking for opportunities to put your data to work.
Use #1: Creating Better Marketing
The goal of your marketing materials (social media posts, emails, YouTube videos, blogs, etc.) is to share your content and encourage your fans and followers to buy your products.
Using what you learned from researching and building your personas, you should have a good idea about some of the subjects your fans are interested in. That knowledge should inform all the marketing materials you create.
One example that is sometimes overlooked are landing pages. These are the simple pages you’ll create to promote a new book, event, or other products you might offer. While there are a lot of best practices that go into making an effective landing page, one of the most important is tailoring the page to your audience.
Since landing pages are meant to attract new customers through search, you need to quickly build trust and show them that your content is right for them. The more you can meet their expectations and speak to their interests, the better your chance of earning a sale and a new fan.
Use #2: Finding New Audiences
Researching and creating your personas may reveal new potential audiences you can pursue. My example persona is a pet lover—I could use this to speak to an audience of pet owners I might have missed. You could even create a landing page specifically about the animals in your stories to speak to these pet-loving fans.
Learning more about the site, social platforms, and online forums your ideal readers use will help you find more real readers. The more you understand about the people you want to read your books, the better you’ll be able to engage with the community.
This is a strategy called market segmentation; you’re breaking your fanbase into smaller groups based on unique interests or needs. When you do so, you can offer them content that specifically meets those needs or speaks to those interests.
Use #3: Planning New Content
Common advice among writers and any kind of creative is to ‘create for your audience.’ Well, the more you know about your audience, the easier that will be.
Put your personas to work while you’re creating content. A prime example is the time your fans spend consuming content. If your readers only spend three or four hours a week reading, you should consider offering short content—like one-paragraph emails or more social posts over blogs.
Great content is key. Writing it for a small, dedicated audience gives you the best chance to build a sustainable business around it.
Growing Your Business and Your Community
The goal of your persona is to help you better understand the real person buying your books (or other content). The better you know them, the better you can hone your content and marketing.
Using reader personas to understand your audience will help you sell more books and create better content. If you’re not taking the time to understand who is buying your books, there’s a good chance your marketing is falling short of expectations.
With generative AI, it’s even easier than ever before to create (and update) your reader personas. Whether you’re publishing for the first time or looking to grow your creator business, defining reader personas is essential.
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