535. Hanging out 👯
Three ways to get smart about where your audience lives and where to do your marketing
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
How to find where your audience hangs out
Three techniques for building conviction and gaining new ideas for where to focus your marketing resources
A marketing leader’s work is never done.
After you’ve built some incredible brand foundations and crafted some awesome narratives and aligned your team to go and make magic happen, you still need to figure out where to do the magic-making.
What channels will you invest in?
Where will you run your campaigns?
Where are all the cool kids (your audience) hanging out these days? 😎
This sleuthing requires two ingredients: 1) a list of all the different channels where your people might be, and 2) a shorter list of all the channels where your people probably are.
I’ve got you covered for Part One:
Let’s talk about Part Two.
The menu will be helpful for determining the breadth of places you could be, but the difference between channels and hangout spots is the difference between a world atlas and a trip agenda. Once you know all the places to go, you really just need to know the places you want or need to be.
In my experience, there are three ways to gain clues for finding your people. You probably already have some strong instincts given that you may know your current audience and customers pretty well. Lean into those instincts, and then supplement it with more data from these three sources.
Three ways to find where your audience hangs out
1 - Interviews
Qualitative interviews with humans will tell you as much or more than deep dives into data and trends. If you want to know about the online habits of your audience, all you have to do is ask them!
Here are my favorite questions to ask:
What devices do you use on a daily basis?
What are the apps and/or software that you can’t live without?
What social media platforms do you use (and how actively)?
What are your first stops when you need to research something: a new purchase, a work-related problem, a day-to-day curiosity?
Where do you go for resources to help you do your job better?
Do you usually read reviews before purchasing a product? If so, where do you look? What reviews do you trust?
Where do you get your news?
What are your favorite websites?
What newsletters do you subscribe to?
What podcasts do you listen to?
What online communities are you a part of?
Once you have a good list of questions, you of course need a good list of people to interview. To find people these people, you can turn to a few different places:
Your customers
Your newsletter subscribers
Your social media followers
Your friends and family
(I also like to end the interview asking the interviewee who else I should be talking to.)
2 - Competitors
One of my favorite shortcuts to audience research is looking at where your competitors are most active and assuming—since you share an ideal customer profile with them— that they are active in the places where your audience lives.
Big picture, I definitely do not advocate for simply “doing what everyone else does.” That’s no way to build a brand.
But when you’re looking for more validation about the channels where you should spend your time, the competition provides one of the quickest and surest pieces of data. Some questions to ask:
Which social channels are my competitors most active on? Where do they have the most followers? Where do they have the most engagement?
Where is my competition advertising? (Big one! If they’re spending money somewhere, chances are it is worth the ROI.)
What type of media is my competition producing? Video? Audio? Other?
3 - Market trends and research
Interviews with your customers will get you the most personal data. Looking at your competitors will help you understand your category better. Zooming out one step further, market trends and research will give you the most macro view into the behavior of your audience.
If you know the general demographics of your persona—age, location, job title, income, etc.—you can cross-reference these traits against some of the new trends in consumer behavior. For instance, if your audience is all Gen Z, it might be interesting to know that 70 percent of them are on YouTube every day. If you’re marketing to millennials, they are on Reddit more than any other age group.
Here are a few of my favorite places to find this stuff:
Bonus fourth way: Your own experimentation
It’s likely that you have some data already on where your audience hangs out. This is a great starting point for building your initial hypotheses about your channel mix and for baselining future experiments.
If you have a hunch on a new place to do your marketing, run an experiment for a few weeks and check the results. That way you’re not 100% bought in from Day One but you can dip your toes in the water and see if it’s worth going deeper.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
