- Author Profile John Moxey
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It’s time to get to know your audience. Understanding your audience is like tuning your guitar perfectly before a big show. It’s essential. But how do you do it?
Below are some key aspects to focus on to get to know your audience.
Getting To Know Your Audience
Build Audience Profiles
Understanding your audience is crucial for any artist, as it helps tailor your music, marketing strategies, and overall brand to meet the preferences and expectations of your fans. Audience profiles, or listener personas, are a great tool to capture and organise information you gather as you get to know your audience.
What are the main advantages to having good quality audience profiles?
Warning! The following 7 points use some business language. Chill. It will help you to get to know your audience. High-quality audience profiles offer several key advantages that can significantly enhance your approach as a musician:
Targeted Marketing Efforts: By understanding your audience’s preferences and behaviors, you can create more effective and efficient advertising campaigns. This leads to better engagement and a higher return on your marketing investment.
Enhanced Fan Engagement: Knowing your audience enables you to personalise interactions and content, fostering a stronger connection and loyalty. It also helps in building a community among your fans, enhancing word-of-mouth promotion.
Improved Product and Content Development: Audience profiles guide the creation of music and merchandise that resonate with your fans. This relevance can lead to better sales and overall satisfaction.
Strategic Planning: These profiles inform decisions about touring, event planning, and collaborations, ensuring that your efforts are focused where they will have the most impact.
Market Understanding: A deep understanding of your audience gives you a competitive edge and allows you to adapt quickly to changing trends, keeping your brand relevant.
Feedback and Improvement: Profiles provide a framework for interpreting feedback, enabling continuous improvement in your music and marketing strategies.
Financial Advantages: With focused efforts based on audience insights, you can optimize your budget and potentially increase revenue from music sales, merchandise, and ticket sales.
In summary, quality audience profiles enable more precise and rewarding interactions with your audience, contributing significantly to the growth and sustainability of your music career.
So, how do we build them?
Dig into Demographics
Basic demographic information is a good start in understanding your fans.
- Who are your fans?
- Are they college students, young professionals, retirees?
Knowing the age, gender, location, and even the income bracket of your audience helps tailor your music, message, and method of delivery.
Understand Their Interests
To know your audience you need to understand their interests. You have to ask questions of your audience.
- What else are your fans into?
Maybe they love certain TV shows, hobbies, or other music genres. This information can help you connect on a deeper level, perhaps through song themes or social media content that resonates with these interests.
Social Media Insights
Social media platforms are great for communication and engagement. They are fantastic tools for getting to know your audience. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter offer analytics that provide a wealth of information about your followers.
- What posts do they engage with the most?
- What time are they online?
This data is like gold for planning your content strategy.
Audience Observations
If you perform live, observe the crowd.
- What songs get them excited?
- Do they prefer mellow tunes or high-energy beats?
Even the clothes they wear or how they interact with each other, and how they interact with you, can give you clues about their lifestyle and preferences.
Feedback Loops
Engage directly with your fans. It’s the most immediate way to get to know your audience where you choose the specific information that you want to know.
- Run surveys
- Ask for feedback on social media
- Have conversations at gigs
Fans love when their voices are heard, and you get firsthand insight into their preferences and expectations.
Analyze Other Artists
Look at artists with a similar style or fan base.
- What are they doing that works?
- What kind of audience are they attracting?
You don’t have to copy them, but learning from their successes (and failures) can be incredibly insightful.
Genre-Specific Trends
Every music genre has its own culture and trends. If you know your audience you can better respond to genre-specific trends. Being well-versed with these can help you align your music and marketing strategies more effectively with what your audience expects or is excited about.
Look Beyond Music
Sometimes your audience’s non-musical interests can provide unique marketing opportunities.
For example, if a large segment of your audience is into environmental activism, you might consider eco-friendly merch or theming a song around this passion.
Remember, getting to know your audience is an ongoing, continuous process. As you grow and evolve as an artist, so will your audience. Keeping a finger on their pulse will not only inform your marketing strategies but also influence your creative decisions, helping you craft music that truly resonates.
Related Articles
Do you want to find out more about the business side of music? You might be specifically interested in learning more about music marketing, release planning, fan base building, or music law and copyright. If so, you can find articles and tutorials on our our Music Business Articles page.
You might find the following selection of music business articles by John Moxey useful:
