To Build a Community You Need To Know The Audience
These days it’s common knowledge that you need to build a community around your art or business to grow.
This is easy to say. In practice it’s really bloody difficult. I’ve not had the best run building a community around myself, although I’m still learning how to be more hospitable with my personality.
That being said, building a community around a brand or product with a clear purpose is something I have professional experience with.
The process is formulaic but requires giving up any semblance of an ego.
A lot of the time the people in the community you are trying to build are not like you, and are motivated by different things.
Your main goal as a community builder is to listen to what people want, and find a way to give it to them.
However this all starts with knowing who your audience is.
The more specific you can make your audience, the greater likelihood you will find them
While there are pop moves that appeal to mass audiences, those mass audiences are still defined pretty well for the content marketers behind it all.
It’s impossible to do anything that makes everyone happy. In every domain there is a “best product” and yet, people still choose inferior options for a plethora of reasons. Sometimes it has nothing to do with specs on a product and more the people who purchase it, just look at Apple vs Android (It’s funny how it’s not even Samsung, but the OS).
Apple understands it wants pristine. It wants people with money, flexing on others that they have the money for an Apple ecosystem. My understanding is the average Apple user is good for 6000$ USD over their life to the company.
Apple is high key authoritative in its approach. You pay for it with a premium and you like it. Apple found its people.
Android started with a more Libertarian approach, focused on Freedom. Especially since Apple took your freedom away. Samsung tripled down on capturing the imagination of the outcasts and counter culture personality types bent on controlling their destiny via technically better stats.
Each route spoke to a core psyche.
When you approach your branding you need to think about who the person in your community is, beyond demographics.
The more labels you can stick on your character personas, the better.
People tend to look at brands with a keyword filter lens, the more personality checkboxes it ticks, the more likely they are to buy in.
Do your due diligence to prep your brand.
Create some character personas like you were writing a character in a novel
A character persona is a tool marketers use that is effectively just stereotyping an average.
It’s ironic you get paid to stereotype in some fields but judged if you say the same thing in the wrong place. Still marketing talk can come off wildly racist when you get into demographic breakdowns of habits. Numbers be numbering and that kind of insight will help you sell more.
It’s why they tell you to put diverse groups of people together, you get deeper insight for profiling your clients.
You need to think about who would actually buy what you are selling.
The first half of this should come from your imagination. Take some time to think about the values you represent and the problems you want to solve in life (even for a corporate entity). Then, think about the people who would vibe with that.
This is your starting point, it gives you a frame of reference to begin your marketing efforts.
Once you have started, you need real intel real fast.
Go outside (or digitally outside) and meet some people. Figure out who likes what you do, and find out more about them. Bribe them with coffee and food for more insight into who we are.
The main thing you care about is their other interests. When you can get 5 common interests shared by 50 people that support you, you have the foundation for some targeted marketing.
You want to break these people up into as many tiny labels as you can.
Once you know what your fans like you can build a community around them
Your job as a community builder is to make it easy for these people to choose your community over others.
Whether you like it or not, you are in a competition for the attention of your community members. They have other hobbies and interests and if there are more compelling things to do, they will leave you. I lived through that with Behind That Suit.
If everyone in your community likes True Crime for some reason, and you are a rapper. Make a True Crime Tuesdays or something where you watch a podcast with them. Even if that isn’t your cup of tea, it will make these people so happy they will work towards growing your community for you.
Ask the community what they want.
For real, I spent many many hours prepping things me and the team I worked with thought would be fun. Then the community was like booooooring. In the Photo Group I used to manage, every second challenge ended up dealing with animals.
We’d try to steer the ship, but people only react to what they want to react to.
Your job as a community enabler is to figure out what they will react to and use that to make them care about what you need them to care about.
Imagine if Quebec were to leverage the fact that speaking French increases your sex potential in Quebec as a tactic to convert new French speakers. I think they’d do much better. Quebec folk like sex, may as well use the sex they like to your advantage.
Instead of guesswork and hypotheticals you can just do some market research.
No matter who you are there is someone out there similar to you doing what you do
One of the things you should do is figure out who your competitors are.
You also want to figure out who your allies and similar minded peers are. In Montreal there are several “cool kid” clubs of restaurant owners who each share similar clientele types. Often this is crafted real specific to ensure a certain look/feel to the crowd when you arrive.
When you know who your competitors/people that are similar to you are, you can start making your life easier.
Go look at what the people who like those pages also like. I mean like literally go to the FB Page of a rapper who makes rap similar to you. Research 200 FB accounts of the people who like that page.
Take note of the commonalities of those people.
See what pages they like. What areas they live in. What keywords you can extract.
If you believe you sound like an artist that’s popping in Minnesota, go run a targeted ad out there and see how it goes.
By doing some real research into what your audience’s interests are, you will be able to narrow down the list of things that you should focus on to build your community.
The more specific it is, the more likely you are to find loyal supporters who care about what you, in particular, bring to the table.
While my accountant likes to remind me that everything has been said before, I like to remind him that maybe the PRSPCTVS of a guy who grew up in the mountains in Quebec who turned into a Financial advisor in Montreal could help other people by twisting the current version of the story into something that resonates more with them.
He argued with me, but embracing your own specifics will help you break past the saturated generalities out there.
I write for overgrown artists on their corporate hustle still trying to make art.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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