Category: Marketing & Promotion

Work done by student editors to market and promote our publication. This includes creating target audience personas, updating and refining a marketing plan, building marketing collateral for sales and media kits, updating social media, and so much more!

Follow-an-author Marketing Research

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Marketing & Promotion, To Make Public blog

As editors for the CLR, it is our duty to explore, edit, and cast the works by dozens of writers and poets into a meticulously curated collection—it’s a simple trade-off: authors get to see their work selected and presented to readers, and we receive written works to then market, publish, and celebrate. Within this relationship, however, opportunity for edification and growth arises. While beginning the copyediting process, our editors do individual research on our featured writers and poets, seeking personal websites, features in other literary journals/magazines, and any other platforms they may be using to share their works. This information aids us in the marketing process, allowing for updated distribution, new opportunities for collaboration, and improved rapport with our esteemed authors.

As students, this process is especially crucial to our individual understandings of publishing—with many of us wanting to pursue editing in the future, this opportunity allows us to perform intimate research on our “case studies” for our future professions. We see first-hand the “backstage production” behind decades of the CLR, exposing many first-time editors to the nitty-gritty details and moving parts behind our journal. Because the CLR is student-run, an inevitable learning experience is thinly veiled over this careful undertaking; meaning each step, manuscript, and style sheet is under the review of keenly-peeled eyes, acquiring new details and logistical elements to cultivate and improve our publishing.

Though this operation is controlled, students orchestrate most of the “big decision-making” and are responsible for applying this personal research to our journal’s marketing plan, which varies year after year depending on what information is gathered. Because the editing world is under constant change, it’s up to us to stay on top of what, where, and how our writers are sharing their works. This follow-an-author process allows us to “stay in the loop,” keeping us uniquely updated with where our writers are appearing (e.g. Instagram, Medium, other literary magazines, etc.); this information then becoming applicable to our own literary review and marketing process.

With each year, it is our intention to continually improve, edit, and learn from these processes, fostering creativity and solidifying relationships between us and our writers, as well as discovering new methods to distribute and market our final product. The goal is never to simply regurgitate these writings, but to scrutinize and master each diligent course of action.

—Becca L.

Guide to Target Audience Personas

On By clackamasliteraryreviewIn Marketing & Promotion, To Make Public blog

WHAT IS A TARGET AUDIENCE PERSONA? A target audience persona is a representation of a fictional someone who fits the characteristics, goals, behaviors, and motivations of our target audience so we can market and provide our books to the real target audiences like you. Yes reader, you!

WHAT’S THE IMPORTANCE OF A TARGET AUDIENCE? They help our marketing go boom; allowing us to understand our customers better and deeper so we can make more and more of our wonderful CLR magazines for the world to read! Our marketing efforts become more effective when they resonate with the audience we’re going for who want more and more of what we provide. This also saves us from creating the mistakes of making or doing something in our marketing that will turn away our audience from our published magazines. We don’t want to be the person who ruins it all!

HOW DO YOU MAKE ONE? That’s a good question. There are many things to consider when creating an audience persona. First things first. Research. I cannot stress this enough. Researching is an effective way of gaining insight and better understanding of the audience persona we plan on creating, whether that be from interviews, surveys, or even as simple as taking notes on the people we talk to on the daily who share the same passions. As long as we are retaining the information we find that is helpful to our publishing goals, we are ready to create an audience persona.

Next we must identify characteristics that our marketing can offer this person. That means putting in their age, gender, where they live, interests, values, and how they buy things based on what they like. These are all things we must consider when planning out our audience persona.

Now for the fun part: creating the persona through and through. Those who have made a character before should have a pretty good visual on how to make an audience persona because the process is similar. Only, the focus needs to be more narrow and unfortunately, certain aspects of creating an audience persona has more limits. That is because we need to have this persona match with what our marketing can do for them. If we lose focus, we’ll lose the audience we worked so hard to attract and that’s no fun. Stick to the plan people!

FINAL THOUGHTS. Personas are a priority to good marketing as a whole. They are extremely useful and are easy to look back on when we continue improving our publishing program. As long as they apply to what our audience wants and needs, their goals, expectations, and whatnot, we’re going to have a pretty damn good literary publication!

—Isabella R.