Target audiences with high product affinity, not just obvious category users
Look beyond the obvious target audience for your product category. Identify audiences with high affinity for your product's core experience or mechanics, even if they're not in your category. For example, an interactive coding platform might resonate more with gamers (who love interactive challenges) than traditional coding students. This unconventional targeting can unlock distribution channels competitors aren't exploiting.
When to use
When scaling distribution in a competitive market where direct category channels are saturated. Especially useful for products with unique interaction models that parallel other domains (gaming, puzzles, social, etc.).
Don't do this
Only marketing to the most obvious audience category (e.g., coding platforms only marketing to 'people who want to learn to code') and missing high-affinity adjacent audiences.
1 Founder Who Did This
Discovered that gaming audiences had unexpectedly high affinity for gamified coding education. Instead of only targeting coding audiences on YouTube, Boot.dev partnered with gaming creators whose audiences overlapped with potential developers.