How to Build an Audience

There’s no magic formula to building an audience – but there is a formula.

Building an audience is simply about being incredibly consistent with our marketing tactics. On most days, we won’t see much action. No new followers, no responses to our newsletter – not even the Internet trolls will take the time to engage us - and that’s perfectly OK!

But, if we use the tools we’re about to learn, and use them consistently, we will almost certainly grow our audience (unless our marketing message is just truly awful – in which case we have a whole lotta work to do!)

Marketing is like an exercise plan. It sounds easy in theory, but in practice there’s a reason we don’t all look like fitness models and there’s a reason we’re all not rocking huge brands – this stuff is hard! Don’t worry though, we’ve got a plan to get you somewhere between totally shredded and less pear-shaped.

In the early days, we’re going to start with folks we know. We’ll include email addresses from our contact lists, our existing social networks and any other source that we can get our hands on. That may be dozens of people in some cases. Yes, Grandma is probably going to get a newsletter whether she wants it or not.

The first few messages we send will by definition be the worst messages we will ever send, because we know the least about our audience. So, we want to make sure those messages are going to a more forgiving audience. Grandma loves us no matter what, right?

Beyond that, we also want to start with people who are more likely to share our message based on our relationship, and sharing our message is how we build word of mouth and growth, so this audience will be important to start. When we’ve exhausted this group, we’ll have other mechanisms to expand it further so we should feel comfortable starting here.

The key to building an early audience is about lots of repetition. Every time we send a newsletter, tweet a message or run a paid ad – even if no one clicks – we’re beginning a cycle of repetition with our audience. We don’t all click the first ad we see, respond the moment we see a commercial or drop everything when we get a marketing email. We need multiple repetitions of a message before we respond.

We’ll dig into how to setup a recurring schedule for each of our marketing tactics so that we’re building a repeating message that will grow over time. It’s important that we realize, though, that our audience will take time to warm up to us. If they hear our message once, they probably won’t think much of it. A second time, they may start to think “Hey, I think I heard this somewhere before” and by the third time they start to think “Hey, I might want to pay attention to this!”

Our repetition is what wins in the long run, so let’s commit to staying dedicated to our message.

Marketing is about sharing, especially in today’s world. In ancient times when Neanderthals did not have Internet access, marketing was about a one-way message whereby print ads, TV commercials, and radio ads were all about inundating voiceless consumers with our propaganda.

Today, the game has changed. Instead, marketing is about getting people to share your message, and that means planting seeds (shareable media) that people will want to forward, repost, retweet, text, or even (gasp!) talk about in the unlikely event they see another human face to face.

To make the magic happen, we’re going to focus on a combination of creating shareable media (newsletters, social posts) and a constant stream of ads to new folks (also social media, but paid media too) in order to plant even more seeds.

Aside from repetition, marketing requires a boatload of patience, which isn’t always our strong suit! We all want to hit the “send” button on our newsletter and have our servers fry like bacon with the amount of incoming traffic. Those days may come, but in the early days, our servers are gonna have some cobwebs on them for a bit.

“Be patient” may sound like one of those lame catch-all phrases people use when they don’t really want to explain what you’re supposed to do. But in this case – it’s really important.

What most first-time marketers tend to do is come out of the gates hard with a few marketing messages, get a few good results (“our first Facebook post got 100 likes!”) and then get tumbleweeds in all their messages afterward. From there we assume that we’ve failed as marketers and go home. That’s where this whole process breaks.

We're going to start off with the three most tried-and-true methods of getting our first customers - email, social media, and paid ads. We can choose to leverage just one or all three, depending on our time and budget.

By default we should always use an Email Newsletter since keeping in constant email communication with our customers is a fundamental building block of marketing. From there, we can choose to expand our efforts with social media or paid media (or both). We'd suggest tackling them in the order below, using paid media last once you've had some reps with our free channels.

Our process will evolve in this order:

Don’t think that you’ll find a single magical channel that’ll bring you thousands of users from one day to the other. It’s by exploring a lot of different channels and sources that you will create a bigger stream of signups.

Creating an ongoing newsletter with your audience is an awesome way to start a conversation. Email allows us to compose more robust messages with images and narratives that people can easily digest. Think of it like writing a mini blog, not like just typing up an email to a colleague.

We should develop a newsletter regardless of how else we market, whether we’re emailing 10 people or 10,000. It’s a great way to engage our audience on a week-to-week basis even while our other customer acquisition methods are still ramping up.

We'll show you how to setup a free newsletter account, create consistent messages, and add new emails to your list.

Thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg and friends, pretty much the entire world is on social media. While that means all of our customers are probably there — it also means the entire marketing world is also there competing for their attention. If we can break through the noise, social media can prove to be an incredibly powerful customer acquisition channel.

Social works particularly well for this stage of our customer acquisition because it's inherently a conversational medium. Later on, when we're getting into new customer acquisition at scale, this becomes a bit more challenging due to the noise and competition. But, in the early stages where we want to ask lots of questions and get lots of responses, it’s a natural fit.

We'll show you how to establish a social media presence on all the major platforms, how to create compelling posts that drive responses, and how to start moving some of those responses toward email capture for long term 1:1 communications.

Although Pay Per Click (PPC) costs money, it is the one way we can ensure that we get new customers to our site immediately. Well, assuming we have a site to send them to.

PPC has become the de facto testing mechanism for thousands of startups. We can get started for less than $100 and begin seeing new customers today.

The twin titans of PPC traffic are Facebook and Google, a fact that drives the rest of the advertising world insane.

Facebook works best if we'd rather target our audience based on demographics like location, gender, age, and special interests.

Google works best if we know that our audience is searching with particular keywords that represent our product.

We'll show you how to setup a basic PPC account, target our initial audience, set reasonable budgets, and make adjustments as we learn what works best.

If this is your first time dabbling with marketing outreach, figuring out the best way to begin building and reaching your audience can be a huge question mark.

We learned that tapping into our immediate social circle should be our starting point, as this group will help us establish a baseline audience that we can test early messaging against and eventually build out further as we refine our strategies.

We should also have a good handle on the three most foundational marketing tools we can take advantage of to begin actually reaching out to our audience, and that if we’re looking for a way to quickly reach a lot of people, building a social media presence is the way to go, whereas if we’re looking to reach customers outside of our social circle, putting some dough into paid ads via Facebook or Google is your best bet.

Now that we have a basic overview of what each of the weapons are, let’s dig in a bit deeper to figure out where we can implement each “weapon” and what it’s going to take to do it well.