How to identify your non-fiction target audience

Identifying your target audience is a really crucial part of writing your book, and a part that often gets skipped.

Typically, the marketing of a book doesn’t occur to a writer until after the writing is complete, but actually, the marketing needs to be properly planned right from the beginning.

It’s the old “fail to prepare and prepare to fail” cliché. But, it’s so true.

So why is identifying your target audience so important? Here’s why:

Who is YOUR dream client?

Who are you writing to?

When you’re writing a non-fiction book, generally the whole point of your book is to provide value or solve a problem for someone. So, how do you know who that someone is if you haven’t identified them yet?

Identifying your target audience early on will not only help you to hone your audience and the target market that you will sell to, but it also helps refine the way you write your manuscript and allows you to write very specifically to the exact person who you want to buy your book when its published.

And of course, if you’re hoping to get traditionally published, the tighter and more polished your manuscript, the more likely it is to get accepted.

How to pin-point your target audience

A popular method of honing your ideal target audience is to create the actual person you’re writing to, often called an Ideal Customer Avatar.

Think of their name, age, where they live, what their hobbies are, what their occupation is, what they like to do in their free time etc. You can draw a picture of them if you like! You could even create them as an AI image if you're not an artist. (Have you tried the Pixar trend yet?!)

This will help you to think clearly about what problems this specific person might have, and how you might go about solving them in your book. From a marketing perspective, these points will help to determine certain trends that this person might follow, keywords that this person might use in search engines and categories of interest in which they might fall into - all very helpful for building adverts.

Depending on your genre, these things are all going to look very different. For example, if you’re writing a book about menopause, your avatar will be very different to that of someone writing a book geared towards men’s mental health.

Once you have your avatar, start writing your book to that person.

And once you have written your book, gear your marketing towards that exact person too. Maybe you’ve identified that your avatar loves to practice yoga in their free time. So maybe you seek out the local yoga studios and drop some leaflets with reception or put a flyer up on a notice board with an image of your amazing new book that they need in their life.

Fine-tune your author branding

Once you know who your target audience is, you can also gear your author branding towards that type of client.

By author branding, I mean the style that you present yourself in across your social media and other online channels. The colours you use, the type of fonts you choose and the way that you choose to convey yourself as an individual.

If your ideal clients are male businessmen who are into their fitness, maybe you’d opt for sleek navy blue colours and a clean striking font. Whereas if you’re selling to new mums, you might opt for a much softer style of branding with brighter colours and a less edgy font.

So, whatever stage of book writing you are currently at, get your dream reader identified, and start writing and marketing to that person right now!

You can find plenty more marketing tips like this one in our Book Launch Strategy marketing pack. Click here to find out more.