Audience building

How do you build up an audience online? 

That’s a question millions of people ask themselves everyday. And although each situation is different, there are several key components that ring true for everyone. So, what can you do to build an audience?

You Can’t Please Everyone

One of my favorite sayings is, “You can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time.” Your target audience is not the same as trying to drive general traffic to your website. Not everyone is going to want to absorb your content. Too many people often fail by trying to be too diverse. They often strive to engage everyone and will bend over backwards to try to make everyone happy. This is a false ideal. Not everyone is going to be your customer regardless of how hard you try. You want to focus more on those who already have potential to be a consumer. It’ll help drive creating viral content that will increase your exposure.

Identify Where Your Audience Is Hiding

One of the hardest things for content producers to do is to find their audience. It’s not enough to create. After all, what good is art, if there is no-one to share it with? So before you share, you need to find out where the audience for your work is hiding. Your goal isn’t an arbitrary number of followers. Your goal is to find a targeted audience of engaged individuals. Influencers don’t want more followers, they want more leverage. Bloggers don’t want more followers, they want more readers. Companies don’t want more followers, they want more sales. Start by making a list of all of the blogs, youtube channels, companies, platforms and places your audience is likely to visit. This could mean competitor’s websites, social media accounts or popular hashtags. Like a detective, you need to know where to look and what to look for. It seems too obvious, but by using Google, you can narrow your field of view. Getting followers for follower’s sake isn’t a strategy for success. It only inflates your ego, not your bank account. You need to be targeted, focused and specific.

Focus on audience preferences

Examine the priorities, engagement habits, buying behaviors, favored pricing, social media activity, and other details of your current audience for commonalities. Then, use this data to inform or refresh your outreach. You may find, for example, that your most-engaged contacts come from LinkedIn or in response to an email campaign, which can be a cue to emphasize those channels. Or, on the message front, you may discover that your audience responds to an offer for a free consultation with your top creative talent, rather than a price break. Marketing CRM tools and an audience dashboard can help you organize and connect all your audience data. This approach lets you see patterns that can provide insight into how audiences respond, identify what they most want from you, and pinpoint opportunities to create personalized communications that show you understand their needs and desires.

Create a Story

One of the best ways to engage an audience is through storytelling. It goes along the lines with being entertaining. I’m not saying you need to hire a comedian to connect with the audience. But you do need to engage them through a specific plot. For example, create a story for your product or brand with a:

• Beginning. Address a problem your product or service can solve.

• Middle. Detail how you can help solve the problem by showing your goods in action.

• End. Show the end result and how your brand can make someone’s life better.

This is a common practice that’s been around for ages. In fact as I write this, I am reminded of the countless infomercials I saw prior to the days of the Internet. Although many were corny, most were exceptionally effective.

Create a Content Schedule

Most audiences love the idea of having content on a timely and routine schedule. It’s why television and radio stations have time slots. And this sense of reliability is apparent online. Part of developing a good content schedule is having a strategy behind your drive. In reality, you are 429% more likely to be successful if you set and meet goals for your content. The hardest part is discovering when your target audience is the most active. However, there are plenty of tools to help you gauge this. Some platforms even come with their own form of analytic software. This is about structure and being viewed as a reliable brand. And straying from a schedule can cause upheaval within the community you’re trying to create.

Be True to Your Trade

The content you create to build an audience for your website should always revolve around your primary industry. If you sell computer parts, don’t dive into political discussions. If you sell gardening supplies, don’t blog about boating. Your audience is focused on a specific niche category, and you don’t want to stray from it. Otherwise, you could lose some of the audience you’ve already collected. The target audience are those individuals who are most likely to buy products or services. Don’t try to over-reach by engaging other types of consumers. You may inadvertently reduce your capacity to meet the demands of those you want to follow the brand. Here’s an extreme example: when’s the last time you saw a liquor store sell toddler toys? Outside of a general store such as Target, the odds are slim that you will.

Use the Power of Subscriptions

Subscriptions keep the target audience connected with the brand. Things like newsletters and push notifications keep people apprised of new content as well as messages relevant to the brand. Since a lot of these are automated, you don’t have to do much aside from adding them to your website. For example, you can get started right away for free if you use something like WordPress and OneSignal. Using some of the best email services around can easily help cultivate and keep an audience engaged. What I’m getting at here is subscriptions like these work to keep your target audience engaged and coming back for more. This is especially true if you offer something like coupons or discount codes specifically through these subscription systems. It’s much easier to keep selling to someone who is an ardent fan of the brand than to find new customers.

Develop the Brand’s Identity

A brand needs to have a form of identity that is accommodating to the target audience. If you want to engage a younger audience, it takes more energy and a playful quality to the business. Let’s take AARP again. You don’t see this brand marketing to the older audience with teen heart-throbs. The purpose of AARP’s content is to make older audiences feel comfortable. The tone of the business needs to match the tone of the audience. It’s the like-mindedness that draws in consumers. In a way, the brand needs to feel more like a good friend than just some faceless corporation. Just remember to stay true to your brand’s niche, as I stated earlier.

Create Stellar Content

Perhaps one of the best ways to build an audience is to make sure you’re creating amazing content. Whether you’re writing blog posts or creating YouTube videos, your audience needs to absorb some kind of quality material. It’s all about creating content relevant to the brand and giving the audience information they want and need. The material should leave the viewer or reader fulfilled in some fashion. This is one of the reasons why how-to and tutorial articles perform so well on the Internet. Many people inherently want to learn. Usually it’s the do-it-yourself people who simply want to save money. If you create an easy-to-follow guide, the audience will flock to it and may even share it on social media. In reality, you have a number of ways to create viral content among your target audience. It often just takes a bit of imagination and fulfilling the needs of your fans. Whether it’s to empower mentally or financially, your content needs to drive the audience to become fans.