Today we’re going to look into target audiences. When you make art or you create a product, pretty much anything in business, it needs to be for someone. Let me be clearer, I mean commercial art or products you intend to sell. When you want people to use your services, you need to define the person you are looking to pay for the hustle.
I know that you can just make art for yourself, or for the sake of it. Most people in my circle want to make money off their art. Anyway I see experts dropping credentials so I will start doing that more.
I was involved in running a decently sized customer service department. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of cases, from people all over the world. I’ve seen how certain geographic regions behave extremely differently than their neighbours. More specifically, I was trained in how to categorize those cases into actionable feedback for key people in different departments. A big part of what I had to do was identify and create segments to parse the data and watch for patterns and outliers.
At the scope of a big time company, it gets complex. Thankfully when you get started the process is a lot simpler. Now that you know I have some experience in this world, let’s get into it.
Why a target audience matters
You can’t please everyone. No matter what you do, some communities will gravitate to you more than others. Your mission with marketing yourself correctly is to identify who actually likes you. More importantly, who likes you enough to spend money on you.
When I perform on stage there is always a few people that really fuck with my set. Even if most of the room doesn't like me that night, I will just focus on the ones that do. I’m good at this now, but it took a long time to develop that muscle. Weeks later when those people see me again and get excited, I realize there is a budding fan in the making right in front of me. I’m blessed that this happens over and over again.
Each of these people, who chose to remember me, are the foundations of my target audience. The more of them I meet, the more data I can track. Tracking data is something you should always be doing. I don’t mean literally storing their data in a file (it’s not legal but… what we do in private…), I mean you need to notice the demographics that want to support you. Focus on the psychographic information they make available to you.
Chris Chrome is going to cry on stage. Instantly that draws some people to him and makes others not like him. However it’s clear, if you are into emo whiney love music, Chris has your back. Chris knows to say this, because we watched all these young & fucked up daddy issues types go hard to his “I got ADHD” stuff. With a bit of pondering you can start to create these kinds of links and shape out who your audience is.
You should create what they call “personas” where you create a fake person and define them. It often sounds wildly bigoted, but you need to map out their ethnicity, age, trauma, and frankly whatever else you can. Create 3-4 personas that represent a sample of who you are making music for.
Then when you create content, marketing material and everything else, you are only focused on those people, who are a representation of your fans that pay you.
A deeper look at personas
To do personas correctly you need to understand demographic information and psychographic information.
Google, jacking Oxford, defines demographic as:
Adjective - relating to the structure of populations.
Noun - a particular sector of a population.
Basically this is your factual information. Your background, your age, whether you are married or not. This includes your location. Your occupation would be included in this. It’s the things you do in life that puts you in one box or another and creates a label for you. Even if you don’t believe in labels, which ironically is another label.
Sidenote, the entire business world runs on creating labels to define people. While each individual can defy labels, they defy one label to adopt another if we’re being honest. Even if they are fickle and switch around labels, that could just be defined as a new behaviour set.
Now let’s take a gander at Google, jacking Oxford for psychographics:
the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.
Here we get the behaviours and personality traits. This may be stuff like being ambitious or being a leader/follower. Perhaps your music is for hustlers. Or maybe it’s for people with daddy issues. It’s a lot harder to do psychographic research, you really sound like a bigoted weirdo when you speak in that language to a lot of people. However if you want to do marketing right, you need to put people into buckets and identify their differences.
To be clear the purpose here isn’t to say anything is greater or worse. But some things are a better fit for you and others are not a good fit. Going through this exercise would probably help people find better love partners and a bunch of shit. It requires a lot of empathy (natural or learned) to pull this off with any success. You have to be obsessed with learning about people. You need to collect a fuck ton of data.
The combination of demographic and psychographic profiling creates a strong persona. It gives you a sense of who to focus on when you create your content, design your product/service or even run for office.
Research, test and tweak
The next step is to test your theory. Focus on those personas and find people in those communities. Or communities your personas would participate in. See how it goes.
The personas you define force you to think about the needs and interests of others. You start to consider how to position what you bring to the table in a way that becomes “something people asked for”. Or at least something they may ask for.
Take note of the wins and losses then take that data back home and refiner your personas. Do not walk into this with prejudice towards the results. Execute your plan and see what happens when you hit real life. I am honestly surprised sometimes at where my music connects. As an example there was a part of me that questioned if the Dave East crowd would like me, and they did.
The whole pickle wave was an experiment. I’ve done a few experiments, that one had the greatest reaction, it stuck. Turns out pro-pickle & anti-pickle are unexplored demographic points.
You need to put yourself into all kinds of environments and find your future clients. You need to figure out where you are most comfortable and who shares the same passions you do. Then you get older and have to figure out how older you fits into the equation. The reality is you need to throw a lot of shit at the wall and see what sticks.
I learned last year that Growve MTL was the best for me to get new fans on an ongoing basis without having to spend money. I also lovie the music and enjoy the vibes. The energy in that room meshes well with my brand of stream of conscious lecture rap.
Opening for other people was also a cool experience. I think Growve actually got me more fans though. The Holden Stephan Roy brand’s formula may not work for you. But you have one that does and if you need help finding yours, for some money, I got you.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
P.S. I dedicate this blog to Basics as an Easter Egg to see if he reads it.