Determining Your Audience Avatar

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One of the strategies in generating a clearer picture of who your audience is entails the creation of an audience avatar. Simply put, an audience avatar is a personification of the characteristics of the average reader for you. The following information can assist you to target your average reader:


• Basic but very important statistical information, such as gender, age, earnings and location

• Other marketing factors that impact their buying inclination are their career, hobbies and interests

• Their reading habits, the types of books and stories they love to read and why

• The things that they value which may impact their reading choices

• Are there specific authors that they trust?



An audience avatar is actually an offshoot of a reliable and well-established process of customer segmentation used in market research. Market researchers collect huge amounts of information about a specific audience and use it to search for patterns. The patterns that come out are cataloged and every market segment is given a tag or a name that personifies their status and behavior.



Audience avatars help to establish a reference point and a standard identity of who you should be trying to attract in your marketing efforts. You may want to come up with more than one avatar that relates to different audience sectors. Creating avatars will help to create a systematic approach that can also be used in writing the content and characters in a story.



The task of creating an audience avatar can be quite challenging.



Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started:

• First find the category you want to write in

• Next find a sub category within the category and check the sales rank for the top 2 books listed on the Top 100 list for that sub category.

• Make a list of sites you think the audience for those books would visit, include the author’s site on your list.

• Now put each site into Quantcast.com and/or google.com/adplanner



These sites will give you the following information:

Age group

Gender

Occupation

Hobbies

Interests



Once you’ve done that you can visit sites and forums through Google by using a keyword to describe the sub-genre. Keyword+”forums” or keyword+”poweredbybulletin” and connect to the users by asking questions about their reading habits and the things they value.