From The Independent Publishing Magazine:
1. Know Your Audience
An overlooked aspect of your marketing campaign is the people who’ll be looking at your ads–your audience! You can spend hours on the rest of these steps, but they’ll be useless if you don’t know who you’re trying to target.
Your book won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay. Rather than trying to reach everyone, target your marketing directly to those who are most likely to read your book.
One great strategy you can use for getting to know your audience is to create ‘reader personas’. A reader persona is a short bio of a reader avatar that represents large sections of your audience.
With a reader persona, you’re basically writing to one person, which is a lot easier than writing general statements in your ads.
Here are some ways you can find information out about your audience and create your persona.
Use Google Analytics: If you have a website, you can find information about your audience through your Google Analytics dashboard. This will tell you a lot about your general audience including interests and nationality. Just check out the ‘audience’ section in your Analytics menu.
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Use Reddit: One cool way to find out more about your target audience is to use Reddit, which is basically a hub for a wide range of online forums. The site is incredibly popular too and some subreddits (the particular forums) have great participation numbers.
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You can also use a Reddit Keyword Tool that will scrape popular phrases from a subreddit.
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Ask Your Readers: One of the easiest ways to get information about your ideal reader is to get info from the readers you already have. You can do this through email surveys, or even start a Facebook group to better connect with them.
Once you’ve got information written down, you can build a buyer persona on a Google Doc, Spreadsheet or any other way you see fit. HubSpot has a dedicated buyer persona builder that’s free to use. While the tool is built for B2B sellers, you can delete sections and add your own, so you can make it fit an indie author.
Link to the rest at The Independent Publishing Magazine
This is good overall advice by Dave Chesson, Mr. Publisher Rocket, but I use an even more simplified approach:
1. Fill up with hundreds of keywords, discovered by both the obvious and using the aforementioned Publisher Rocket.
2. Load them into the campaign at very low bids (like $0.05) on a very low budget (like $1.00/day).
3. Watch and adjust the winners and losers (keywords) as needed (not daily).
I call it the Drip-Drip-Drip Method, and it hasn’t let me down. I’m always in the black with these ads.