What Most Experts Get Wrong About Understanding Their Audience

If you've struggled to choose a niche, or you're afraid of building everything around the wrong audience, the problem may be where you started.

Most of us were taught to begin with the market: define your niche, research pain points, learn the exact words your audience uses. It sounds responsible. But it trains you to shape your message around what already exists, which is exactly how experts end up sounding interchangeable.

In this episode, I share a different starting point: understanding how you see the problem before you try to define who you serve. When you do, choosing an audience stops being about narrowing and starts being about recognition. You begin to see where your work naturally lands, and who immediately recognizes themselves in the way you describe their situation.

This is Part 2 of my 3-part Building Your Authority series. If you haven't heard Part 1, start there.

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Marketing Your Truth Collective
Workshops, trainings, and live support to help you clarify your Why-You Factor and see your audience through that lens.

https://elinatoli.com/collective

Thank you so much for tuning in to Marketing Your Truth™! If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from aligning their marketing with their values.

To stay updated on future episodes, visit https://marketingyourtruth.com, and follow me on LinkedIn, @EliNatoli. 

See you next time, where we’ll dive deeper into how to build authentic connections with your audience. 

Transcript

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This episode is part two of three-part series on what it actually takes in 2026 to build and grow an online business given where we are in today's skeptic saturated market. And why so many really smart, even people who are seasoned and experienced, right now are feeling stuck trying to figure out how to grow their business or how to get back to the momentum that they once had and make profits again. Now, in the previous episode, episode 19, I talked about why we're no longer in the era where you could simply take what you know, something that was based on your expertise, your experience, your passion, and turn it into a solution, and then rely on your marketing and promotions to make it work, to sell your solution. Now, that was the model that many of us relied on for years, from roughly around 2010 through 2022. It was the most reliable path to building a business. But that approach doesn't work anymore in 2026. Now, if you haven't listened to episode 19, I highly recommend starting there first because in that episode, I go into details about what it actually takes today in 2026 and in the foreseeable future to build a profitable business. I explained in that episode why I strongly believe that we are now in what I call the age of authority, meaning that your buyers, your clients, they are not just comparing one solution to another, but they're trying to decide which one will work best for them. And before they even get to the point of evaluating the solution itself, they're evaluating the person behind the solution. And they might not even be consciously aware that they're doing this. In fact, you're probably doing it right now in your own life. When you're looking to solve a problem, when you're looking for a specific outcome or solution, you are either consciously and some of it subconsciously asking yourself questions like, do I trust the person behind the solution? Do I believe that their approach is going to be the viable solution or the right approach for me? Do I believe they actually understand my specific situation? And if those answers aren't there, they're not obvious, the solution itself almost doesn't even matter. Which means your authority, how you see the problem, how you think about it, how you approach solving the problem is no longer optional. It's foundational. And in the last episode, I also introduced the first piece of that foundation, which is your why you factor, the clarity around what you see, how you interpret the problem, and why your voice is the right voice that your prospect should be listening to or leaning into. Now, today we're going to move into the second piece of this foundation, which is all about your audience. But more specifically, how you see your audience, and as a result of that, how they get to feel seen by you. So again, the second part of this foundational piece is about your audience. And this is one of the most misunderstood parts of building a business. Because most of us were taught to approach this in a very specific way. What I mean by that is as soon as you have an idea that you want to take to the market, you're told to go to understand your audience. You're told to define your niche, resource your audience's pain points within that niche, figure out what they want to hear, figure out what the desired outcome is that they're looking for, learn the exact words that they use to describe the problem or the solution or the outcome. And then you're told to build your messaging around that. Now, on the surface, that sounds responsible, right? It sounds like you're being thoughtful, you're being thorough, you're being um logical, you're doing your due diligence. But here's something that is really subtle that's happening underneath this approach that most of us don't even realize. And that is you're being trained to look outward before you fully looked inward. You're being trained to shape your message around what already exists in the market instead of anchoring it in what you actually see. And this is exactly where things start to break down. Because what starts to happen is this your messaging might sound right, it might sound polished, but it will become interchangeable. There's no distinction between what you're saying and what dozens or hundreds of other people in your space are saying as well, because they're taking the same approach. They're taking this outward approach. And so as a result, you end up constantly adjusting, refining, second-guessing yourself, trying to get everything to click and trying for your voice to rise above. And the other thing that you might be wrestling, this is something that I see a lot of people wrestle with, is you might start thinking, well, my solution could work for multiple audiences, but I don't know which one to choose. Or my solution could work across multiple industries. So which one should I go after? And then of course, you're told that the answer is simply to niche down, which for a lot of people, this immediately brings up a lot of fear. It did for me, because once you start thinking about choosing a specific niche or specific audience, the problem or the fear is that, well, what if I pick the wrong one? What if I put all this time and effort into building my marketing around a specific audience or for a