Make a Plan for Reaching Them—Building a Marketing Platform (Step 2 of 5)

By Michael Drew - Apr 01 , 2009

There are five primary steps in the platform-building process.

Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience
Step 2: Make a Plan for Reaching Them
Step 3: Set Up a Gravity Well
Step 4: Brand Yourself as an Expert
Step 5: Accommodate Human Temperaments

Last time out we took Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience. Would you like to revisit that step now?

Step 2 – Make a Plan for Reaching Them

This involves a three-phase process-

1. Find out where they are
2. Create content for relevant media channels
3. Make contact

Find Out Where They Are

Internet World Stats reports 73.1% of the North American population is online. That represents a 128.3% increase in the last eight years. Europe’s usage has gone up 271.2% over that same period, Asia’s 469%, and Latin America’s 820.7%. And these numbers continue to grow daily.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. ~Bill Gates

Your target audience is congregating at that town square. If not all of them, certainly enough to skyrocket the number of people who know you or at least know of you and respect what you do. Have you set up shop in this global village? Please do. Millions of readers exchange lists and reviews daily on social sites like Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing. They read books for free on sites like FreeBookSpot, ManyBooks and Free-ebooks. And at a time when the largest brick-and-mortar retailers are wondering if they can survive, Amazon.com’s book sales increased 18% in the 4th quarter of 2008.

There is no getting around it – the Internet is where your target audience discovers, reads and buys their books. As such, it should represent a significant part of your platform going forward.

Yet the power of interacting with your audience live and in person has not diminished in the least. Seek out opportunities to get up in front of your target by delivering a seminar or demonstration at the events, conferences and business gatherings they attend. And don’t hold back when you are up there. Don’t worry about giving too much away. Showing them your best stuff will only whet their appetite. Who knows, you might even gain some attention from whatever press is covering the event.

Create Content for Relevant Media Channels

Once you have determined where to meet your target audience, it is time to create content that can be read, heard or viewed in the appropriate formats for those destinations.

My partners and I created a division called Promote A Book Media to help authors build book-selling platforms online using Permanent Media Placement.

1. We mine your existing content (news stories, websites, interviews, author bios, presentations, press releases, etc.) to find the most relevant and authentic material.
2. Then we use that material to create video, images, text and audio files.
3. Next we turn those files into a web-friendly rich media pack (videos become clips, images become slideshows, text becomes newsletters, articles, blogs and press releases, and audio becomes podcasts).

But the best part of this process appears in the Making Contact section below.

Before we get there, let’s quickly discuss websites. The business cards of the 21st century. To not have one is to broadcast to the world that you are behind the times. You know millions of readers surf the “Net” daily, actively seeking out breaking waves of information and entertainment. Do you want to be the one to provide it, or would you rather it come from a competitor? And it’s not just about having a website. It’s about having one designed to allow specific personas to gather the specific information in a specific manner.

Read about the power of persona-lization in action.

Make Contact

And now for the best part of Promote A Book Media’s Permanent Media Placement process – using our working relationships with top syndication services to-

4. Distribute your web-friendly rich media pack to over 200 of the world’s highest traffic media sites (YouTube, Google Video, flickr, PR Web Photowire, Facebook, etc.). These 200 sites have a combined 430 million visitors per month. Think you might find some of your target audience in that crowd?

It’s a lot to process. Building a platform in addition to writing a book and excelling at your career is a tremendous undertaking. But it can be done. Just take it one step at a time. We’ll pick up next time with Step 3: Setting Up a Gravity Well.

Questions about building a marketing platform may be directed to Michael R. Drew at the Austin, Texas, headquarters of Promote A Book: 512-858-0040. You can also contact Michael via email at michael@promoteabook.com.