With the corporate market becoming increasingly competitive and the pandemic making it harder than ever to attract and retain customers, many businesses face challenges when trying to build audiences for their marketing campaigns. Creating a target audience is crucial for successful marketing. Without one, you won’t be able to create marketing materials and content that meet their needs. If you simply target anyone, then you’ll find that you don’t attract the attention your business deserves. The expression ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ comes to mind. Audience Building for your marketing campaigns and brand is essential for your business, but if you’re trying to save money by doing your marketing in-house now, you might not know where to start.
Thanks to the rise of technology and the increased use of social media, it’s never been easier to build a great audience for your marketing campaigns, but you’ve got to do it right to get the maximum benefit from your hard work.
That’s why I’ve put together an audience-building guide to help you to find your target and set them in your sights.
An oldie but a goldie, the first step is to create a profile of your target customer and list some of the pain points that they might be suffering.
Get creative and try to connect these pain points and challenges to your service offering, so that you can find ways that your business can benefit your clients.
You’ll need more than one buyer persona: after all, unless you work in a very small niche, you’re going to have more than one type of client.
Each buyer persona needs to provide rough details on everything from your potential lead’s job type through to their age and housing situation.
Pain points aren’t the only information you can extrapolate from your buyer personas. When you have a complete persona, you can also identify the social media platforms that they’re likely to use, the best way to contact them and other factors that could have an impact on your marketing campaign and lead generation strategy.
An easy way to find inspiration when building your audience is to check out what your competitors are doing and how they’re building their audience.
Search for all of the mentions of your competitors online, and then explore where these mentions occur, whether they are positive or negative, and more.
If your competitors are focusing their attention on a particular online platform or audience-building strategy, then the chances are that this approach is working for them, and could work for your business too.
While you don’t have to completely copy your competitors, and indeed, if you want to stand out, you shouldn’t, emulating them can save you time.
You’ll be able to identify online stomping grounds that work for businesses in your niche and then bring your unique brand onto them, without having to research them as thoroughly as you might have if you didn’t explore your competitor’s strategy.
Image Source: Pixabay
If your business is at the top of searches related to your niche and target topics, then you’ll be able to grow your reach and build a larger audience organically.
As such, any successful audience-building strategy needs to include SEO. SEO is a key component of any business plan, particularly in today’s society, where more than 60% of all internet traffic comes through search engines.
Getting your website to the top of your target results pages can be tough, and it requires a continued strategy, just like audience building.
Techniques such as guest posting, finding broken backlinks on relevant sites and others can all help you to get your business noticed and at the top of search results.
Putting effort into your website’s SEO will benefit not just your audience building, but also your firm’s brand, sales and much more.
It can be hard to create a successful SEO strategy in-house, so consider outsourcing some elements of it to save your team time and still achieve the results you need to succeed.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn are perfect for anyone looking to build quality leads for their marketing and sales funnels.
If you invest time and effort into building a strong social media presence, then you can earn a bigger following for your business.
Everyone who follows your page, or engages with your social media content, can become a member of your audience and become a potentially profitable lead.
The more posts and innovative content you share, the more likely your social media pages are to attract a large following and get you a wider audience. As such, you should consider working with social media experts and creatives to boost your social media content strategy.
Most social media platforms also offer you the opportunity to pay to advertise and get your content noticed by even more users, so you could consider this if you have the budget.
Image Courtesy: Pixabay
As well as the obvious social media platforms, there are many other online forums and websites that can help you to build your audience and grow your reach.
Check out the latest social media platforms, such as TikTok, as well as other online spaces that could benefit your business.
Q&A platforms like Quora, as well as forums such as Reddit, can also help your business to build its audience and grow its brand.
Creating accounts on all of the online platforms out there would be impossible, so you should try to only focus your audience building strategy on the ones that will be the most helpful and earn you a responsive audience.
Research new and trending social media platforms and online spaces to find the ones that are worth your team’s time and effort, to make your audience-building strategy as efficient and effective as possible.
It’s a known fact that every business needs a blog, but many choose not to start one out of fear that it will be too much effort.
However, blogs can actually save you time; the content you post can serve as the basis for social media posts, email series, sales funnels and more.
Blogs are also surprisingly easy to write; if you’ve got a passion for your niche and are staying up to date with the latest developments in it for your business anyway, then it’s not hard to write down your thoughts and opinions.
Get started on your business blog, and you’ll probably find it hard to stop!
Image Courtesy: Pixabay
As well as posting your content on a variety of platforms, you should also try to incorporate various types of content into your strategy.
Content isn’t limited to just written blog posts; you can also create anything from videos to GIFs, memes to podcast episodes and more.
If you can imagine it, there’s probably an online tool to help you create it. The only limit is your imagination, so try to think of the content that you and your fellow industry peers enjoy, and then consider creating it for your company.
Another approach to consider is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing involves rewarding partner blogs and website for all of the traffic that they bring to your website.
Usually, businesses pay a few pence per visit or click, to encourage partner websites to work hard and promote their affiliate link.
Affiliate marketing can help you to boost your business’s SEO and get to the top of your target search engine results pages, as links from relevant, quality websites are viewed favourably by search engine algorithms.
As well as boosting your SEO, the tactic will also help you to grow your brand recognition and build a larger audience.
Consider starting small, and only offering affiliate marketing options to trusted websites that you’ve worked with before, then building on your programme to include more sites.
As you grow your reach, you’ll be able to monitor the success of your affiliate marketing strategy and see how much traffic it has generated.
Suggested Read:–Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing
Best Affiliate Marketing Platforms to make money online
Audience building is an essential component of any marketing strategy, but it isn’t as simple as just creating an audience and keeping it forever.
If you want to keep your audience growing and engaged, then you need to keep creating fresh, relevant content and adapting to the changes in your market and the world at large.
Not all of the strategies that you try will work, but you shouldn’t get discouraged. Instead, learn from your mistakes and use them to fuel your next tactic.
Overall, building an audience has changed over recent years, and with the current global situation, it’s more important now than ever before that you’re working proactively to drive your business forward and grow its reach.
I hope that this article has shown you how you can use the latest tools, platforms and tactics to build an audience and grow it over time for the benefit of your business.
Hannah Stevenson is the Content Marketing Manager and Linkologist for a highly-regarded link building agency. She’s a former journalist who now runs the firm’s content marketing strategy and manages her own blog, so she understands what content creators and publishers need to succeed.
Featured Image courtesy: Pixabay
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