specific market and it doesn't work for me? Right? What if I go down this path, invest months or even years, and then realize that I have to go back to square one because I chose the wrong direction. So if that is you, if that's something that you've wrestled with, or you find yourself constantly changing audiences, constantly changing your industry, your niche, or your messaging as a result of that, and you're still not sure if you're on the right path, it's often because the advice that you've been given about how to understand your audience is flawed at the root. It's flawed to begin with. Because if you look a little deeper at what you're actually being told to do, what you'll notice is this. You're essentially being told to study what people want. And then you're being told to shape your messaging, your copy, your positioning in the market around what they want to hear. And this is where things, again, like I said earlier, start breaking down because if you look at anyone who you admire, who's built a real authority in the market, I'm talking people like Seth Godens, Brene Brown's, Simon Seneck, like whoever who's built a category one platform that you admire, you look up to. What you'll notice is that they didn't build their work that way. They didn't start with their audience. They didn't go to the market and ask it to tell them who to be or what to say. They didn't contort themselves to fit a certain narrative or demographic. They started somewhere else entirely. What they did was start with a clear point of view about a specific problem and a clear belief about how that problem should be solved. A point of view that's shaped by their own lived experience, by observation, by time spent in proximity to the problem. And at some point, they either experience something firsthand or they observe something closely enough and long enough that they developed a conviction around how this problem needs to be solved. A conviction that says this problem isn't being solved the right way. The way this problem is usually approached is incomplete, or there's something important being overlooked here. And that's why people are still stuck. So the very first question they ask isn't who is my audience, or how big is the market that I'm gonna step into? The questions start looking like, what is my audience doing right now to try to solve this problem? And why the things that they're trying right now either is failing to help them solve the problem, or actually it's worse, it's backfiring or making the situation worse. And what do I understand about solving this problem that actually works, not just temporarily, but in a meaningful, lasting way? Now, of course, these are very high-level questions. When I work with clients, whether it's one-on-one or inside the Marketing Your Truth Collective, we go a lot deeper than this. There are multiple layers that we explore to fully uncover what's at the core of how you see your audience, how you see their circumstances, and how you believe the way to help them get to that solution needs to happen. But even if you just stay at this higher level with the questions that I just asked, I'm sure you can start to see a difference in the way that you are thinking about your audience or the way that you're thinking about their circumstances. Because when you do that, you're not just studying people, your audience, from the outside, you're recognizing them from within the problem that you understand. You're looking at them through the context of what you already understand about the problem and about the solution. There's perspective there, there's interpretation, there's context. And that context is what you're actually after when you look at your audience. That context is what gives your voice authority. Because when you take this approach, your audience research is not going to be about guessing or fitting in, it is about recognition. You're essentially recognizing the people who are already living inside the problem that you understand deeply, who are ready for the way that you see and solve it. And this distinction matters more than people realize. Because when you're observing your audience from outside, detached from your own perspective, your own unique lens, what you're doing is trying to piece things together. You're collecting data points, you're listening for patterns, you're trying to understand what people are saying, and then you're reflecting it back to them in a way that you're hoping it would resonate with them. But when you're recognizing your audience from within the problem, from how you're seeing the problem, from your context, from your lens, you're not guessing, you're truly seeing them. And what you'll start noticing is that, like, you might hear your prospects describe their situation in a certain way, and immediately you understand what's underneath that situation. You can see where things are falling apart, you can see the gaps between what they think the problem is and what's actually keeping them stuck. You can recognize exactly where are the moments where things start to go off rails for them, off track for them. And that level of clarity changes how you communicate when you go to the market. You're no longer trying to say the right things, you're describing what's actually happening from your own viewpoint. And the interesting thing about that is when your ideal buyers, when they hear you, it lands differently for them because you're telling them something that I guarantee you, when you do this, when you take this inside out approach, almost majority of people in your market is not even looking at it that way or talking about it that way. It is very, very deep. It's not surface level. And this is where that deep connection and trust begin to surface. Now, it's also worth underlining this. As you can tell, you can get here without first understanding your own why you factor, what you see, why what you see is the right way, why you believe your way of approaching the problem or solving this problem, getting to the solution is the right approach, is the complete approach. So before trying to understand your audience, the order matters. You have to start with you, because when you skip this first part, when you go straight to audience research without grounding yourself in your own perspective, in your own lens, again, you are outsourcing your authority. You're gonna start letting the market tell you what matters, what to emphasize, what to say, how to say it. Now, there is also something else that's happening underneath all of that that most people don't realize. Again, the way that we've all been taught to approach understanding our audience and understanding our place in the market comes from a very specific kind of marketing initiatives or marketing best practices, which is all about starting with demand. What I mean by that is you look at what your audience, your prospects