Discovering Who Your Ideal Reader Is
EPISODE THREE
Knowing how to communicate and connect with your ideal reader is the cornerstone to your social media and online marketing. Jenn and Marcus discuss how an ideal reader profile provides vital information for authors and simplifies the process.
An Ideal Reader Profile will provide authors with ease and information to dramatically simplify their marketing and make it more effective.
For authors, having an ideal reader profile will:
Create ease
Provide a sense of confidence
Here are three points we discuss that will provide information on your ideal reader:
What to post on social media
How to connect with readers
How to ease your reader's hesitation
Transcript
JENN: Hello, this is Jenn dePaula, and you're listening to the book marketing simplified podcast.
MARCUS: And I'm Marcus DePaula. And in our first episode we gave you three things to get you rolling with your book marketing, setting a goal, creating an ideal reader profile, and then choosing one platform to invest your time on.
Last time we dove in a little deeper about goals and so this time we'll dive in to the second item, which is the ideal reader profile. And this is kind of at the core of everything that you do, right?
JENN: Yes.
MARCUS: Why is that?
JENN: I believe not only just from our own experience, but from all of our clients and authors that we've coach through the years that your ideal reader profile is what sets you apart on social media, online, everywhere you need to be as an author. But it also provides you with so much information that helps you to be specific in what you talk about, but also it enables you to connect deeply with the actual people that you want to connect with, which is your readers. Because not everyone is going to love your book.
That's what we talk about, you know, "if you're marketing to everyone, you're marketing to no one." And so you want to talk to the actual people that would be interested in your genre, in what you're writing about and all that good stuff. And so your ideal reader profile really helps you narrow all of that down.
MARCUS: Gotcha. I understand the mindset of that, but when you're strategizing and planning for your marketing and creating those posts, how does it actually help you?
JENN: For authors. It creates ease. If you're an author and you are completely overwhelmed by the idea of posting something on social media where millions and millions of people are, it terrifies you.
You don't want to feel like you're bragging. You don't want to talk about yourself, you don't want to be self-promotional, and there are all of these hesitations and insecurities that go along with it. But when you have your ideal reader. And you know that you're talking to just one person rather than a million people, it really removes that stage fright that you have going into social media to post, or even putting yourself out there for an interview on a podcast, or to write a blog post or whatever you're trying to do within your marketing. When you can just focus on talking to one person rather than millions of people, it creates ease and removes that apprehension.
MARCUS: So it's a lot less intimidating to have a one on one conversation with someone in your living room than it is to be up on stage, which I guess it can be kind of equivalent to what you can feel like when you're broadcasting on social media, if that's what you're trying to do.
JENN: That is absolutely it. It's really thinking about how much easier it is to talk to just one person that enables you to have a conversation with your readers rather than broadcasting and promoting, which is so much more likable. And people are attracted to that. They want to have a conversation rather than being promoted to.
MARCUS: It makes them easier to relate to you as an author.
JENN: Absolutely. But then the ideal reader profile also provides authors with a sense of confidence. When you just sit there in front of your computer and think, "what on earth am I going to talk about? What am I going to post?" You stop and it makes you think, "Oh, maybe I'll try again tomorrow." And you just keep putting it off and putting it off. When you know exactly how to connect with and how to create conversations with your ideal reader, that gives you the confidence to post consistently because you start to see results from those posts when you know exactly who you're talking to.
MARCUS: And once you find a thread, you can pull it that and it just opens things up to a whole other string of things.
JENN: Yes, absolutely.
MARCUS: So it makes things easier for you, not just being less intimidating and helping to give you more ideas. But what I've seen you do, it also gives you very specific, practical things that tell you exactly what you need to be saying. What are those things?
JENN: Well, within our ideal reader profile, with the Mixtus Method, we outline over 40 points that you can consider for your ideal reader.
It opens up just a world of conversations, connections, and all those different points. And so what I wanted to do was to highlight three ways that you can use that information from your ideal reader profile. The first thing is it shows you exactly what you can post on social media.
One of the questions is what are your hobbies, what are your interests? And those were some of the points that we talked about in the first episode. I know that my ideal reader loves photography, and I enjoy photography too. So maybe one of those posts that you can share is what equipment you use, what lenses you use, how you use an iPhone to take great pictures, how you use your really nice camera to take photos.
It gives you all sorts of things that you can talk about, not just about your book. Because yes, you do want to talk about your book, but you want to connect with people on a personal level and have real life conversations so your readers don't feel like you're just trying to sell to them. They want to know that you want to connect with them.
The ideal reader profile really shows you what you can post on social media that you will actually see results with.
