How to Build an audience the smart way

Click here to get this post in PDF

We earn commissions if you shop through the links on this page.

Building an audience is hard right? With all the noise in the market, it’s almost impossible to catch people’s attention let alone make them actually stay and become loyal… However, it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve over the years of doing marketing online crafted a step by step process that I’ve used to get 10,000+ visitors a month on my website and 280,000+ impressions a month on Pinterest.

Today I’m going to show this exact strategy so you can replicate the success by yourself and take your business to the next level. Let’s get right into it!

The most crucial, but also the most overlooked step when building an audience

A lot of people skip this step, well, that’s a big opportunity for you to win an advantage. The thing I’m talking about is analyzing and doing research.

Most people think they already know their audience well enough, don’t walk into that trap. By not really knowing which problems your audience is facing you’ll not be able to know what they really want. And… If you arent giving them what they want then it’ll not matter how many blog posts, YouTube videos, or social media posts you put out. You’ll just come off as more and more annoying.

So how do you really study your audience the right way? That’s what I’m going to show you now.

1. Start with yourself…

Before you can start to study your audience, you need to study yourself. The reason for that is simple: If you aren’t knowing yourself you’ll not know who to target. So the first thing you need to do is to ask yourself the following questions:

• Who do I like to serve?
• Which group do I have the most experience working with?
• What group would be the most profitable to work with?
• Which group are in the most need of my help?

Now narrow down to the exact group you want to target.

Done?

So now you’ve come further than 90% of all business owners. Sounds crazy? I get it, but it’s outstanding how big percentage of all business owners that don’t have any clue of who they want to target. And as the saying goes… If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to none.

Now to the next step…

How to actually learn to know your customers better than themselves

This is the step where the magic happens. It’s here you’re going the find the way to position yourself to really stand out as the only alternative. So how do you do that?

The first step is to know where to search. Look where you audience are hanging out, here are some examples:

• Facebook groups
• Linkedin
• Forums
• Live events
• Twitter
• Meetups
• In influencers social feed

Now go to these places and search for the answers to these questions:

1. What is holding them up at night?
2. What makes them angry?
3. Which trends are uprising in their niche?
4. What are their top 3 daily frustrations?
5. Which words, are they using when describing their problem?
6. What does a normal day for them look like?
7. What do they dream of?
8. Who do they admire?
9. Which other companies have tried to sell to them and failed?
10. Which other companies are successfully selling similar products to them?

When you’ve found answers to some of the questions it’s time to move forward to the next step…

Study your competetion

To be able to position yourself the right way you’ll have to know what your competition is doing. If you for example are running a business in the fitness industry and see that the people in your target audience have 2 main problems: weight gain and fatigue.

Then the next step would be to look for what competition is focusing the most on. If your competition is focusing mostly on weight gain then you’ll be able to position yourself as different if your content has a higher focus on increasing your energy.

You should although not only study your competition to see what you can do differently. Also, learn from them, but remember:

Learn from your competition but never copy, copy and you die

– Jack Ma

To be able to do research in the most effective way possible I’ll highly recommend you a tool called SEMrush. With this tool you’ll be able to see:

• Which pages on your competitor’s websites that’s getting the most traffic
• What content is getting the most social shares
• Which keywords are getting the most traffic
• Which keywords are the easiest to rank for
• How to make your PPC campaigns more successful
• Which niches are the most profitable once

The right way to build an audience on social media

If you want to build an audience you’ll need to have a social presence. But to be honest, It’s not easy to keep up with all of these platforms:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram 
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIn
5. Snapchat 
6. Tiktok
7. Pinterest

Yes, it is… if you aren’t having an entire team it’ll be upright impossible to hold a presence in all of them. So what should you do? It’s easy, don’t focus on all of them. Instead, focus on those platforms that your audience hangs out on. In that way, you’ll be way more likely to build a following. Think about it why would you want to focus on platforms that your audience aren’t even spending time on.

Build relationships

When it comes to social media this is key, that’s why it’s called a “social” network and not a “self-promoting” network. Although most businesses you using it like that. Instead, focus on the other users and build real relationships with them. Not:

– “Great pic… By the way, I got the best carpeting firm in the entire San Diego area”

It’s easy to look through those kinda things, instead, you need to have all of your focus on the user. Join Facebook groups where people in your target audience are hanging out. Then help people out for free. If you’re doing that you’ll not only get contacts that’ll be willing to share your content, you’ll also establish yourself as an authority.

Don’t overthink

The reason why most people are having almost no presence at all on social media is that they’re overthinking too much. Either they are too afraid to upset someone or they are scared of being punished by the algorithm. By posting a lot of content without overthinking too much you’ll gain 3 main benefits:

1. You’ll get more optimization data
2. Way more people will notice you
3. You’ll be able to be more creative which will help you with standing out

For example, if your passion is for music, you can share information about famous guitar players, guitar maintenance, lessons for playing guitar, or music in general. 

Be Consistent

Well, I think you already know that you should be consistent when it comes to social media updates. However, right now I’m talking about another kind of consistency and that’s that your message needs to have consistency. What that means is that all your posts shall follow the message that you want to deliver.

That means if you’re a financial advisor with the main message to make people live more frugal lives and make decisions for your future, then you should not post quotes about “live for the night”. If you’re doing this kind of mistake you’ll:

• Not be able to communicate as clearly as you could with your audience
• Coming off as a hypocrite
• Annoy your audience (they are getting disrupted by other things than the one they follow you for)
• Not be able to build loyal fans (to do that you must stand for something)

This may sound like something obvious but it is an important mistake that people are making. By now being aware of it you’ll be way more likely to communicate in the most effective way possible to your audience.

