Understand Your Audience to Drive Business Growth on Social Media | Marketing | YAPCreator Replay | E5

0:00Hala Taha:Today's episode is sponsored in part by Shopify, Quo, Indeed, and Experian. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash profiting. Quo is an AI-powered phone system that brings your calls, texts, and contacts together in one place. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash profiting. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire talent all in one place. Get a$75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at indeed.com slash podcast. Experian is a financial app that negotiates your bills and cancels unwanted subscriptions.

0:41Hala Taha:Get started with the Experian app today. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com slash deals.

1:02Hala Taha:Hey, Young Improfitters. Welcome back to another episode of the Yap Creator Series Replay. If your content is not landing, I want you to stop blaming the quality for a second. Because the real issue might be your audience. When you truly understand who you're trying to reach, everything shifts. Your message gets sharper, your content gets more engaging, and your results get a whole lot better. So today, we're breaking down exactly how to read your audience, adapt to what resonates, and create content that connects and converts. Whether you're building a business, scaling your platform, or just trying to grow your reach, understanding your audience is your biggest unfair advantage.

1:41Hala Taha:You'll hear from top experts plus the exact strategies we use here at Yap to stay relevant and impactful. If you want your content to finally stick, this one is packed with gems. So listen up, take notes, and let's get right into it. First things first, before you can forge a meaningful connection with an audience, you need to figure out who they are. As a content creator, understanding the balance between a broad and niche audience is crucial for growing your engagement and your business. Broad content allows you to reach a wider audience and potentially increase views and revenue, while niche content creates deeper and more meaningful connections with a dedicated community.

2:20Hala Taha:The key is finding the balance that works for you. And whether you're marketing a product, a service, or just yourself, it's useful to start by thinking in terms of your TAM or your total addressable market. But just how big or small should you start? This is what Neil Patel, an expert on digital marketing, told me about how he approaches a potential audience.

2:40Neil Patel:What makes a good audience market to me is a big TAM. So assuming you find something you're passionate about by just through trial and error, you gotta make sure you're focusing on a big TAM. Everyone says the riches are in the niches. That's far from true. If you look at the majority of the large corporations out there, like Tesla's automotive, right? People need cars in this world. If you look at Microsoft, everyone needs software to run these computers and digital devices that we're on. If you look at Google, we're relying on search for anything and someone organizing data and feeding it to us in a very organized fashion.

3:15Neil Patel:If you look at Apple, we need all these hardware pieces that they're selling from headphones to cell phones to laptops, right? These are large markets. If you again, look at the biggest companies in the world. They're going after large markets and not niches. So the key is to go after a big TAM. Now you can start in a niche if you want, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to make sure that you can expand that niche into a large market because the amount of effort it takes to market a business, whether it's on LinkedIn or any social platform or even SEO for a niche compared to a large market is almost the same amount of effort.

3:52Neil Patel:Sure, it's harder in a large market. It takes longer to see results, but it's the same process in the same time and energy that you're putting into it. So might as well go after something big because it's very unrealistic to be in a niche and being like, you know what? I'm gonna dominate this niche and gobble up 100 % of the market share or even 20, 30%. That's very hard to do. But on the flip side, it's easier to say, hey, I'm gonna go after this multi-billion dollar market and I'm gonna gobble up 0.1 % of it. right? You gobble up even something small, that's enough money where you're generating millions of dollars where it's meaningful.

4:28Neil Patel:For example, if it's a$10 billion market that you're going after, you gobble up 0.1%, that's big enough to create amazing life and a business.

4:37Hala Taha:So you're saying you need a big, sort of more broad market. You don't want to get too in the niches because they're really hard to find. That's like finding a needle in a haystack. When you're a marketer, you want to find your audience in mass. You want to target them in mass. That's how you're going to target them in the cheapest way, most effective way. If you have to find like 10 people here or 10 people there, it's like you are just going to exhaust yourself and it's going to be very expensive.

5:01Neil Patel:Exactly right. You need to go after a big market so that way you don't have to have frequency issues of like, oh, I've shown my ad to 500 people. All right. How many more people can you show? Well, that's my only audience or even 10 ,000 people. It's not enough. you need to go after the masses.

5:18Hala Taha:So I know that you have a formula for marketing that you talk about. Could you break that down for us?

5:23Neil Patel:Number one, go after a really big TAM. Once you have a big TAM, then if you want to do well, you need to take an omni-channel approach from LinkedIn to Facebook to Instagram to WhatsApp marketing through text, through email marketing to SEO to paid advertising. It doesn't matter if you like paid ads on Facebook or not. If it's profitable, it's profitable. You got to keep leveraging it. And then from there, you got to figure out how to add in the upsells and downsells, because if you look at marketing over time, it continually costs more and more. So you got to add in the upsells and downsells.

