Size your audience with Napkin Math

There are very scientific ways to size an audience. I assume it requires complex data sets and Excel spreadsheets and things that make me break out in a cold sweat. So yeah, I don’t do that. Instead, I’ve learned quick and easy ways to *roughly* size an audience to get stakeholders excited and bought in.

You may be thinking…hey, let’s just go after the whole audience (or the largest audience) and call it a day. If you’ve worked with me, I’ve probably made a slide with something similar to “If you try to talk to everyone, you talk to no one.” (I’m positive I borrowed it from someone else, so thanks whoever that was!) Please, please, please for all that is sacred, narrow down your audience. You can always expand it later.

I recommend prioritizing audiences and then making a decision based on agreed-upon criteria: size or demographics (like income) or interests or lots of different things that GWI can measure. And then, systematically develop strategies that engage each of those audiences.

I also recommend quantifying a target audience for stakeholders. Creative teams want to know the hopes, fears and dreams of the target audience. For the logically-minded folks, they’re looking for something that convinces them that this audience will help achieve their business goals. Spoiler alert: smart audience work can do both!

For the anonymized and WIP-designed example above, I partnered with the lovely and super smart Ryan Parkhurst and Russell Pinke to identify which audiences were most valuable and why. For this engagement, we conducted an in-depth quant survey, a qualitative interview and created GWI profiles to explore our hypotheses from a variety of angles.

It was a blast! I got to nerd out with Russell and he taught me a ton of bonkers things about Excel. Ryan made sure that I didn’t get stuck in the weeds and pulled out sharp points to explore. Together, we identified a somewhat surprising and data-supported recommendation. To stop going after an audience who would likely never be convinced. And instead, to start aggressively nudging the almost-fans to become loyalists.

This project ended up being a patchwork of Napkin Math exercises. And took considerably more time than 2 days (more like a month?). But determining the universe of people who might be worth targeting was an important part of the puzzle. There are roughly 77.5M Medium Mediums in the US. Yes, let's do it!

Are you curious about the size of your current or potential audience? Do you need the answer quickly and without a ton of research? Let me know. I can help.