3 Ways to Building Your Online Audience

Why Building an Audience is Important 

Building an audience is crucial for any business looking to grow and succeed long-term. Without an engaged audience, it's incredibly difficult to get feedback on your products and services, promote your brand, or drive sales.  

Who is my audience?

Your audience is a group of people who have shown interest in your company, brand, products, or services. This interest leads them to actively follow you on social media, sign up for your email list, engage with your content, make purchases, recommend you to others, and more.

In short, an audience takes actions that directly support your business goals.

What are the three ways you can build your audience?

1. Create Valuable Content 

The key to building an engaged audience is creating content that provides value for them. You need to understand what your audience cares about and create content that educates, entertains, or helps them in some way. 

Some tips for creating valuable content:

- Focus on solving your audience's problems or answering their questions. Provide practical tips and advice they can use.

- Tell stories and use examples your audience can relate to. Stories help connect with readers emotionally.

- Make your content easy to scan and consume, with good formatting and visuals. Chunk content into short paragraphs, use lists and highlight key points.

- Entertain as you educate. Humor and personality make content more enjoyable and shareable. 

- Curate and repurpose existing content into new formats. Turn a blog post into a video or infographic. 

- Get inspiration from trending topics and current events relevant to your audience. Add your own commentary and perspective.

- Promote engagement with questions, polls and calls to action. Ask for feedback and responses.

Providing value builds trust and loyalty with your audience. It gives them a reason to keep coming back to you as an authoritative source that makes their lives better. That's how you turn readers into a community of fans.

2. Engage With Your Audience

Engaging with your audience is crucial for building loyalty and trust. Make an effort to respond to comments and questions on your content in a timely manner. This shows you care about your audience and value their input. 

Ask your audience for feedback through polls or surveys. This provides valuable insights into what resonates with them and what they'd like to see more of. You can even ask them questions directly in your content or social posts. Not only does this make them feel heard, but you gain first-hand data to refine your strategy.

Aim to foster a two-way conversation with your followers. Social media is the perfect platform for this engagement in real time. Respond to mentions and comments with thoughtful replies. Ask questions to spur discussion. This helps strengthen the relationship and community around your brand.

3. Choose Your Platforms Wisely

When building your audience, it's important to focus your efforts on just a few key platforms, rather than spreading yourself too thin. Do your research to find out where your target audience is most active online. 

Focus on establishing a strong presence on just one or two social media sites and/or content platforms that are highly relevant for your brand. For example, if you're a B2B company, you'll likely want to focus on LinkedIn rather than TikTok. If you're a food blogger, focusing on Instagram and Pinterest could be ideal.

Really get to know the platforms you choose and optimize your presence for them. Create content specifically tailored for that platform and post consistently. Make sure your profile is completely filled out and portrays your brand identity. Interact regularly with others on the platform. 

It's better to have a thriving presence on just a platform or two than a mediocre presence spread thinly across many sites. Once you've built a solid foundation on your initial choices, you can consider expanding. But keep the 80/20 rule in mind. 80% of your effort should go to the vital 20% of platforms for your goals.

Key reasons why building an audience is so important!

Feedback: An audience provides invaluable feedback through comments, surveys, reviews, social media interactions, and more. This helps you improve and tailor your offerings.

Promotion: Audiences share and promote your content and products organically. This word-of-mouth marketing is more trusted than ads.

Sales: The larger your audience, the more potential customers you have. Audiences directly convert into revenue through purchases, subscriptions, donations, etc.

Loyalty: Audiences who connect with your brand tend to remain loyal over the long-term. This provides stability and growth potential.

Influence: A large, engaged audience gives you credibility and sway in your industry. You have greater ability to affect change.

In today's digital world, every business needs to actively build an audience that believes in their brand. With a core group of supporters, you’ll find it much simpler and easier to be heard and succeed.

Your Marketing Coach

-Shenequa ❤️