MARCUS: So if we're treating this like a conversation then we can almost think about it like a one-on-one interaction with people. And if I am talking to somebody and all they're doing is telling me about whatever work, whatever project they're doing, I'm going to get bored pretty quick. And if all they're doing is talking about themselves, I'm going to probably try to get out of the conversation and go somewhere else.
So what you're saying is once we have this embodiment of a human in this profile that we're actually trying to virtually have a conversation with, then it allows us to engage them in a way that's more than just self-promotional and drawing them into who you are as an author, not just trying to sell them on products.
JENN: Yes. And if you're thinking about it, like you're going into a cocktail party, and if you see someone that you know, you know immediately what you can talk about because you know them. And you know, the things that you have in common. You know they might have kids, or they might have just started a new job, or, they're interested in gardening or something like that.
You know what you can talk about. But if you walk up to a stranger and you have no idea, it takes a little bit. You need to ask questions. It's a little more unsure. So going into what you share and what you talk about on social media, knowing who you want to talk to, and knowing who you want to connect with. When you have these details in order and when you have these ideas in place, you know, "okay, I can start talking about this, or I can start asking questions about this specific topic." It really gives you much more context to put your conversations around.
MARCUS: So having this detailed outline of a person that embodies who you want to connect with helps you know exactly what to post what to write, what to talk about, what to interact with them on. Are there any other things that it can help you with?
JENN: Well, one of the biggest things I think that many authors don't think about within their marketing is why a reader might be hesitant buying their book. There are millions of options out there. Readers are bombarded with books and authors and so many people that are writing.
MARCUS: And not just books, but YouTube and TV shows and music... Podasts...
JENN: Yeah. And so what you need to do as an author is to think about: what might be your readers, apprehensions or hesitations in buying your book?
So one of those things might be maybe you're a brand new author and they don't know who you are. So what you need to do is to provide some samples of what they can expect, whether that be through your blog, whether that be through your social media posts, sharing some snippets from your book. Maybe it's sharing a short story that you write that isn't necessarily connected to your actual book that you're trying to sell. It's giving them a way to. See what you're about and what you have to offer.
And another hesitation might be. If you're writing nonfiction and you're trying to solve a problem asking, "will this really work for me?" Having that hesitation of I don't want to buy this book and invest my time in reading it if it's not going to work.
So how do you address that with your marketing? You show how your book is different. Showing points that they can put into practice to see, Oh, what he's saying works. You know, like, "I tried this and it works." And so it's giving them some sort of sampling, answers to specific problems or pain points that they might have that they can put into practice to see results for themselves. So knowing what hesitations they might have in thinking about that ahead of time so you can address that in your website, copy in your social media posts and your blog content, in all of these different resources that you have that you can put to work in your marketing. How can you address those hesitations? And that is what the ideal reader profile helps walk you through.
MARCUS: And maybe having the details of their interests and hobbies and the stuff that's not necessarily directly related to your book - being able to use that as you address those hesitations can help draw them in. So, you know, using examples of things that you know they're interested in or sharing personal anecdotes that relate to what you're trying to address as far as those hesitations go.
JENN: Absolutely. And we are all connected by story and those personal experiences. And then it also gives your ideal readers a chance to respond with their own stories. There you create conversations and you can share your experiences. And when you share experiences, you create a lasting connection.
MARCUS: All right, so what is the make it happen moment for this episode about the ideal reader?
JENN: The make it happen moment is to really adjust your perspective that you're not speaking to millions of people online, that you're speaking to one specific person, and that's your ideal reader.
MARCUS: And if you need help getting into that mindset, there's plenty of blog posts that you've already written on the website. But obviously if you really want to go and actually make your ideal reader profile, our foundations course actually gets you going with that. And then it also helps you take the next step of putting it to work for you with the tools and stuff that you use.
JENN: Yes. It really helps simplify the process. It will literally change your mindset. It will change how you work and how your marketing works.
MARCUS: And it'll actually make your audience grow. Even though you're talking to one person, you'll end up having more and more people following you because they feel like you are just speaking to them directly.
JENN: Absolutely.
MARCUS: Now that we talked about figuring out who your ideal reader is, the next step is to figure out where they are online to make sure you're not wasting time. So that's what we're going to talk about next time.
JENN: And as always in the comments or in social media, let us know if you have any questions or if you've found something that works for you, let us know.
MARCUS: And if you find our podcast helpful, we'd like to ask you to help us spread the word and let people know about it. We really appreciate you listening and we want to help as many authors as we can.
JENN: Absolutely. So until next time...
MARCUS: Thanks.