Finding your Audience
Finding, growing and maintaining an audience can be one of the most difficult tasks when starting a business — the “build it and they will come” motto doesn’t work (trust me, I’ve tried and failed at that) when everyone else is grabbing attention through advertisements, marketing, free samples, and the like.
This article will act as a (brief) summary to understand who you should aim to target, and some potential strategies, when building or growing at an early stage.
While the article itself will often use gaming as an example, these strategies are not vertical-specific. Change the context to fit your needs, and the strategies can still work.
Defining your audience
The first (and one of the most important questions) to ask is simple: who is your audience?
While this may sound simple, “everybody” isn’t an answer. Different people have different interests, motivations, pains or frustrations, and needs, which can only be tackled in specific ways.
A great place to start is age — are you creating educational games, perfect for children? Are you creating games that might require a certain amount of gaming experience to enjoy? Are you creating something inspired by 1970s pop culture that most younger consumers wouldn’t understand?
Newzoo.com have a wealth of user persona references focussed on gaming, with an example of that defined as an “ultimate gamer” below. If your plan were to create a game which attracts this type of user (such as including open world, a strong narrative, or multiplayer features), you may generally aim for men between 26 and 30.
Saying that, however, you’ll notice that not 100% of the “ultimate gamers” are men between 26 and 30. There will be different audiences, who you may attract more as you scale.
Newzoo has a number of articles and infographics which may be helpful for anyone creating a game, or even want to see what additional user personas look like.
Sizing your opportunity
It’s unlikely that a game with a very small audience will be sustainable. However, you can’t just throw the same game at every person and hope something sticks. Knowing the size of your target market will be key to tracking your metrics, goals, and highlighting the opportunity with others.
There are a few ways to do this. Let’s assume your target demographic are “ultimate gamer” men aged 26–30 (from the above graphic):
- Top-down: There are 7 billion people in the world. Assuming half are men, that’s 3.5 billion. Currently, roughly 8% of men fit our age range, so that’s 280,000,000. Assuming only 17% of people in the world speak English (the language you make the game in), that’s 47.6 million. Let’s assume 10% of those are “ultimate gamers”, leaving you with 4.76 million. You can then continue to narrow this down by genre, region etc. until you have a number you think is reasonable.
- Bottom-up: Find a game which has similar user personas to you, and aim to take a fraction of their audience. For example, if you wanted to create a battle royale game, Apex Legends hits about 220,000 players per month. According to Newzoo’s research, 70% of those are male, about 17% are “ultimate gamers” and an estimated 25% might match your overlapping age range. That’s about 6500 people who fit your criteria. From there, let’s say you want to attract 1% of those, being about 65 people playing your game per month. And you want to do this for maybe 50, 100, or 250 of the biggest battle royale games and you can find a target size.
While the numbers from bottom-up approaches may feel smaller, they could often be more reliable estimates. They also benefit from using real-world data.
Finding your audience
You’ve decided on a target audience, and sized up the opportunity — where is the best place to find them?
This can depend on a few factors, including your offering and where that market is thriving. For the Web3/NFT space for instance, you (generally speaking) may see more success on Twitter than Reddit. Gamers, however, may find more success in Reddit or through the Discord channels of similar games (if they allow self-promotion). Other great options may include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or other social media platforms.
Depending on your audience, you may even find more success in-person. If you want to sell a product to schools or schoolchildren, consider reaching out to schools themselves.
Whether you rely on social media platforms or not, consider still creating some profiles so potential users can reach out to you to learn more.
Engaging with your audience
Are you ready for one of the hardest parts? Talk to people.
Respond to people’s posts, comments or questions (whether that’s explicitly about your offering, a competitor [where you can highlight your features] or even answering mundane questions) and post your own. Ask users if you can schedule conversations to showcase your product and get their feedback. Offer free trials (or discounts), giveaways and other incentives to attract people in, then keep them hooked with a great product or value proposition.
Alongside this, consider collaborating with people who share similar communities — whether that’s other business or “influencers” (e.g. content creators) who may share a similar audience or have an interest in your product.
Changing with your audience
Most things change over time. This “innovation” and the types of users who adopt at given times, is commonly summarised through an innovation life cycle:
Those who support you early on, the innovators and early adopters, are unlikely to be supporting you the entire time (especially if your solution evolves significantly or is not a requirement in someone’s life [compared to say, a broadband provider, doctor or school]).
This isn’t always your fault, though. Many times, early adopters like to be early adopters (where they get to talk more with the creators/developers/owners), and may jump between many early-stage offerings.
While you can update features and requests in line with this audience, know that your future audience may be completely different. Always be looking to move forward.
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