Know What Your Audience Wants With Quality Market Research
5 simple techniques to create a reader persona or avatar.
Have you ever published something and gotten a resounding echo in response? Nobody read your article, the editor rejected your book, or you sold one lonely e-book?
What went wrong? You thought your writing was interesting, structured properly, and your grammar was correct. I’ve had this happen, and it sucks!
I’ve learned to ask this essential question, “Why should my reader care about what I’ve written?”
The answer, “Because I think it’s good,” or “Because I think it’s funny, interesting, or educational,” won’t work.
Next question. “How do I discover what my reader cares about?”
Most of my writing is for business blogs and websites. I must know what my reader is interested in. If not, I’m wasting my time and my client’s hard-earned money.
There are tools you can use to find out what your reader wants, to understand what they crave, and get familiar with them. I will show you how to do just that.
This reader can be called a profile, a persona, or an avatar, but it’s an image of one person in your audience.
When you have a thorough understanding of who your reader is and what they hope to read, you will also be able to market to them — a huge bonus!
The vast majority of products are sold because of the need for love, the fear of shame, the pride of achievement, the drive for recognition, the yearning to feel important, the urge to look attractive, the lust for power, the longing for romance, the need to feel secure, the terror of facing the unknown, the lifelong hunger for self-esteem and so on. —Gary Bencivenga, legendary copywriter.
We won’t be successful if we make assumptions about our readers. We’ve got to know what problems they are trying to solve.
Here, I’ll use one of my own projects as an example.
Here are a few projects on my list.
- I’m working on an informative blog post about gardening for Medium.
- How to Start Your First Vegetable Garden, a full-length book.
- Outline a 2,000-word article I hope to sell to Organic Gardening magazine.
- A Texas seed company hired me to produce a 900-word piece on the best vegetable varieties for Central Texas.
I’m working on the beginning gardener book first since it requires the most research, and I can use what I learn for the other projects.
I need to get a clear picture of a typical reader for my book.
This will be a fictional composite person based on research. Think of it as developing a backstory, just as you would for a character in a novel.
So who would my imaginary gardener be?
Step # 1: I start with some simple Google searches for my high-level questions, including a date.
Google: Who spends the most money on gardening 2020?
I’m guessing that a group spending money on their hobby would be a likely buyer for my Basics of Starting Your First Vegetable Garden book.
As I scroll down and I see a comprehensive report titled 2020 National Gardening Survey. However, it costs $1200.00, more than I want to spend!
Next, I find an article titled State of the Industry 2020, published by Garden Center magazine. Not too many specifics here, but I note this promising statement, “With the resurgence of victory gardening in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and high unemployment rates, edibles saw the biggest growth this year.”
Google: What age are the people gardening at home?
An article titled Why the 20–30 Somethings Are Gardening tops the page.
“Although food gardening, in general, is up 17% in the past 5 years and still growing, the rate is up by 63% among ages 18–34, according to a new study by the National Gardening Association.”
I list points from the article:
- These new gardeners are looking for ‘real’ and ‘non-virtual’ things in their lives.
- They worry about the security of the food supply.
- Gardening is a hobby to share with their children.
- They have small yards and are interested in container gardening.
- While interested in organic growing, they lose patience with complicated instructions.
This is beneficial information I can use!
I decide my new gardener is Ryan, 32 years old, and he works as a software developer.
Step # 2: Many big tech companies are downtown, so I imagine Ryan living within biking distance of downtown. I am familiar with a vegan restaurant in the area, and so I put him living in zip code 78704.
Enter the zip code at https://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/ to pull up the basic demographic information.
- Median household income of $51,00.00
- Most people live in rental homes
- 84% single, 12% have children
- Education level: 50% graduated college
Ryan rents a single-family house on Monroe St. with his friends Renae and Anthony.
Step # 3: Next, I go to the global demographic site, Esri. Fortunately, we can gain a lot of spending and lifestyle information from their free services.
Enter a zip code to get reports on area residents. They tell me that the three groups of residents in this area are the Young & Restless, Emerald City, and Metro Renters.
I decide Ryan fits in the Emerald City group, so I gather information from that report to combine with the other facts I’ve collected (and imagine) about him.
Ryan balances long hours on the computer with biking and working out at the gym. He embraces the ‘foodie’ culture and enjoys cooking adventurous meals using local and organic foods to share with his friends.
His slightly shabby rental house was built in 1946. The landlord lets Ryan have a garden in the backyard where he’s learning to grow vegetables for the first time. He enjoys growing things, but his plants aren’t producing too well.
