Spearheading Your Audience for Rapid Growth
To many successful creatives, success is a mystery. Those who have it often don’t know how they found it, and those who don’t are frustrated for not having it yet. Even more complications arise when we all have different definitions of success:
- being able to completely sustain myself via streaming games – or
- having XYZ number of followers/subscribers – or
- growing my influence enough to get promotional packages from gaming companies – or
- having a small, regular audience I can connect with for the fun of it.
With streaming (or any creative endeavor), no matter what your definition of success is, it generally involves having an audience, and audience building can be a confusing task. For the sake of understanding, I’ll be using an analogy inspired by prolific author, blogger, and podcaster Tim Ferriss.
The Spearhead Technique
Imagine your content is a spear, with the tip being your early creations and the body being what you make later. If you want to pierce into any communities, you’ll have to start with the spearhead – the narrow point at the end. This means that you have to drastically narrow down your immediate target audience. Pick a several niches you currently belong to and make people who share those traits the group you target most first.
For example, I am a young adult gamer with a mind for productivity who plays music and has a decent level of involvement in the Super Smash Bros eSports community (among other things). If I were to attempt at rapidly building an audience, I would likely make content on how to rapidly improve competitive play in Smash using myself or a friend as the test subject, as my viewers likely want efficient tutorials to improve their play. It’s a fairly unique niche for content, but I also have to see how much competition I have. When people like ZeR0, Beefy Smash Doods, and many other Smash creators exist (who have significant rapport in the community), my spearhead’s target is already fairly occupied, so I’d need to either alter which niches I choose or narrow down my target audience even further.
When Your Niche is Already Occupied
A huge reason many creators fail is that they are too broad with their target audience – by trying to appeal to everyone, you become generic and don’t appeal much to anyone. When you are starting, you must build a core, devoted audience before you try to broaden. It’s why I gave up Let’s Playing on an old channel. I attempted to appeal to everyone with excessively broad content, and because of that I never developed a core audience. Larger channels like Game Grumps on the other hand, are made of already successful individuals and already have their core audience, so they can broaden successfully. Too broad a spearhead, and your niche is guaranteed to be occupied.
Finding the Focus
To narrow your spearhead, you either need a more unique combination of niches, or you need more specificity in the ones you already chose. however, it also must be something that people are looking for. If your niche is tutorials for a ten year old game that very few people play anymore, then you’ll likely have a tiny niche that has a small chance of expanding. Chances are content already exists for those old games and many things you do will just be recycling things that have been done.
To expand on my Smash example, if I were to further narrow down my audience, I could make myself a channel for rapidly improving Smash play by interviewing top players, networking at local events, and making a series where I train a new player to at least a beginning competitive level using the tips I make content about. Similar content has already been done, but this specific combination of niches has very little competition.
Sample questions could include:
What are your most effective training methods?
How do you improve your play against your worst matchups, both in terms of specific characters and other players?
Who has been your biggest influence as a smash player, and who has helped you most get where you are today?
What do you listen to when you play best?
These could be done while playing against them over Wi-fi, and there are a number of ways this spearhead would likely work. The Smash Community has a large, devoted audience that I could begin tapping into at local tournaments, building connections and producing content for them. Then, interviewing top players would allow me to retain my niche, but expand it to a larger audience.
Making a series training a new player using information from the interviews would appeal to the audience I’ve built and to a broader audience of people who watch the game but don’t play it.
When events like EVO have TV coverage and hundreds of thousands of viewers on Twitch, you know that the market I’d expand to exists.
Putting it Into Practice
Last winter, I experimented with an extremely-focused approach to streaming. I started playing a couple different games on Twitch, and after finding some surprise success in Super Smash Brothers and Fire Emblem: Heroes, I decided to go all in on Fire Emblem. For 7 days straight, I streamed FEH to between of 5-10 viewers, and by the end of those 7 days I became a Twitch Affiliate.
What I did was find a game I was knowledgeable about and enjoyed (FEH or Smash), stream regularly, and find a community that wanted me there. One viewer invited me into a discord community to advertise FEH streams to “thirsty viewers,” and about half of my views were thanks to them. I haven’t streamed in a few months, but in that week-ish-long experiment, I learned the importance of focused content to attract a community and of involving yourself in a welcoming, pre-existing community with that focused content. While I didn’t make ultra-focused content, having a live stream for viewers who wanted it when others weren’t making that content was enough.
To Summarize
Your content needs to start as authentically you as possible before you insert yourself into a broader range of content. Your content is a spear, and you’ll be a lot more effective with it if you use the pointy, focused tip.
Andy Cormier 