How to Define Your Audience
Tom Webster says: Get specific. VERY specific. And then… get even MORE specific.
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Last time on The Creativity Business…
We talked with podcasting research & strategy wizard Tom Webster of Sounds Profitable about why You Don’t Deserve An Audience. You have to earn an audience by creating something remarkable for a specific group of people.
In this edition, we’re going to talk with Tom about how to determine and find that specific group of people - your intended audience. (And I’m going to have fun using Tom’s strategies to develop weirder and weirder content ideas using Tom himself as a proxy for my audience…)
The Power of One
In beautiful alignment with Dan Misener’s advice of starting audience development on Day Zero, Tom suggests thinking about the audience before you do anything else.
“You need to have a theory of who you're talking to. There are a couple of poor answers to this. The worst answer is everyone. Good luck with that. No one who ever said that has succeeded. The second worst answer is some kind of advertising or sales target. Men 25-54, or sports fans. We are not monolithic. There are 60 million kinds of sports fans, men 25 to 54. Let's just meet one.”
That’s right. Pick ONE.
“Make a show for one person. Make a show for one person that's not you.”
[NOTE: I am choosing Tom as my one person.]
“I have a long career in radio and I’ve worked with a lot of radio stations as a consultant around the world, and the smartest program directors in the world will make a very specific picture of that one person. A name and what clothing they wear and what they drive and where they live. They build a real avatar of the target for this particular station.
“I worked with a dance station in the UK once, and this is one of my proudest moments. We had a very specific target audience: young women, a few years out of school, maybe in their second job. They may not be married. They still want to go clubbing, but they can't do it like they used to.
“I named her Kylie Unlikely.
“If this person is in your head, you're going to create a thing that's unlike anything else.”
[NOTE: My person’s name is… Tom Webster. I’m fleshing out my Tom profile: Married middle-aged Bostonian male, fabulous hair, frequent traveller, brilliant keynote speaker, and soon-to-be book author. VERY specific!]
Even MORE Specific Than ONE
If you want to make a show that’s exceptionally valued by your one person, Tom suggests getting to know your one person even better.
“The phrase that I use a lot comes from James Joyce. It's something Molly Bloom said to Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. ‘Who is he when he's at home?’”
[NOTE: Who is Tom when he’s at home? Why, he’s the first person I’ve talked to about Earning Attention who has quoted James Joyce!]
“Here’s how to do that: if you're a podcaster, find out what else people listen to. The reason is that you want to know if there's another thing you can talk about, another connection you can make.”
Finding more than one connection is a phenomenal strategy for differentiation and for super-serving your audience. For example, here’s what else Tom listens to (complete with a smart lesson):
“There is a sports podcast that I listen to religiously. It's a former ESPN writer and on-camera person named Ryen Rusillo. He was invited to join The Ringer with Bill Simmons, which is part of Spotify. There are 150,000 sports podcasts. So why do I listen to this one?
“The last half hour of Ryen's show is something called Life Advice. People write in and what's very clear is that they all are young men just starting their careers.
“Some of them are still in college, some of them are in their first job, and Ryen's like their big brother or their uncle. And they write in with questions like, ‘My roommate peed in the dresser drawers of my girlfriend. What do I do about this? Do I kick him out?’
“Ryen realized that his audience loves sports and ALSO that they're these young men that haven't figured out how to be professional adults yet. It's not something you would've mapped out when you're doing a sports show. But it's why I listen to the entire show - I have to hear Life Advice every single week.”
At this point, I know Tom is a research expert, a podcasting and radio expert, a married Bostonian, a frequent traveller, a James Joyce aficionado, and a sports fan who enjoys life advice for young men. How many podcasts address all of these elements in ONE show?
Currently, zero.
However, if I really wanted to get Tom’s full attention, I might consider the addition of multiple points of connection with Tom. I might create a show about research in radio and podcasts, featuring illustrative examples from the works of James Joyce, set to a soundtrack of New England sea shanties.
Or I might make a travel show featuring cities where pro sports franchises are based, complete with an advice column for frequent travellers.
The Known New Contract
Combining adjacent content lanes in a single show is a great positioning strategy - it’s a model for creating shows that don’t exist but will be highly valued by your very, very specific target audience. Picture yourself as a content alchemist, making gold by combining two things that are not traditionally paired together.
Why are you putting life advice in my sports show? Why are you putting sports in my life advice show?
“There is a foundational concept of rhetoric. It's a concept called the Known New Contract. If you start with something that people are familiar with and are comfortable with, then you can more reliably introduce something new.
“If you're doing Known to Known, it's not novel. And if you're doing New to New, people aren't receptive to it from the get-go.”
Known New is also the core principle behind how music is programmed on radio. Most people don’t want to listen exclusively to new music or new artists that they haven’t heard of. So how do you do it? Employ the Known New Contract!
“All around the world, the most popular songs are played very frequently. But you have to play new music or you'll never get new popular songs. And nobody likes a song when they first hear it. Nobody likes brand-new music.
