The Audience Building Question Most Artists Skip

Originally delivered as part of the Inner West Council Creative Toolbox Program 2026.

Who is your work for?

And how do they currently find out about you?

The first question, most artists can answer. The second one tends to produce a pause. A vague gesture toward Instagram. An honest "I have no idea."

That gap — between knowing who your work is for and actually knowing how to reach them — is where most artists spend a lot of time, energy, and low-grade anxiety. It's also completely fixable. Not with more posting, or a better Instagram grid, or a publicist. With a framework.

Here's the one I use.

Before you pick a channel, define who you're actually talking to

This is the step most artists skip entirely, and it's the reason so much audience-building effort produces so little result. You can have a perfectly executed social media strategy that's talking to entirely the wrong people.

When I ask artists to describe their audience, they usually reach for demographics — age range, location, art-form interest. That's a starting point. But demographics don't tell you how to reach someone. Psychographics do.

Psychographics are what your audience believes, values, cares about, and does with their time. Two people with identical demographics can have completely different relationships to your work — and completely different media habits. A 38-year-old woman in the inner west who reads literary fiction and attends experimental theatre is a very different audience member from a 38-year-old woman in the inner west who doesn't. Same demographic. Completely different person to reach.

A useful exercise: describe your ideal audience member not by who they are, but by what they care about. Then ask yourself what they do on a Tuesday night.

That second question is deliberately concrete. It gets you out of marketing abstractions and into actual human behaviour — which is where all of your channel decisions need to live. What someone does on a Tuesday night tells you a great deal about where they are, what they're reading, whose work they're already paying attention to, and what kind of invitation they'd actually respond to.

Your audience is three groups, not one

Most artists think about audience as a single category: the people who already come to their work. The people who show up, buy the ticket, follow the account. But sustainable audience building requires you to think across three distinct layers simultaneously — because each one calls for a different approach.

Your existing audience — people who already know and value your work. Small but high-trust. Your job here is to retain them and deepen the relationship, not to grow. They're also your best source of intelligence about the next layer, because understanding what your existing audience has in common tells you exactly where to look for more of them.

Your adjacent audience — people who don't know you yet but share values, interests, or communities with your existing audience. This is your most realistic growth pool. They're already primed for what you do; they just haven't found you. Most of your audience-building energy should go here, because these are the people who will understand your work immediately once they encounter it.

Your influencer audience — programmers, curators, critics, community leaders, editors. They don't necessarily consume your work themselves, but they control access to people who will. One champion in this layer can put you in front of thousands of already-primed people. This is the layer most artists neglect because it doesn't feel like audience building — but it often produces the biggest leaps.

Different strategies speak to different layers. Knowing which layer you're trying to reach at any given point changes everything about which channel makes sense, and what success actually looks like.

Three channels. One question.

Every audience-building activity available to artists falls into one of three channels — and the most important thing to understand about each is who controls the reach.

Publicity is borrowed reach. A journalist or editor decides whether to cover you, and their audience trusts their endorsement in a way they'll never trust your own promotion. One well-placed feature can reach more new people in a day than months of social media — and it lives online indefinitely, becoming part of your professional record and your grant application history. But you need a story, not an announcement. Editors aren't looking for "artist has show" — they're looking for a human journey, a cultural hook, a community angle, something that gives their readers a reason to care beyond your existing reputation.

Social media is rented reach. You control the message. The platform controls who sees it. The mechanism is repeated, recognisable presence over time — which means it rewards consistency above everything else, and punishes the burst-and-burn approach most artists take. Here's what most people miss: the content that builds audiences isn't the promotional post about your show. It's the process content, the perspective, the story behind the work — the things that make someone feel like they know you before they've met you. Announcements convert people who are already warm. Everything before that is what gets them there.

Community engagement is owned reach — and it's the most underestimated of the three. It means building genuine presence in the spaces where your audience already exists: arts venues, festivals, and organisations, but also community groups, councils, libraries, and non-arts spaces that share your values or your subject matter. It means collaborating with other artists, contributing to others' platforms before asking them to contribute to yours, and showing up consistently rather than only when you have something to promote. The audiences built this way are the most durable because they're built on relationship rather than algorithm — no platform change can take them from you.

One thing worth knowing: your most passionate audience might not identify as an arts person at all. An artist making work about grief, migration, or the environment often finds their deepest connection through communities organised around those themes. That's a community engagement insight — and it opens up a much wider field than most artists consider when they're thinking about where to put their energy.

The question that actually matters

Once you understand the three channels, the most common response is: I need to do all of them.

You don't. As a one-person practice with limited time and energy, trying to do all three at half-capacity produces worse results than doing one well. The goal isn't to cover the bases. It's to build something that actually compounds.

Three questions help narrow it down:

What are you trying to achieve right now? A specific event or milestone in the next one to three months points toward publicity. Sustained presence over six to twelve months points toward social media or community. Long-term relationship-building points toward community first. The channel should follow the goal, not the other way around.

Where does your audience already live? Your psychographic work should point you here. If they're active on a specific platform, go there. If they're embedded in a particular community or geography, meet them there. If they read specific media, that's your pitch list. The most efficient audience building meets people where they already are rather than asking them to come find you.

What can you actually sustain? This is the one people skip because it feels like settling. It isn't. The best channel is the one you'll use consistently over months, not the one that's theoretically most effective. An inconsistent presence on three platforms is worth less than a consistent one on one.

The channels do compound over time — publicity drives people to your social media, social media builds the trust that makes community engagement feel like a natural extension, community relationships create advocates who share your content and tip off journalists. But you don't need to build all three simultaneously. Build one properly. Layer the next when the first feels stable.

That's not a limitation. That's a strategy.

Building Your Audience is part of the Inner West Council Creative Toolbox Program 2026 — a series of professional development workshops for artists. If you're interested in having me deliver this workshop for your organisation or council, get in touch.