Designing An Audience-Driven Channel Strategy For Your Book
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Before I launched my book, a career memoir about working in advertising and marketing as a creative, I read dozens of advice pieces on Medium and elsewhere for tips on getting started and tools. I’m sure you have too.
Building up to the launch, I realized that while I had a loose project plan of activities, I hadn’t put down on paper an audience and channel strategy that I would normally do for my own clients to market their products.
So I took a few minutes and created this simple grid of key audiences mapped to owned, paid, and earned channels with tactics. I recommend others do as well.
My goal was to see if: one, if I have all my bases covered; and two, track progress and performance. This would help me judge what works best in terms of investment of time, sweat, and money and shift tactics as needed post-launch. With book publishing, you need to consider the long-term.
Audiences
Positioned as half-memoir, half-guidebook for careers, I knew potential readers of my book, Bronze Seeks Silver, would be the many people I’ve worked with over the years, others with similar careers, and students entering the industry. What I also disccovered is a huge community of writers (who buy each others books) and avid readers who consume ebooks, especially freebies, and then write reviews that fuel the self-publishing industry.
This gave me six priority audiences to target and engage: friends and family; past and current colleagues; broader industry folks; students; avid readers; and fellow writers.
Channels
If you’re a marketer or publicist, you know this common framing of marketing channels: Owned (channels under your control, including your web site, email list, social channels); Paid (channels you pay to appear on with advertising or sponsorship); and Earned (channels you pitch to be mentioned or appear on such as op-eds, podcast appearances, events, and reviews). There are other ways to organize your channels, but I found this the clearest for my purposes.