“So if you're a rock station and you want to introduce a brand-new rock song from a new artist, what do you do? You bracket it with giant hits. You say, ‘That was Led Zeppelin. Coming up in a couple of songs, we've got a classic from Nirvana, but first, here's a great new band…’
“That's what I think a great show has. You have to start where people are and then cycle the new in.”
To go back to Ryen Russillo, listeners might initially come for a great sports show (the Known), but be pleasantly surprised by the Life Advice segment (the New.) It’s precisely the addition of Life Advice into a sports show that makes people come back over and over again. Life Advice also sets the podcast apart with a unique, differentiated format, which makes it tough to compete against.
It will be precisely the addition of city guides and tips for frequent travellers in my sports show that lures Tom into becoming a lifelong fan…
Or it will be the use of the Known New Contract in my new show about research strategies for radio and podcasting, which ALSO has a segment applying those same research strategies in other unusual ways, like determining where to travel, how to make life decisions, or how to determine the best clam chowder in Boston…
Or it will be the use of a sports podcast format and tone to talk about the latest in podcast research that will surprise and delight Mr. Webster.
The possibilities to enchant Tom are ENDLESS!
How Does My Show Survive With ONE Audience Member???
At this point, some of you might be getting worried about audience size. After all, the more and more specific you get with your audience and the more and more differentiated your content gets as you employ concepts like the Known New Contract, the smaller your audience gets, right?
Maybe. (And maybe not!) More often than not, it’s a more effective strategy to super-serve a niche instead of trying to make a mainstream hit for everyone. Also more often than not, a really well-thought-out niche strategy will deliver a larger audience than attempting to attract a mainstream audience. Tom explains why:
“You demonstrably can't please anywhere near anyone. And some of the most successful things you can think of please very few people. The hotelier Ian Schrager very famously wrote, ‘I would rather have a hotel that 90% of the world hates and 10% love than one that people like.’ He's right.”
In the last edition, which was about how to Earn Attention in a world where audiences have infinite choices, we talked about the need to make something people LOVE instead of something people just… like. ‘LOVE’ versus ‘like’ applies here, too, in a different context.
By super-serving a specific niche, learning a ton about your intended audience, and creating differentiated shows that cater to the multifaceted interests of that audience, you are almost certain to create something they will LOVE. Why?
No one else is willing to make something so specifically tailored to them.
You will have ZERO competition.
“One example from TV is Mad Men. A lot of people would say Mad Men is a huge success. But only a million people watched that show. At its peak, maybe 2 million. And the way that you hear people talk about it, you would think it was the greatest show on television, the biggest hit of all time. It's not.
“It’s the same with many brands that you admire. What's the market share of Rolex Watch? It's under a percent.
“These are huge successes, but not in terms of the number of people or the market share. They don't please everybody. They really thrill somebody. And if you can get your mind around that, you can be successful with a show.”
I’m the One For Tom
Little does he know it, but I think I might be the ONE person for Tom’s content. I get excited when I hear him talking about ideas like this. It’s nerdy. It’s a very specific niche. It’s not for everyone and others might find it boring.
But me?
I’m a nerd that obsesses about producing and marketing content. I’m a geek about how to Earn Attention by hyper-focusing on audiences. His personal niche is so bang-on that I semi-regularly interview Tom about his podcast research. And he uses accessible storytelling and analogies (the Known) to share fresh research insights (the New).
I don’t like Tom’s content.
I LOVE it.
Thanks, Tom!
(If you want more Tom in your life, he is the host of The Download podcast and writes frequently at Sounds Profitable.)
Takeaways
Are you caught in the trap of trying to reach everyone? Or a broadly-defined advertising demographic?
Have you thought your ONE person?
What do you know about your ONE person?
How can you find out other connections, interests, and traits that make your ONE person even more distinct? Who are they when they’re at home?
Can you design your content for that ONE person in a way that eliminates all your competition because you’re the ONLY one serving them in this way?
How can you use the Known New Contract more effectively in your content, marketing, and communications?
What’s Earned My Attention Lately
Two great posts about the power of stories compared to other formats!
Pacific Content and Signal Hill Insights conducted original research and found that narrative driven podcasts are much more effective than interview podcasts when it comes to generating brand favourability.
Gary Ross wrote about stories versus information and nails it. No child ever asks for a dose of bedtime “information.” (Although it would probably be effective for putting them to sleep…)
Continuing with the theme of stories, Elaine Appleton Grant is on a quest to discover how to tell phenomenal stories in Season 3 of Sound Judgment.
Stephen Shedletzky’s new book, Speak Up Culture, talks about how to build inclusive cultures where it’s safe and worth it to share ideas and have disagreements. If you’re going to produce creative work, you need the right environment in which to do it.
The team at Quill put together a Branded Podcast Playbook full of smart thinking, and they graciously included some familiar names from this newsletter: Tom Webster, Dan Misener, and myself! :-)