Wealthsimple Foundation’s Leen Li on understanding your audience
Editor’s Note: We sat down with Leen Li, Chair of the Wealthsimple Foundation, to tap into her expert insights on understanding your audience. This conversation is part of an exciting new series on our blog, so stay tuned for more thought leadership from top C-suite executives… 
It’s important to read the room — even if the room isn’t a physical space.
That’s where understanding your audience comes into play. When it comes to social media marketing, the most successful campaigns (think: a viral YouTube series about financial literacy that garnered over 1.5 million views) are fueled by solid audience research.
According to Leen Li, Chair of Wealthsimple Foundation, rigorous surveys, data analysis, and feedback gathering are totally worth the effort.
Take the Toronto-based charity’s YouTube venture, Money Master Class, as an example. By tapping into audience insights, they created a series that teaches financial basics like budgeting and building credit.
The result? Over a million combined views and an overwhelmingly positive comments section — because Wealthsimple Foundation knew exactly who they were speaking to.Lucky for us, Li took the time to share Wealthsimple Foundation’s audience research secrets. Keep reading for her expert tips on understanding your audience and actionable steps to help you master the art of reading the (virtual) room.
The importance of knowing your audience
Sometimes, posting on social media can feel like you’re screaming into the void. Which is why knowing your audience matters: only then will you know who’s hanging out in the void and what to yell at them.
“When we’re talking about financial literacy, we need to understand what concepts resonate with our audience and how they consume information,” says Li.
Here’s why audience insights are a game-changer:
Target a specific group. The reason social media can feel like an empty void is because it’s hard to create engaging content for the entire internet. In fact, it’s widely recognized that social media users aren’t easy to please. That’s why defining your niche audience and gearing your digital marketing towards your target demographics will make your job much easier.
You can’t be everything to everyone
Choose the right platforms. Li says that distribution is key: it’s vital to make sure that you know where your audience spends time so you can guarantee that your message gets to them. “You can have the best product and content, but if you can’t distribute to your audience on the proper platform, you’re not going to hit your goal,” she says. That’s why Wealthsimple Foundation used social media to share educational financial literacy content — it’s where the young people are.
Create content they actually care about. Audiences want content that is #relatable, and to relate to someone, you have to take time to learn about them, first.
When we ask our audience for feedback, we see what topics and examples resonate with them most — what they want to hear about
Use the right format. Different audiences prefer different formats when it comes to content. Thanks to Wealthsimple Foundation’s market research, they found that young Canadians gravitate most to simple, short content in video format — that’s why they decided to make a YouTube series (more on that later!).
Make the most of your money. Marketing isn’t free — especially paid posts and boosted content. When you understand your audience and target the right people, you ensure your ROI is as high as possible. Wealthsimple Foundation used both organic and paid content in their marketing strategy, plus audience insights, to make sure that their investments don’t go to waste.
How Wealthsimple Foundation’s Money Master Class was born
Li shares that Wealthsimple Foundation’s goals are primarily to support and educate Canadians regarding finances and financial literacy. Much of their work is focused on students and families that come from low-income or marginalized communities.
The Foundation aims to impact millions of people, so their in-person events, while valuable, weren’t enough alone to meet their goals.
“We needed to up our social media strategy and presence to reach out to people on a mass scale,” Li says. To that end, the Foundation decided to seriously invest in social media content.
“This is actually the first time that Weathsimple Foundation put dollars behind highly produced content,” she explains.
With that investment in mind, the charity decided to do thorough research prior to creating the content itself.
They defined their target audience and learned what elements of financial literacy were most important to them (that’s where the in-person events came in handy — participants would answer a survey and choose from potential topics of interest, like taxes, credit cards and grants).
The three most popular topics were Money Mindsets, Budgeting, and Building Credit, so the Foundation decided to create a video series covering those themes called the Money Master Class.
From there, they gathered intel on what format their audience preferred (short, easy-to-digest videos) and started testing different social platforms.
YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram were put on trial. “For the length of video that we have — each episode runs between 3-5 minutes — it’s considered long-form content on TikTok and Instagram,” Li explains. Because both platforms are so scroll-focused, favoring seconds-long videos, the Money Master Class series wasn’t a good fit there.
YouTube was the winner… and some pilot-paid content proved that further. “We tested our hypothesis by investing some dollars in YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram just to see what the first $1,000 could get us,” Li shares. “The results very obviously favored YouTube.”
When the Money Master Class officially premiered, the very first video, “Money Mindsets,” garnered over 800,000 views. Talk about a solid investment.
8 tips to better understand your audience
1. Be specific about who you want to target
Li admits that the Wealthsimple Foundation’s target audience was too broad at the start.
“We were not really thinking about our audience as strategically as we are right now,” she says, explaining that the charity was aiming content at both students and their parents… so there was a wide range of age, education, wealth, and social media literacy.
“After the first year and a half, we decided to focus our energy and resources in a more strategic way, not everyone, everywhere,” Li says. Wealthsimple Foundation chose to zero in on the 15-24 age group, allowing their marketing strategy to become more specific and intentional.
2. Pay attention to your social media analytics
Social media analytics are free, super valuable, and easy to gather (especially if you’re using a powerful tool like Hootsuite). You can use social media to get insights on what kinds of posts perform the best, so you can focus your resources and time on the types of content that your audience cares most about.