5:59Neil Patel:In other words, build that funnel, figure out how to generate more revenue from that same customer. And if they're buying more right at purchase, it allows you to spend more money on marketing, as well as figure route away to generate reoccurring revenues.

6:12Hala Taha:However broad or narrow you go with your potential audience and whatever channel you reach them through, remember that you are ultimately the one picking your audience. That's right. Your audience is your choice and building an audience is really its own kind of a business. In fact, none other than Mr. Side Hustle himself, Nick Loper, shared with me how he now considers building an audience on channels like YouTube to be one of the most promising side hustles around. Something that I read of yours that I thought was really interesting is that you actually consider a side hustle being growing an audience, right?

6:49Hala Taha:You call it an audience business. So talk to us about why having an audience in itself can be a side hustle with multiple avenues.

6:57Neil Patel:Yeah, this is probably, you know, tier three, you know, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible, hybrid, you know, content-based business, audience-based business, where it could be a social following. It could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And once you have people paying attention, like the entire playbook opens up. Yeah, sure. You could sell services. You could sell products. You could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play. And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last 10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space because the scale is almost infinite, right?

7:44Neil Patel:It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10 ,000 people listen to or 100 ,000 people. And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.

8:02Hala Taha:Whatever content arena you decide to play in, it's not just enough to turn up and churn out content. Julie Solomon, who's the queen of influencer marketing and an expert on how to break through on platforms like Instagram, explains the critical distinction between simply creating content and producing content that genuinely drives results with your audience. When it comes to Instagram, because that's really been my platform of choice since 2013. So I have been there through the ups and downs and the in-betweens. And I think that where most people get it wrong is that they get so lost in having to have to do it a certain way or trying to beat some kind of system or some kind of algorithm.

8:44And what I have noticed throughout a decade plus of supporting people on Instagram and coaching them in order to build a brand and visibility there is that, yes, it's important to understand things like hashtags and SEO and viral hooks and all of those kinds of things. But really, at the end of the day, it just comes down to, do you have value-based content that is specifically talking to the person whose problem that you solve? And are you showing up as an authority and as someone that can educate them as being that solution provider as consistently as possible. And most of the time, people aren't doing that because they're so focused on these things that really just don't matter at the end of the day.

9:32You know, it doesn't, and that's why, I have a lot of people that will come to me and it's wild that they've got tens, if not hundreds of thousands of followers and they make no money. And I'm thinking, how do you have all this and you don't make money. And it's because maybe they figured out a way to go viral, or maybe they figured out some kind of giveaway process to gain a following, or maybe they did some collabs. But because they weren't creating that value from the get-go, because they weren't thinking about, what do I specialize in? What is my offer? Why do I want to pick up this phone and post something every day?

10:10It's like they completely missed the boat. And before they know it, they're three months in or three years in or 10 years in. And then they come to me and they're like, Julie, I don't understand how I've kind of been trying to grow and piece milling it together. And maybe I've gotten to a thousand followers and nothing's happening, or maybe I've gotten to a hundred thousand followers, but still nothing's happening because I'm not making any money. And so what's happening here? And so I think that for growth on Instagram, you really have to think about that through line. Are you just creating content just to create content because that is just a hobby?

10:42Or are you actually creating content to solve a problem for somebody, to be of service to someone, to be a solution provider for someone? Because that's how you actually end up monetizing it. And those are two completely different focuses.

10:54Hala Taha:Totally agree with that. And also from a sponsorship perspective, it's also important to think of this. Because if you're just creating mindless content that's going viral, maybe you're reposting viral videos and you've got this huge broad audience, but nobody knows what you stand for. You're not the actual influencer. your content went viral. You didn't necessarily go viral. Your ideas and your products and services didn't necessarily go viral. It's just content, right? And so it's hard to get brand sponsorships when you actually are not an influencer and your content just went viral because there's no way to really describe your audience.

11:29Hala Taha:It's hard for brands to understand who they're targeting exactly. So that's something else to think about. Yeah, I call those people cold creators, that they are showing up to create content, but there is no warmth behind them focusing on building the know, like, and trust. And we even see this with a lot of massive influencers out there. You think about, you know, Charlie, I can't remember her last name, but she was on Dancing with the Stars. Her family had a reality show. They went, her and her sisters went viral on TikTok. And now it's like, not only is there, all they talk about is how their mental health is just like all over the place.

