Know your audience

The first step is to know who you are developing content for. Audiences are diverse and have very different reasons to be following you and watching your content.

Knowing your audience helps you understand who you create content for, what value they get from it, and what the reciprocal value exchange is between you as a creator and your viewer. When you know your audience, you then have a clearer vision of what your content does for them, and whether it helps serve your goals as a creator. If you want to create effective channels to acquire customers, you must be able to segment your audience. One way to get started with segmenting your audience is to look at their intent. Why are they watching your content ?

While it is different for each viewer, your audience broadly can be segmented by their level of connectedness with you as a creator and content-brand.

Unfamiliar – they don’t know who you are and just stumbled onto your content on the internet

Casual – they are vaguely familiar with who you are and watch your content occasionally

Active and passionate – they are very familiar with you and are passionate about what you do

True-fans – they are super-passionate about you and actively tell others about what you do

As a knowledge-creator, your content will not resonate with everyone in the world. However, it will resonate very strongly with a few for whom it will mean a lot and who will support you. This is your mini-army of supporters, your true-fans. Typically, this is the segment of your audience that is responsible for 90% of your success. If you are thinking about your content strategy as a business, figuring out how to expand this segment and create pathways for more viewers to become true-fans can give you massive gains.

This is because they are your core supporters and have received so much value from you that they’ll drive your brand forward by buying your content products, telling others about how amazing you are, and engaging with your content so that you can create better products for them.

All of this is great in theory and for you to think about audience segmentation.

But how do you actually go about figuring out who belongs to which segment of your audience ? Through tools and processes.👇

Gaining control of your audience

When you deliver content to your audience, they can do one of 4 things in return:

• watch your content
• engage with your content (liking, commenting or sharing)
• give you their email address to stay in touch
• pay you for your content

While you have no control over the first two actions, you can leverage tools that give you direct access and control to effectively segment your audience.

Utilising tools to create a filter to then segment your audience is a great first step towards knowing who to deliver what content to, but more importantly to drive conversion from passive viewer to loyal customer.

What tools can you use to segment your audience ?

Some of the tools you can use to work out how your audience is segmented are:

• creating a membership
• creating an email capture form
• creating a content paywall

When you create an email filter through which viewers have to give your their email address to access content, you create incentive for your audience to be closer to you, while at the same time filtering out those the less-engaged audience base.

Similarly, when you create a content product that people have to pay for to access, you’re transforming the relationship from a creator ←→ audience to a creator ←→ customer relationship. This is a key first step to catalyse your work as a creator into a business that earns you reliable, monthly income.

Importantly, by creating a direct relationship with your audience, you can encourage your audience to convert into customers, with significant benefits for both sides.

For the creator, the direct relationship creates the foundation layer of customers to build a creator business on top of it. With this infrastructure in place, creators can activate several strategies to drive business goals such as sales, engagement and retention:

• early bird discounts
• exclusives
• referral programs
• communities
• email newsletter
• bundled content packages

For your audience, the direct relationship creates a sense of ownership and commitment to the creators content products. Audiences can then gain direct value from creators in several ways:

• accessing premium content products
• gaining value through discounts and promotional tools
• sharing value to unlock more value
• personalised and custom content

As you begin to segment your audience, you’ll then be able to create the funnel to your customers, getting key ratios in place such as:

Total viewership : Engaged Audience

Engaged Audience : Free members

Free members : Paying members

With these metrics in place, you’re now in a strong position to craft a compelling strategy to build your creator business.