Whether you are an entrepreneur, blogger, or influencer, your audience is what fuels your career. The biggest driving factor of any business is the people’s inclination to help grow that business. Without consumers, no matter how good your product is or how much money you have for investment, your efforts will fall flat. This is why the first aspect you need to focus on while embarking on this journey, is to focus on how to gain consumers and live up to their expectations.
Here is a brief guide on how you can achieve an audience to grow and expand your venture.
Set a Target Audience
Before you rush into nudging people into following your brand, you need to know what kind of people you want. The thumb rule for any marketing strategy is to have a target audience. Having the “one size fits all” mindset is the worst mistake you could make while promoting or marketing. Start small and see what kind of people you see relating to your brand and using it. Once you know that, you can make a map of potential people who could be a part of the inner circle of the existing customers.
You can always contact experts on market research for advice and consulting. Use the website getemail.io to find email addresses from LinkedIn of various professionals.
Know Your Audience
The foremost step to gaining an audience is to know them. If you don’t know their inclinations and opinions, then your efforts into strategizing will go in vain. There are many ways you could do this, the first being market research. Look at your competitors and their audience to understand what appeals to them. You could also create focus groups for a more detailed point of view.
A popular method of planning content for your audience is by creating buyer personas for them and stepping into their shoes to understand what will compel them to use your brand. If you are already into business, then feedback forms and interaction with your audience is a fun way to know how they are getting along with your brand.
A/B testing
A/B testing is another most common and effective way of knowing what your audience will accept or reject. The digital age has made A/B testing quite simple and efficient. Since you can edit, upload, and delete almost everything in real-time in the online world, many companies have used it to their advantage to check what works with their audience. This hit and trial method has been successful with many big brands such as Instagram, Gap, and Walmart.
Retain Existing Members
The last step is to retain the current customers you have. If you only look to gain a new audience and don’t pay attention to the old ones, then you will not only receive them in a bad spirit but also lose them. Customer retention is very often underestimated which causes trouble in the long term.
Treat your loyal customers with reward points and since you have the most data on them, use it to personalize their experience. This will gain you good reviews and word-of-mouth marketing for new customers. Two birds, one stone!
Conclusion
Attracting an audience is all about these four factors. Once you master them, nothing is stopping you from driving traffic, unless you have an exceptionally bad service! Take care of your people and they will return the favor!