All three of the roommates buy natural, green, and environmentally friendly products. They love learning new things to keep life interesting.
Ryan goes to lots of music shows, especially the big outdoor events in Austin. He likes living close to downtown, with the new library and Farmer’s Market.
Like most people his age, he looks for information on YouTube first. He posts on Instagram when the mood strikes but finds most social media boring.
He graduated from U.T. with a degree in computer engineering and hasn’t thought too seriously about getting married or having children.
Step # 4: Ryan’s gardening hopes and fears.
I need to find out what he hopes to gain from my book or article, what motivates him. At the same time, I’ll gain insight to help me market my book.
Social media makes it easy.
Facebook has groups about nearly everything. Join some groups in the same genre or subject as you write. Go to the group page, and with the ‘search’ function, look for questions people are asking.
For instance, on the Central Texas Vegetable Gardening page, I typed, “How do I ___?’
Questions include, ‘how do I prepare my soil? ‘when do I plant?’ ‘how much should I water? and ‘what about caterpillars?’
I also see people say things like, ‘I’m a newbie, so don’t laugh…’, ‘this is a dumb question…’, ‘it’s my first year…’. People are insecure, but they have lots of questions!
Quora is another place to see what questions people are asking in a more global audience. Questions include ‘how much room do I need to grow all my vegetables?’, ‘what are the easiest vegetables to grow?’, and ‘how do I grow bigger vegetables?’
If I’m stuck for questions, I can read Reddit, too. Again, just simple keywords like ‘grow, vegetables, problems’ can bring some leads.
Read an article like this one: Social Media Demographics, to find out where your typical reader spends time. Since YouTube is the top social media for Ryan, I check it out and find the top views on the subject are for Gardening 101 and A Complete Guide to Digging & Planting a Vegetable Garden.
Amazon book reviews can be incredible sources of insight.
Particularly, I am looking for the specific problems readers are attempting to solve. I take notes of the exact words they use as these will be valuable terms to include for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
I look for ‘Beginning Vegetable Gardening’ and read reviews of highly and poorly rated titles. It’s helpful to see what people find useful and what they don’t like.
Reviewers use words like precise, concise, easy-to-understand, good index, lots of pictures, and mention that one of the popular authors has a website and podcast, too.
Several readers mentioned that the book didn’t mention it was mainly for U.S. readers, and they were located in the U.K., making a lot of the text irrelevant.
Negatives include not being detailed enough for beginners and assuming that the reader had more prior experience than they did.
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist.
In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one. — John Steinbeck
Step # 5: Ready to write
Hopefully, Ryan won’t be the only reader of my new book. I will make two more profiles for this book and keep all these people in mind as I write. I frequently visit new gardeners as a consultant, and that first-hand contact adds depth to my research.
Likely readers include Susan and Peter, a recently retired couple planning to start a garden. And Felicia has plans to move to a small farm in the country but is eager to learn garden skills.
This research tells me what Ryan, Susan, Peter, and Felicia hope to learn.
It will also give me ideas to develop my social media content calendar and to market my writing.
For instance, Ryan wants to grow some kick-ass vegetables to cook and impress his friends. He won’t spend all weekend gardening-he has other things to do. He’s looking for simple, straightforward information — hopefully with links to YouTube tutorials to clarify the tricky points.
He’ll lose interest if I geek out on Latin names for vegetables and a deep dive into soil science. K.I.S.S. is what I need to focus on. When I start going crazy with the details, thinking about Ryan helps me concentrate.
When I’m writing, I pinned my taped my reader avatar to the wall above my desk, so I’d remember to keep them in mind.
Ryan shops at the Farmer’s Market; perhaps I could sell books there to build some buzz. Would there be a way to tie into the huge techie community in Austin with cooking demonstrations with a popular vegan chef?
The possibilities are enormous! These tips will make your writing more engaging and help you effectively market your books and articles.
Resources I frequently use include:
A to Z Databases ‘Ultimate Reference Tool for Library Patrons’
Career Explorer Find what people actually do at work.
Census.gov A source of quality data about the nation’s people and economy
Esri Powerful mapping and analytic software.
Gale Databases for research and education.
PayScale Research how much jobs pay.
Research Gate Discover scientific research.
Google Scholar A deeper dive into Google.
US Bureau of Labor & Statistics Lots of data for curious minds.
Do you need help creating your Reader Persona? Click here for information.
Cindy has been a farmer, teacher, bookstore owner, and writer. She loves books and is intensely curious about life. Join the conversation.
