GoCorral

How do I use the customer profiles that I wrote?

I’ve got three main TTRPG products that I produce. The Setting the Stage podcast is the most prominent one at the moment. I’ve got my video content that I post on YouTube and TikTok. Finally, I have the gocorral.com blog, right here! I’ll focus on just Setting the Stage for now.

The Data

The podcast is unique among the other creative things I produce because I can get some audience demographic data. People who use Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube can volunteer to share some demographic information about themselves on their accounts. That info gets logged and matched with my show in aggregate. So I don’t know that listener #14528 lives in Chicago, but I do know a certain percentage of my audience lives in the United States.

Spotify metrics show my audience as 86.4% male, 8.4% female, and the remaining as other or non-specified. No surprises there that TTRPG content is mostly male in audience. As far as age there is a bell curve of ages between 18 to 59 with 2% of my listeners at 60+. YouTube shows a similar bell curve of ages with a few more in the teenager range of 13-17.

Apple probably has a lot of data, but they don’t share much with me. All I get from them is that most of my audience is in the United States with Canada a distant second.

I don’t actually need help for the location demographics though. All the downloads have to go through my host at ACast which is at least able to track where the downloaded episode is going. From that I can see that 50% of my audience is in the United States. The rest seems split across most of Europe, Canada, and Australia. Latin America has a small percentage. While there are some downloads in India, Africa, and the Middle East, its nothing significant. Absolutely zero downloads from China due to their Great Firewall.

Analysis

So from all of that I learn that my assumptions about my audience are largely accurate. They live mostly in the United States. They are mostly male. What I did learn is that my audience is also mostly of a working age, but no particular focus among those ages.

The age fact is the most useful. That tells me that most of my audience is not Petes or Gregs. Pete is too young. And also probably not engaged enough to listen to hour long lore-based podcasts. Gregs aren’t listening to my podcast. The true Greg started playing D&D while attending college in the 70s. Greg should be 60+, but with very few people in that category I know I’m probably not getting much of that customer profile.

The ten to one ratio of males to females probably indicates that my audience mostly falls into the Carson profile. Not that all women are Francies or all men are Carsons. But we can assume that more of the profiles lean in those directions.

It’s important to keep in mind that demographics are not the same thing as customer profiles. Demographics can frequently overlap with customer profiles, but they are actually tracking something different. Customer profiles are what’re called psychographics. They describe personalities, customer opinions, and behavior. A teenage girl can be a Greg and a elderly man can be a Francie. It’s just more likely to be the other way around.

Actions?

What can I do with this information though?

Well, podcasts are very hard for people to stumble upon while browsing the internet. The goal would typically be to craft specific advertising messages to target different customer profiles. But I don’t do any ads for my podcast. At least, not yet.

When designing ads I need to consider which customer profile a particular ad is trying to target.

Pete Power Gamer – I don’t think my podcast would have much appeal to Pete. I can’t convince him to listen without misrepresenting what the podcast is. No need to target an ad here.

Francie Feminist – Francie might like some of my episodes. The particular ones I’ve had that have focused on social issues might hit better than others. 34 – Maura and Spire, 40 – Kevin and Wing Women, 48 – Udy and Pendragon, 50 – Emma & Maia and Yeld, 53 – Maia and Pinehurst Academy, and 70 – Sensei Suplex and Project Aurora might be good fits. I could pull some nice clips from those episodes for different advertisements to put on other podcasts. Ideally the audience of those other podcasts would be primarily Francies so that my message hits the intended customer profile.

Greg Grognard – This customer profile might run into an issue. That being, there don’t appear to be many Gregs listening to my podcast. I’d need to ad swap with a different podcast that has a strong Greg audience. Unfortunately, I don’t know which podcasts like that which would also be willing to ad swap with me. Because if the other podcast is mostly Gregs, then they wouldn’t get much out of an ad on my show! That said, Greg would probably like episodes 9 – Scraw and Gnomestones, 14 – Nathan and Aenea, 15 – Hayden & Carson and Egress, 19 – John and Onlap, 39 – Jeph and Big Campaign, and 47 – Malcolm and Our Town.

Carson Creator – I suspect that most of my audience is Carsons. So structuring marketing messages to Carson shouldn’t be too difficult. I posted a poll on my Discord server to see what people liked about the Setting the Stage.

Not a clear winner, but homebrew lore was the most popular along with homebrew TTRPG systems being a close second. I know that most of the people in the server fit the Carson customer profile because the population on the STS Discord is mostly guests on my show. They aren’t all Carsons, but most of them are.

The best content for Carson is probably showing off episodes where the guest has finished or is close to publishing a TTRPG product. 14 – Nathan and Aenea, 21 – OnslaughtSix and Aerda, and pretty much every episode from episode 37 and onwards are all good fits for that.

Conclusion

Thinking of which content to recommend to Greg, Francie, Peter, and Carson isn’t enough. The broader use of the customer profiles is appealing to their needs and desires. Greg wants to feel justified in sticking to the Old School Renaissance way of playing games. Francie wants to open up the hobby to more people. Pete wants to feel powerful. Carson wants to be noticed. Theoretically most of my episodes could appeal to all four of the customer profiles. I just need to frame them in the correct way.

Actually making ads for ad swaps and for social media is a whole new thing for me. Actually executing this barely outlined strategy is going to be exciting and new. Just gotta do it!