35 Marketing Your Venture to Audiences
Elizabeth Mays
Overview
You’ve identified a problem, need or opportunity and you’ve developed your solution to it as an entrepreneurial venture. You now have a minimally viable product or service. This chapter will talk about how to market that product or service to your target audience in order to find users and customers.
Your Audience: Users vs. Customers
The first thing to keep in mind is that media entrepreneurship is different from traditional entrepreneurship. You may be marketing to two distinct groups–users and customers–and you may want them to take different actions.
Think of a restaurant you frequent. The people who go in to eat are the end users of the product and also the people who pay for that product. The restaurant’s users are also its customers, so it only needs to market to one audience.
Now think about a technology venture like Facebook. Facebook makes its platform free to its users but charges advertisers to market to those users. This is much more similar to the traditional model for content and media businesses in which the core product (news) is given away free to an audience whose attention is then sold to the advertisers.
That’s not to say that as a media startup you can’t charge your users–you might have premium news or subscriptions, branded tchotchkes, events they can attend and hopefully countless other streams of revenue.
Your users may be just users of the product, or they may also be both users and customers to you.
The point is, if your customers and your users are different, you may need to reach them with different approaches and messaging.
For the purposes of this chapter, though, we’re going to focus on marketing your business in a way that attracts and engages an audience that uses your product, because whether that audience is paying you or inspiring others to pay you, without an audience, you can’t monetize.
Audience Acquisition
You might ask, why do you need an audience if they are not paying you directly, or not paying you yet? Traditionally, in media, the size of an outlet’s audience is important because it determines how much it can charge for advertising. Nowadays as a media startup, you probably want to also charge the audience for something–whether that’s a membership, events, a subscription to premium content, or something else. Either way, the larger your audience, the more revenue potential. Even if you’re grant-funded, you’ll want to prove to funders that your work matters and is worthy of more funding. The size of the audience that sees your work is one measure you can use to demonstrate impact.
Quantifying your audience is a measure of reach. The depth of their interest in you (which may be measured in terms of the length of time they spent with your content, whether they shared it, and other metrics) is known as engagement.
When you’re marketing your venture, it’s important to know whether it is more useful to your business goals to get a large quantity