I got my queue cleared and am finally delivering on my promise to talk about target market versus target audience. I’ll get right to it by saying these terms are not interchangeable.
For our purposes here, I will stick to this topic as it relates to marketing and selling books. In the broad sense, your target market is essentially anyone who may be interested in your brand. For example, if you own a bookstore, readers are obviously your target market. For specific types of books, though, you are looking for a target audience, which is simply a subgroup of customers within the broader market.
Image by Dariusz Sankowski
For example, if your bookstore is running a sale on comic books, your target audience for that particular event is no longer just anyone who reads, but rather, readers who enjoy comic books. If you advertise that event to readers in general, it’s very possible you may get some comic book lovers to visit your store, but you substantially increase your chances of getting more sales if you create an ad specifically for your target audience, which is comic book lovers.
Here's an Example
To take it out of the realm of books for a moment, you could think of it this way: you market beard and mustache products for men. Well, your target market is most likely men between 30 and 60. Might a 15-year-old have a mustache? Sure. But you would have to market a whole lot of 15-year-olds until you found some that regularly maintain a mustache. However, when you market men between 30 and 60, you’re probably going to find a significant number who have an interest in either beard or mustache products. Another great example is baby food. The market for baby food is…uh… babies. However the target audience is the people who will be buying the baby food, and that’s mom and dad. Therefore, your target audience is actually adults, (who have children.)
We can even use an example that is very simplistic, such as an over-the-counter painkiller. That medication would appeal to anyone who ever had an ache or pain, which is pretty much all of us, so your target market is very broad. If you are marketing painkillers specifically for arthritis, though, you suddenly find yourself with a much narrower demographic, which, once again, is your target audience. In this case, that would be people of a certain age. You can certainly do broad marketing and you may stumble upon an unfortunate twenty-something who is dealing with early onset arthritis, but you will have wasted a lot of advertising dollars on the average twenty-something who doesn’t have to worry about that yet and subsequently ignored your ads.
Now that you understand what the two terms mean, let’s go over their importance. If you don’t know your target market, you’re essentially doomed. Fortunately, most people usually know at least that. Where the ball often gets dropped is figuring out who the target audience is, specifically.
Back to the Books
Let’s go back to books. If you wrote a mystery, obviously, your target market is people who read, but your target audience is people who read mysteries. The trap with books is that you can’t stop there. Mystery is still a very expansive category. Narrow it down to a Victorian mystery, a modern mystery, a mystery involving a murder, a missing person mystery, a cold case mystery. See how easy it is to keep going once you start? Never overlook all those subcategories you need to link your book to or you will miss a lot of potential sales.
It’s also important to understand what people perceive a category to be. When I was self published, I managed to have a bit of success. In fact, I was probably doing better than I realized at the time. Part of what helped sales along was making sure I got the book into the best subcategories. I tried to avoid billing my novel as romance this, romance that, and nothing more. That's because I learned early on that it’s important to understand what people perceive a category to be, not just what you know it to be technically.
Over the years, the Historical Romance category changed significantly, and is now strongly associated with Joanna Lindsay or Catherine Coulter style fiction, as opposed to the styles of Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, and some of the other authors who made it great to begin with. Rozsa Gaston is a terrific example of a modern writer who writes in that fantastic style. She definitely learned how to subcategorize to find those people who are looking for a meat-on-the-bones story, rather than one graphic sex scene after another with a few historical facts thrown in for good measure.
Eliminate Some Competition ( But do it RIGHT! )
Image by Sergio Cerrato
I knew that my novel was far more mystery than it was romance, although the romance line was strong. I always made sure not to overuse the word romance in any of the tags or trailers, because the last thing I wanted to do was attract the graphic sex fluff crowd, which is not the audience for Hot Winter Sun.
Instead, I used tags like Historical Mystery, Romantic-Suspense, Historical Fiction, and for subcategories, I chose Gothic fiction, Gothic romance, Tudor fiction, Renaissance romance, etc.
Although it was not written in the Tudor era, it’s far closer to that than some of the other historical fiction subcategories that are more along the line of Jane Eyre. The primary reason you want to choose more than one or two broad categories for your novel is to eliminate some of the competition, but you need to do it right. It’s better to compete with ten thousand books than it is to compete with a hundred thousand books. However, it is vitally important to choose the correct ones when you are playing that game. THAT’S a topic for another post.
Well, I certainly didn’t cover everything there is on this massive subject, but I hope it cleared up target market versus target audience and touched a bit on the importance of properly subcategorizing your book to reach that audience. Write on!