How can you anticipate the content people want before they want it? How do you figure out where your audience lives online and what they like? What is a creator, after all?
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, we were joined by Julia Munslow, special projects editor at Yahoo News, Alexis Gay, comedian and host of Non-Technical Podcast, and Sushma Dwivedi, who leads communications and brand marketing at Daily Harvest. All three of our speakers come at the challenge of building a brand online from different angles, and they all had valuable perspectives to share for navigating a social media landscape that has very high expectations from anyone creating content in 2021.
Whether you’re an independent creator or a company, you need to think about how to connect with the audience that’s right for you before dipping your toes into brand building. With more platforms than ever, and more savvy content perpetually upping the social game, it’s worth remembering that building your audience doesn’t just mean accumulating a sky high follower count.
“It doesn’t really help anybody to try and be everything to everyone at any size of brand, no matter how big or small,” Dwivedi said. “… When you’re really looking to galvanize a base, and build some momentum amongst a dedicated base of customers, it serves you to really think about who they are. What do they need? Where are they and how on those platforms are they being communicated to?”
Before you can study an audience you want to reach, you have to figure out where they live online. And as new social platforms and products emerge, that process can require quite a bit of trial and error. For Daily Harvest, TikTok was a successful experiment that continues to pay off, but not all experiments will work out — and according to Dwivedi, that’s just fine. Daily Harvest dipped a toe into Clubhouse when the social audio app took off, but because of the visual nature of its brand and audience, it wasn’t a perfect fit.
” … I think the key for us is really figuring out what makes the most sense, based on what it is that we produce in the world,” Dwivedi said.
Once you’ve decided where to build an audience, learning to speak your audience’s language in an authentic way is next. Sometimes that means being more natural with your own language — skip the brand jargon, always — but it can also mean becoming very familiar with the communities you want to communicate with and the platforms they spend time on. To pull that off, you’ve got to do your homework.
With the Yahoo News TikTok channel, the time Munslow and her team invested translated into more than 1.4 million followers and 79 million likes on one of the toughest platforms for brands to crack. For Munslow, learning to speak the same language as her TikTok target audience grew out of paying attention to what Gen Z users looked for and cared about:
We studied TikTok; we became part of the community. From the start, I think a key component was that we always took Gen Z and young people seriously and truly believed that they wanted to know what was going on in the world. You know, they care about the news, they care about issues, they’re one of the most politically active generations. And just because they’re consuming the news on TikTok doesn’t mean that they care any less — they’re just consuming it a little bit differently. So we realized that we were able to, you know, speak their language, maybe a little bit more conversational. Talk to them as if you’re talking to a friend and saying, hey, look at this cool thing that I found. From there, we were able to start iterating on our best practices as we figured out what works.
From their time studying the platform and experimenting with content, Munslow and her team figured out that their audience deeply cared about what was happening around the world, but they wanted the news presented in bite-sized portions sans the kind of spin you’d find on a 24-hour news network. The team started packaging up into concise summaries of the news of the day, and the account took off.
For Gay, who left her job managing creator partnerships at Patreon to strike out on her own, being thoughtful about audience building early on was essential:
“I think one of the biggest insights that I drew from my time at Patreon that I apply now to my own work, is to build your audience, not just build an audience,” Gay said. ” … If you want to grow really fast, you can do that. There are all kinds of growth hacks and tactics. And oh, trust me, there are people on the internet ready to tell you about them. But in my opinion, you will build an audience that doesn’t necessarily care about you and what you’re making. And the reason that I think it’s important to focus on compromising the speed of growth, like the slope of that line for the direction of that line to be just going up and to the right, is that ultimately, you don’t just want an audience that you can say, look how many followers I have on the internet. You want an audience, you can do something with them.”
As Gay sees it, by focusing on audience quality over quantity, your followers will be more likely to buy a product, sign up for a webinar or otherwise engage with the stuff you’re putting out in the world.
“If you spent all your time just growing a big audience that doesn’t actually care about what you’re making, they’re not going to take any action, they’re not going to watch the video or buy the thing or go to the event,” Gay said.
Growing more slowly and deliberately can be frustrating and it can involve some trial and error, but it’s the right long-term move for a lot of people and brands trying to make content that resonates.
Whether you’re a brand looking to partner with creators or one looking to copy some of their platform savvy, understanding and respecting the deep well of knowledge it takes to fluidly communicate through social platforms is essential, according to Munslow.
“You know, I personally have come to believe that everyone is a creator — in some way, you are creating something and you’re putting it out online — and I also think that brands, businesses, we should take creators seriously. It’s hard work,” Munslow said. ” … Brands should be leveraging and using the power of creators because they understand these platforms extremely, extremely well.”
