Audience Vs Numbers.
How do you get people that are actually interested in your brand/product and not just numbers?
With social media influencers on an increase and marketers under constant pressure to meet up with KPI, there is a high tendency for most brands to end up shooting in the dark with the wrong audience.
These days, we see a social media account with over 2k followers with zero engagement when published content, why? such an account only has numbers and not the audience.
The Audience gives you attention, while numbers give you status
With the numbers, one can brag about status, but with the audience, attention is guaranteed. In attention is your engagement, your converts, and your sales; thus in all thy getting, get attention.
If you don’t have my attention, you can’t sell to me. You can have 2k people in a hall, but if you don’t have their attention, any attempt to sell to all will fell on dry ground.
So how do you water the ground, and how do you convert your numbers to an audience? focus on their need. Many a time in our quest to generate leads, to create a marketing funnel, to up-sale, we focus too much on ourselves and forget the prospect. The prospect is the king.
Develop the act of listening, pay attention to the numbers you have, which will direct you on how best to make them pay attention and become an audience eventually.
Have empathy, don’t rush it.
Allow people to give you attention. Some tend to force the audience through baits; free ebook, subscribe here to get this or that, you must be following me to qualify for this giveaway, etc. Yes, all these work but it just leads to forced attention which 99% of the time doesn’t last after they have gotten what they are there for. So offer value and allow them to give you attention.
For instance, I write a Twitter thread about understanding NFTs, and at the end, I attach a link to my newsletter and say “sign up here to receive my free NFT guide”. Now there’s every tendency that most readers will signup for your newsletter with an alternative account that they hardly use and your sales letters would be going to spam folders and never likely to be read anytime soon. But let’s assume you wrote the same thread, got their attention, and at the end, simply put, to understand more about NFTs and how to profit from it, hit the follow button. To know how to buy, trade, or create an NFT, download my guide for free. When they do, you tell them that you publish weekly posts on NFTs and if they would want to stay updated, they can subscribe. Trust me, if the content in your NFT guide is solid, you will have over 80% of the readers converting as your audience and you have their attention going forward because you approached it from their angle of need and not from yours.
I can get why most people would prefer to go the other way round, to hustle their audience, to have numbers rather than an audience, it is because building an audience takes time, it takes sweat and blood, it takes care and empathy and many don’t have this so they would rather buy an IG account 12k followers but with zero interest in the story, they are trying to tell. Many lack the patience to build slowly and build steadily.
As you build, remember to seek attention, rather than status.
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Cheers