Refining My Target Audience - Micro-communities

[Emerald]

Four months ago, I started a Youtube channel, in the niche of spirituality, psychology, personal development, and awareness of social under-currents. So, my audience is likely to have some degree of cross-over with Leo's audience, but my channel is more about reintegration of disowned traits on the individual and cultural level. I also do book reviews and share insights from them. 

So, a lot of it has to do with creating mental frameworks and understandings psychologically and spiritually to get past the initial bottlenecks of the spiritual journey and to get on level ground to progress forward in life without fighting various repressions and complexes. It's also for people who have an insight seeking bone and a penchant for plumbing the depths of the human experience intellectually and philosophically. But I also intend to delve into the topic of deconstructing such spiritual frameworks to aide people on the path to enlightenment. I also have topics that relate less to spirituality too that could be enjoyed by people who aren't interested in spirituality or enlightenment. Then I have very New Age topics like my insights regarding my out of body experiences. 

So, my topics are a real Heinz 57. For this reason and others, I've recently hit a small dip in motivation and consistency, and I'm trying to get back on the horse extra strong. 

So, I would really like to market to others who are similar to me in the way that I think about spirituality. I tend to be put off by a lot of New Age stuff because much of it thrives off of wishful thinking that isn't grounded in anything solid. But I know that marketing to a New Age audience would be an easier market to target than the "rational spiritual in-betweeners" who tend not to have a strong group identity. 

I was watching a video today about social media marketing, and it was suggested to refine audiences down to various micro-communities. So, this seems like a decent solution to this issue.

So, do any of you have ideas for smaller sects within the 'spiritual community', 'philosophical community', 'psychological community', etc. that I should target my videos to? Thank you

[Sarah Marie]

@Emerald Wilkins I own a marketing company. And what you are going to do is right on track .

Think about who your dream market would be. Try to see what they are interested in. Or focus on one niche at a time. Perhaps a smaller niche (search long tailed marketing) at a time.

Hope this helps. 

[Emerald]

20 minutes ago, Sarah_Flagg said:

@Emerald Wilkins I own a marketing company. And what you are going to do is right on track .

Think about who your dream market would be. Try to see what they are interested in. Or focus on one niche at a time. Perhaps a smaller niche (search long tailed marketing) at a time.

Hope this helps. 

Thank you. I'll definitely do some research on long tailed marketing.

[Robert]

@Emerald Wilkins I'm gonna be honest, to me it sounds like you don't know your target audience at all - you listed four different topics (spirituality, psychology, personal development, and awareness of social under-currents), and then you talked about extra stuff for people who aren't interested in your main topic. This is where I think the problem lies.

One way you can find your target audience is to do this exercise I learned about niche selection. What you do for the exercise is start with the main broad topic that you want your channel to be about (such as spirituality), and then narrow down that topic as much as you can just to see a variety of more specific potential niches to build your brand around.

Here's an example: You might want to start with "spirituality" and then narrow that down to "spirituality for beginners." And then you might want to narrow that down to "spirituality for women beginners." And then you might want to narrow that down to "spirituality for women beginners who have been abused in the past." And then you might want to narrow that down to "new age spirituality for women beginners who have been abused in the past."

Here's another example: You might want to start with "psychology" and then narrow that down to "psychology for teens." And then you might want to narrow that down to "psychology for teens with depression." And then you might want to narrow that down to "psychology for Christian teens with depression," and so on. Just an example.

There's an infinite number of combinations you can use. Maybe you don't want to go as narrow as the examples I gave. Maybe you just want to do something only as narrow as "spirituality for beginners," but even so, your niche should help you cultivate and maintain a stronger brand as long as you narrow down your topic in some manner.

4 hours ago, Emerald Wilkins said:

I also have topics that relate less to spirituality too that could be enjoyed by people who aren't interested in spirituality or enlightenment. Then I have very New Age topics like my insights regarding my out of body experiences.

Yeah, so when you're more certain about your audience, cut out stuff like this if necessary. If people aren't interested in the main topic of your channel, don't do videos targeted towards those people.

[Emerald]

8 hours ago, Robert said:

@Emerald Wilkins I'm gonna be honest, to me it sounds like you don't know your target audience at all - you listed four different topics (spirituality, psychology, personal development, and awareness of social under-currents), and then you talked about extra stuff for people who aren't interested in your main topic. This is where I think the problem lies.

One way you can find your target audience is to do this exercise I learned about niche selection. What you do for the exercise is start with the main broad topic that you want your channel to be about (such as spirituality), and then narrow down that topic as much as you can just to see a variety of more specific potential niches to build your brand around.

Here's an example: You might want to start with "spirituality" and then narrow that down to "spirituality for beginners." And then you might want to narrow that down to "spirituality for women beginners." And then you might want to narrow that down to "spirituality for women beginners who have been abused in the past." And then you might want to narrow that down to "new age spirituality for women beginners who have been abused in the past."

Here's another example: You might want to start with "psychology" and then narrow that down to "psychology for teens." And then you might want to narrow that down to "psychology for teens with depression." And then you might want to narrow that down to "psychology for Christian teens with depression," and so on. Just an example.

There's an infinite number of combinations you can use. Maybe you don't want to go as narrow as the examples I gave. Maybe you just want to do something only as narrow as "spirituality for beginners," but even so, your niche should help you cultivate and maintain a stronger brand as long as you narrow down your topic in some manner.

Yeah, so when you're more certain about your audience, cut out stuff like this if necessary. If people aren't interested in the main topic of your channel, don't do videos targeted towards those people.

I don't want to narrow my content because my channel is about sharing insights that I've gained over years of introspection and research. It's more about surveying a lot of topics in as much detail as possible than specializing in a particular micro-niche. All the topics that I cover are generally under the wider blanket of personal development, and that there is a large crossover between each of these topics. Leo seems to have made covering a wide range of topics under the window of personal development work for him with an uncommon group of target audiences, so I'm confident that I can find my audiences as long as I can figure out who they are, where they congregate, and tailor my content delivery to them.

[Telepresent]

(Apologies if I'm dragging up an old and irrelevant post: feel free to ignore!)

Can I ask whether you're concerned with your website/channel as a business at the moment?  I ask because you talk, in one of your blog posts, about the idea of painting - how it's not about being concerned with what people will think of the picture, but the painting of the picture.

If you're not concerned about monetizing your channel any time soon, if you're trying to understand your own approach to spirituality and work out how to cast all these areas under your net, why should you be concerned with refining your audience?  I would have thought, if you're looking for understanding and perspective, that a 'refined' audience is a hinderance?

Edited May 28, 2016 by Telepresent
Clarity