Personally, I think that before any creator goes about investing their time and energy in a project, be it a new album, a design product, or an original game, they should first form a relationship with their intended audience both online and offline.
However, this doesn’t always happen. If you’ve already invested hard work and money into a crowdfunding project and are now trying to find the target audience for this project, it will be much more difficult to connect with your potential fans or customers, unless you have a product that genuinely markets itself.
To help with this process of establishing yourself in your target industry, I’ve included a few resources and tips below that might speed up the process of finding influencers and communities in your niche.
Communities
Communities form around interests, great content, people, products, and common missions or values. Often times, communities have guidelines or rules. Failure to abide by these written or unspoken rules can have you labeled as a spammer, or someone who only wants something from other people. The best way to integrate into a new online or offline community is to interact, give, and contribute to the community, before you try to extract value.
There may or may not be an online community that contains members of your target audience. LinkedIn groups, google+ communities, and forums are a great place to start when searching for your target audience online. You can also search for communities surrounding people.
Often times influential bloggers have people that frequently comment on their articles and interact on social media. Looking through an influencer’s followers on Twitter can be one way to get a sense of their audience. You can also use this technique to generate leads that you can interact with on social media, before pitching your campaign.
Using Google Alerts
You can use google alerts to set notifications for key terms. Then, when one of these terms pops up in a newly indexed website, a news article, or a blog, you will be notified via email. Google alerts are a good way to keep tabs on new content being produced in your target industry. You can use them to generate a list of potential journalists and bloggers that may be willing to write about your crowdfunding campaign. You can also use it to track influencers that have an audience in your target industry.
Google Search Tools
With google search tools, you can specify the time, location, and reading level of search results. You can also specify whether you’d like to search through books, blogs, discussions, and news. With such a large array of search features, you can hone in on websites that feature key words in the last 24 hours or bloggers who have written about a particular topic in the pas week. You can even search through discussions to find relevant communities or forums in your target audience.
Image Search
If you have the images used in a popular crowdfunding project, you can use google image search to find articles across the web that include this image. Essentially, you can use google image search to generate a list of bloggers or journalists that have written about a particular type of crowdfunding project in the past, and may be willing to write about yours.
Many times, these websites also have a community surrounding their content that is enthusiastic in tech, music, or film. You can use the image search method to identify your target audience.
Technorati
Finally, Technorati is a great resource for finding blogs that have an audience in your target niche. You can search via industry, tags, people, and blogs or articles.