Write blogposts

Another way to create an audience is by running a blog. To create big audiences through blogging you’ll only need to do 2 things. Yeah, not 1,000 only 2. Here are they:

1. Write content that your audience likes.
2. Promote the content.

That’s it.

But now to the little bit trickier part; how do you actually know what content your audience likes and how do you know which way is the right one? Here’s a step by step guide of how to do it:

1. Craft the right content

The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you are crafting the content that you’re audience really wants. So how do you do that? It’s actually pretty easy.

Step 1. Just take the information that you gathered about your audience in the first step.

Step 2. Go into the SEMrushs “keyword magic tool” there you’ll see exactly how many people are searching for the term every month, plus suggestions of other popular keywords, and how hard it is to rank for.

Step 3. Search for the keywords that have the has the best difficulty/search volume ratio.

Step 4. Look at your competitors’ blog posts at these keywords and make sure to write something 10 times better.

Okay, you know how to choose the best keyword to go for now is the next step to actually create great content. This video will show you exactly how to:

2. Promotion 

On the internet, there are 600 million different blogs. that means that it’s a pretty big chance that nobody will see your great blog post if you aren’t spending time on promoting it. So how do you promote content the right?

It’s a thousand different ways to promote your content by showing them all to you I’d be leaving you way more confused than before you read this article. That’s why I’m only going to show you the 5 most effective once. Here are they:

1. Guest posting

This is one of the oldest tricks in the game when it comes to promoting content. A lot of people do say that guest posting is dead. Is that true? Well… It depends if you’re in B2C: yes. If you’re in B2B: It depends. 

Let me explain what I mean by “it depends” most people aren’t getting results when doing guest posting. Does that mean that it doesn’t work? NO.

They are just doing it the wrong way. Here’s how to do it the right way:

1. Give bonuses to the readers like a free report etc. This will make them come over to your site.
2. Have patience. It will take about 2 years for you to see results most people are giving up before that point.
3. Write at least 5 blog posts a week. The goal with guest-posting is to become omnipresent to your audience.

2. Email people, you’ve linked out to and ask them to share

This is a very basic yet effective one. Make it a routine to link out to some authority in your niche in the articles you write. Then email them and ask them to share the content. This will give will make you able to reach out to a way bigger part of your target audience.

3. Contact people who’ve shared/linked to similar content

This is one is really easy and only takes around 20 minutes extra for each blogpost. However, it can deliver some serious results. The only thing you need to do is to get a list of similar articles, that you find on the web. Search for their URLs on social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. When you’ve seen the people that have shared them reach out to them and show your piece.

4. Help a reporter out

HARO is a network where people can give tips to journalists who need help with information. In exchange, you’ll get sited as a source and get a link. By using this technique you can get backlinks from high-quality sites like Fast Company even if you’re completely unknown.

Responding to the perfect HARO query will give you an opportunity to pitch yourself as a source.

5. Network with influencers in your niche

Do you want backlinks, social shares, collaborations, or guest post opportunities?

Well, by building relationships with other authorities, you’ll be able to get all of them effortlessly. It is no trick to doing this, just see it as making friends.

Leverage videos

We are living in a completely visual culture today. Remember that one “A picture is worth a thousand words“? Well, a video is worth ten thousand words. That’s right, video advertising is a sure thing for creating an audience, here’s how to build a following with it :

Tell stories

This one is important no matter if it’s a blogpost or a Video. It’s a form we as humans always have communicated through and it has always been powerful. This is the reason why fiction books are so much more popular than textbooks. You’ll also be able to make the listeners connect with you in a deeper way when you build a story. So how do you create stories?

Here’s how if I’m gonna explain it simply:

1. Start with the end What is the main takeaway from your story?
2. Create your hook. Tie it to the end and make it evoke curiosity.
3. Choose where to begin the story
4. Write down some interesting things that you can add to the story
5. Refine the story to make it more vivid.

Focus on the hook 

Watch time is the single most important factor for the youtube algorithm. But at this time it’s not easy to hook people in. You’ve maybe heard that the average attention span for a person is 8 seconds. I know It’s sick but It’s something that you have to adjust to if you want to be successful in video marketing. So how do you really hook people in? Here’s how:

1. Mention a problem. E.g. SEO is hard,  no matter how many blog posts I write and how well I optimize I’ll not get any traction…
2. Give them a promise to solve it. E.g. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this video, I’m going to show you the exact process I followed to turn my website from having 0 visitors to now 10k in just 6 months and how you can replicate it too.
3. Bridge E.g. Let’s get right into it!

Yet it’s simple it directly makes it completely clear what the viewer will get out of it.

Email marketing

Email marketing is not a way to get new people in, you’ll need to have a blog or any other kind of media to be able to promote it. Although It’s a good way to make people that visits your site a part of your audience. 

Here’s a great video that covers everything step by step:

The bottom line

Marketing is a very important aspect of any business. This process begins even before the business has started. You need to target your efforts if you want to succeed in this noisy world. The first step is always to find out what the target audience really wants then deliver it on the mediums where they hang out.

You may also like: 4 Steps to Building a Successful Start-up Company

Image source: stock.adobe.com