“How you talk to a 15-year-old or 20-year-old is far different from how you talk to a 45-year-old,” Li points out — your analytics will show you what language, ideas, and themes resonate most.
Plus, through in-depth key metrics, analytics can show you how well your social media audience aligns with your target audience.
In a perfect world, that Venn diagram should be a circle — the people you reach on social media are exactly who your content is aimed at. But that’s not always the case.
Use your analytics to see if your intended audience and your target audience match up. If they don’t, it’s a sign something has to change.
PSA: You can use social listening to learn more about your audience, too.
3. Focus on your audience’s lived experience
Weathsimple Foundation’s goal for the Money Master Class series was to educate Canadian youth — especially youth from underrepresented communities — about money.
“Before we started the project, focus group feedback highlighted that our audience wanted their experiences centered in the content,” says Li.
Through surveys, focus groups, and polls, Wealthsimple Foundation created content specifically designed to resonate with them.
That meant hiring talent who looked like their audience, using the language they spoke, and being as relatable as possible. To do this, they partnered with Underscore Studios (a Toronto youth-run agency) to produce the videos.
“We intentionally curated a cast and crew comprised of young people that reflect the diverse communities we aim to serve,” Li explains. “That ensured the series felt authentic both behind-the-scenes and on screen.”
4. Conduct surveys
Gathering audience insights can be tricky, especially online — so, to counteract that hurdle Li recommends using in-person events, whenever possible, to gather data.
Wealthsimple Foundation’s team realized they could use their events to better understand specific audience needs and their pain points and, in-turn, gain intel for future marketing campaigns.
“We’ve done over 250 events over the last three years,” Li notes, explaining that at each event, participants were asked for feedback on what topics resonated with them most.
“That way, we can really understand our audience, and what they want to learn from us,” she says.
5. Actually use the survey results
Maybe it’s a no-brainer, but we’ll say it anyway: your audience’s feedback might not align with your expectations, and that’s okay.
The entire point of conducting polls and surveys is to better understand your audience and use that information to improve your strategy.
Li explains that Wealthsimple Foundation’s first Money Master Class topic, Money Mindsets, likely never would have happened without audience surveys. “Money mindsets wasn’t originally going to be one of the three episodes,” she shares.
“It’s just about your mindset, it’s not traditionally teaching you how to invest or save.” However, surveys of the Foundation’s target audience proved that Canadians aged 15-24 are really interested in how to think and talk about money.
“I was personally a bit surprised about how popular that topic was,” Li admits.
But, the marketing team took the survey results seriously and pivoted — the Money Mindset episode was the first video launched, and it has over 880,000 views (and counting!) on YouTube.
6. Leverage partner organizations whenever you can
This tip is useful for any business, but it’s particularly helpful for non-profits: Li suggests finding local organizations that already have a connection to your target audience and establishing partnerships with them.
This helps build your brand’s community and allows you to tap into a valuable pool of people who are already engaged.
For example, Weathsimple Foundation has partnered with The MINA Project and Toronto Community Housing. These two organizations target the same audience that the Wealthsimple Foundation hopes to reach.
By hosting events together, collaborating on a social post, or even scoring a guest spot in another nonprofit’s newsletter, the organizations help each other out, conducting surveys and feedback polls on behalf of one another.
7. Hire people in your target audience
You’ve likely heard jokes about Gen Zers being behind every viral marketing campaign, and that’s because it’s valuable to be part of your own target audience.
As soon as Wealthsimple Foundation determined that it would focus its marketing efforts on 15-to-24-year-olds, a job posting went up.
“The moment we decided this was our strategy for the next few years, we hired someone who was actually in that age group,” Li says.
“We needed someone who really understands social media, is good at it, and knows what is trending and engaging… an expert,” she shares.
8. Listen to feedback post-launch
“Everything we post on social media — that’s not the last piece,” Li asserts. As much as you may want to give yourself a pat on the back after hitting “Share” (or “Schedule” if you really know what you’re doing), it’s vital to track your audience’s feedback after the content goes live.
The intel you can gather after your marketing campaign is just as valuable as the intel you gathered before, if not more.
“We use the feedback and the comments section to drive our future social media,” shares Li. Noting that since the Money Master Class launch, feedback gathered from high school students indicates that they want to learn more about investing and taxes.
“So, we will prioritize new episodes around this content,” she says.
Key takeaways
This success story from Wealthsimple Foundation isn’t just a chance for them to brag about their excellent social media campaign (or serve as a gentle reminder that you should probably brush up on your financial literacy, too) — it’s a master class in marketing.
In the spirit of the YouTube series’ school theme, let’s go over some lessons learned:
- Defining a clear target audience will help you better focus your time and resources.
- Doing audience research prior to launching a new social campaign will set you up for success.
- Investing in the tools and time it takes to examine your audience is worth it.
- You can learn more about your audience through in-person surveys, online polls, and your social media analytics.
- Getting insight from your target audience (or better yet, hiring them for your marketing team) will ensure your content is approachable and relatable.
- Your audience feels represented (or “seen”) in your content.
- Listening to audience feedback after you post online will improve your future social media strategy.
Okay, class dismissed… unless you want to learn more about finding your perfect target audience.
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