12:03They can't show up. They can't be consistent. they're not happy, they're not fulfilled. But a lot of the brand deals that they've started to do, whether that's product lines that they've launched or what have you, have now been pulled off the shelves because they're not converting. And the reason why is because they didn't take the time to build that know, like, and trust with their audience. They didn't take the time to really build a brand around the reputation that they wanted to have. They were just creating content for the sake of creating content and doing it on TikTok and blowing up, but now they don't have anything to show for it.

12:33And there's a lot of creators that that has happened to over time that have gone on to maybe get a Sephora, you know, makeup deal. But then a year later, they don't have any makeup in the stores and it's because it can't sell.

12:45Hala Taha:So how do we figure out exactly what will resonate best with our target audience? To truly connect with that audience and create content that genuinely serves their needs, you need to understand what interests them, what drives them, what thrills them. Understanding what your audience wants is the foundation of creating content that stands out, even since the dawn of time when early humans were telling their first stories around the communal fire. Of course, nowadays, most of our audiences are online, but we can still learn a lot about how to shape and respond to an audience from those who are gifted performers and make their living by delighting live audiences.

13:23Hala Taha:The magician and mentalist, Oz Perlman, is one such performer, and he shared with me some fascinating insights into how he uses deep knowledge of human behavior to read an audience.

13:34Neil Patel:Every show is different, which is great because every audience is different, right? Think about it. If you're watching a movie, the movie's always the same versus what I do is not like watching a singer or a band where they can change the song a little bit, but it's still the same song. For me, everything I do involves audience interaction. My show is the audience because if I'm doing a show for a thousand people, 50, 60, 100 of them will be a part of it at some point. I throw Frisbees around the audience. We hand envelopes. We pick people out of the whole crowd. I've done arenas before with 10 ,000 people.

14:06Neil Patel:And what my show is all about is audience reactions, watching someone's face and that shock and that amazement. And sometimes that just absolute silence when you've done something that seems impossible or you've told them something, there's no way you could have known or anticipated. And that's really the product I'm selling is very memorable moments. usually with a lot of emotional impact. And so it's helpful in certain parts of everyday life, but it's funny because not as if I can just walk into a real estate negotiation and be like, I know their bottom line. I know how much money I'm saving.

14:38Neil Patel:Like it works in certain ways. It's helpful. It's an edge, but it's not the same. It's a, it's a facade. You know, it's, it's an entertainment pursuit because in my shows, I'm the director. I get to call the shots in a certain way. So I wish I could tell you, go to the poker table and just make millions. you know funny enough a lot of casinos they have people trained in what i do going against me you know they're they're the ones who are making sure that i can't cheat that reminds me of something

15:05Hala Taha:that i've also heard you said where you say that your profession is more like a comedian than it is a magician because you're actually feeding off the audience and not just like doing the same

15:14Neil Patel:thing over and over again totally and i can't it's hard to practice what i do so a magician think about it can practice. Like I use example of a card trick. You can practice a card trick at home in front of the mirror for days, weeks, years, and perfect the moves that are required. Right. Same with the same thing with a juggler, let's call it. But a comedian has to tell their joke. He or she tells their joke. And the only way you know, if it's funny is if an audience reacts, right. The audience is your canvas. So the exact same thing applies. And that's the reason right there why there's so much fewer mentalists than magicians, because the learning curve is so steep.

15:50Neil Patel:You can't get better without first bombing. So you need to be bad and start doing it and getting better and better with audiences. And a lot of people don't have that stomach. They can't deal with that level of rejection over and over and not be good for years at times.

16:06Hala Taha:The audience is your canvas. I just love that. And it's just as true for an online audience. The best online content isn't just a one-way broadcast. It's a conversation. It's about give and take, where we're tuning into what our audience really wants, what resonates with them, and what keeps them coming back. In other words, you're not creating content for yourself. Just like Oz Perlman, you're responding to what your audience is telling you, even when it's through nonverbal cues like likes, shares, and comments. Every interaction is a signal, and your audience is showing what they relate to, what they're curious about, and sometimes what just isn't clicking.

16:45Hala Taha:At times, you may bomb just like a stand-up comedian or a live performer might. The magic happens when you take the time to interpret these signals and respond to them. That's when your content goes from good to great. But figuring out an audience, of course, takes time. Perhaps nobody I've spoken to knows this better than my good friend, the entrepreneur and the host of the Social Proof podcast, David Shands. David is one of the hardest working people I know. And as you'll hear, he knows his audience down to their daily routine and their habits. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

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