would want, and then you define your audience based on that demand. So you start studying their pain points, and then you shape your message around those pain points. And from there, what happens is most people start competing. You're in a place at that point that you're competing on being the most clear one or competing on having the best messaging or even pricing. Now, that approach can work in certain types of markets, but it also creates a very specific outcome, no matter which market you're in. What it does is it puts you in direct competition with everyone else doing the same thing. So if you are feeling like, oh my gosh, my market is too crowded, um, you know, there are all these people saying the same things as I'm doing, that's what's happened. You are in demand capture marketing without even realizing it. Essentially, you and everybody else in your niche are starting from the same place. And you're all shaping your message around what already exists in the market. And that's how your message and even your solution starts to become interchangeable. If they, you know, remove your name or remove your logos or your branding, you end up sounding like everybody else. Your solution starts looking like everybody else because the way that it's being expressed is filtered through what the market already expects to hear from you. And again, this is exactly where so many experts start to feel really stuck and start to get on this treadmill of outmarketing and spending almost 70 to 80 percent of their time chasing and marketing and promoting themselves because they're trying to choose an audience while standing inside a model that was never designed for the kind of work that they do. Okay. You as an expert, what you bring into the market is something that is transformational. And even if you believe that what you do is different than everybody else in your niche, in your market, even if you believe that your solution is more effective, you still end up blending in because the way you're expressing it has been shaped by what already exists instead of what you actually see. And so again, I want to go back to what we touched on about niching down. People who have genuinely differentiated, deep transformational solutions, what they don't realize is that their solution can work for multiple types of people. It can work across industries, it can work for different stages within that industry, it can work for different situations. And that's why, you know, when you're being told to pick the right audience, it starts to feel heavy because it feels like this high-stakes decision of what if I choose the wrong audience? But again, that pressure is there because you're starting from the wrong place. If you start by getting clear on your own why you factor, when you understand how you uniquely see the problem that your audience is dealing with, when you're grounded in your own perspective, your own unique way of looking at the problem and the solution, choosing an audience is not about narrowing, it's about alignment. Okay, think about that and sit with that. When you choose an audience and when you choose a market to step into, you're not doing it because you were told to niche down. You're doing it because you want to be in total alignment with the type of work that you're doing. Because you have done the work, because you have looked at your own why you factor, and now you're looking at your audience through that context, what you start to notice is that you're asking questions in terms of where does this problem show up most clearly? Who immediately recognizes themselves when I describe it this way? Where does my way of thinking create the most relief, the most clarity, the most traction? And so instead of forcing yourself into a niche, you recognize where your work naturally lands. And then from there, and only from there, does it make sense to look outward at the market? And what you're doing there is pretty much understanding or trying to understand how this problem is currently being talked about within that niche, within that market. What's being repeated by everybody else in that market, what's being oversimplified, what's being overlooked, what's being missed. Now we're gonna go into more details of this last layer in the next episode, which is all about market gaps. Where does your voice and your perspective fit into a particular market? And what are the needs within that market that is not being filled by anybody else? Right. So we're gonna go into details of that, and that would be the third part of the foundation. But for the time being, what I want you to sit with and take away from this episode is this never ever start trying to figure out who your audience is. Always, always, always start by understanding how you specifically see the problem. How do you specifically think is the right way to solve that problem? Because when you're clear there, your audience is no longer something that you have to define. It becomes something that you recognize. And by the way, this is exactly the type of work that we do inside the Marketing Your Truth collective. When you step into the collective, the very, very first thing that I help everyone do is to define these foundational pieces, understanding and clarifying their own YU factor, and then helping you to go through understanding your audience through the lens of your YU factor, and then understanding where are the unmet needs in your market. And you'll do this work with hands-on workshops where I'm taking you through exercises for you to brainstorm and dig out all these gold pieces. And when you go through that work, now you have a collection of your own unique perspectives. And then from there, you're going to be guided through a series of hands-on exercises to channel your unique perspectives and what you see and how you solve the problem into your marketing pieces, specifically into a marketing flywheel, which is a way for you to create marketing initiatives where every single one of them compounds as time goes on. So you're never starting from scratch. If this is something that you could benefit from where you are at this stage of your business, you can learn more about it at elianatoly.com slash collective.com slash collective. And in the next episode, we're gonna go deeper into how your perspective finds its place in the market and how that's what's ultimately going to position you as the clear choice for your audience. I'll see you then. And if this episode spoke to you, will you take a second to leave a quick rating or review? It really helps others find this show and join this movement of purpose-driven entrepreneurs using their gifts to make a real difference, not just a living. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here. And if you haven't subscribed yet, now is the time. There is so much goodness coming in 2026, and I don't want you to miss a single episode.