When I first started out in publishing, I defined my customer audience through demographics.
What’s demographics? Say you’ve pinpointed that your customer is a male born in 1948. He grew up in the UK, lives in a castle, has married twice, and enjoys wealth and fame.
That sounds well and good. You believe you are focused on the specific audience for your creative work. But did you know those demographics apply to King Charles as well as Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath?
This example shows how unreliable demographics are for choosing an audience. Marketers who rely on them are working from outdated information.
For this lesson, I wanted to show why using demographics is flawed. I chose real-world data from my bestselling title as an example.
I wanted to sell copies of my book locally to people in the affluent areas around Exeter where I live. I hired a leaflet drop company, printed the leaflets, and coded each postcode. This way, I could track where the sales came from.
5,000 leaflets went through people’s doors. The result? A tiny amount of website traffic and no sales.
Why? Because it was completely untargeted. I was going after everybody. I wasn’t clear about the specific people I wanted to reach outside their post code and my assumptions about who they might be e.g. members of the RHS, National Trust etc.
Demographics are a fools errand. What you need to focus on is psychographics: the worldview of your ideal customer.
If you’ve written a book or created an online course on a specific topic, you need to be very precise your audience’s ‘worldview.
For my bestseller title, Edible and Medicinal Wild Plants of Britain and Ireland, my audience, through a psychographics lens, is:
People who feel disconnected from their ancestral knowledge. They believe the land has more abundance and meaning than what the status quo teaches. They feel frustrated that everyone else knows something they do not. They think expert foraging knowledge is overwhelming. They want to start as beginners without having to be experts. They value direct, practical experience over abstract knowledge.
There’s also a subtle feeling of rebellion. They believe value goes beyond the economy. It’s open to anyone who has the right knowledge. Their core identity is someone who wants to move from being a passive observer of nature to an active participant.
I recently held an in-person foraging course, and members of the far-right party “Restore Britain” showed up. Near the end of the event, they became contrarian and disruptive. This triggered other group members, as some of their comments were quite outrageous.
I realised in that moment that my messaging wasn’t clear enough. I don’t teach racists or fascists. They’re not allowed at the party.
I’d got sloppy with my messaging, and I had to reassess the worldview of the people I’m trying to reach.
So explore the psychographics of your audience. What do your people believe? What do they value? How do they see the world?
Worldviews, the pocket of people who are going to resonate with your work, can be grouped together. Your job is to find the different pockets of people. Describe them based on their beliefs, worldviews, visions, and fears, rather than their age, gender, profession, post code etc.
When you nail this down — and it can be quite a ball-ache the first time you try — your marketing becomes far more focused. Your offer stands out the moment it reaches these people. Selling becomes easy because you’re validating and talking to their inner world. But you need to know who those people are.
Doing this is also a way for your audience to self-select what supports their worldview. A reader who doesn’t share that worldview is immediately excluded. Selling our creative work isn’t about reaching everybody — that is ineffective, as the Exeter leaflet drop proved.
So forget demographics.
Instead, describe your people by what burns inside them. Don’t just look at what’s written on their driving licence.