Audience Acquisition: How To Build Simple Growth Funnels

Communities come together in all sorts of different forms whether it be live and in-person and/or digitally with the magic of the internet. Opening the right channels for audience acquisition is key to building your community in their new digital home.

Here at Honeycommb we build branded networks where communities of people come together around the things they love. Our goal is to simplify the community creation process and enable you to focus on your audience acquisition and community building practices. By giving ownership and control back to the community, audiences are incentivized to be apart of branded networks that put people first.

Some community managers find that the hardest part of community building is on-boarding audiences from across different channels in a dedicated single-network. We’ve made building your own custom experience simpler than ever, the next step is gathering your audience through your owned channels.

Show Off Why Your Community is Unique

Step #1 in audience acquisition: Tell people why they should be there.

Use visuals to catch audience attention and show them exactly what they’ll be downloading and signing up for. Showcase a little of the magic that happens within the community to excite and impulse people to join right then and there.

User-Generated Content (UGC)

Audience Acquisition is all about showing off this community you’ve built and are building. Showcase what members share in the network. Exposing great content from within the app also serves as an example of what a user can post once they’re apart of the community.

Using tools like embeddable iframe content and shareable posts (accessible for public networks when social sharing is enabled) is an exceptional strategy to share what happens inside your network with the people outside.

Leverage User Connections

Your community is all about the people inside of it. Showcase the different ways users can connect and support one another. We’re talking about posts, comments, group chat, and direct messages (DMs).

Groups

Think of Groups as a way to organize the content and experience in your network. Communities want sub-categories to organize and engage with. On the flip side as an admin, these are also ways to create smaller segments within your community and align on the things that users are interested in. Groups can be based around topics, around interests, and/or around geographic locations so show off how a user can find what they’re most interested to see.

Your Social Network Feature Set

Mentioning the features and capabilities your app has is a big reason why users will download in addition to the value your dedicated environment offers.

– Groups
– Live Streaming
– Push Notification
– DMs (private messages)
– Group Chat around live events
– Easy way to invite others
– A user’s data not being sold
– No ads

Hyperlink Every Mention of Your Network

Step #2: Make it easy for people to find the right platform for them.

With every mention of your community’s name, there should be a hyperlink pointing people to the right place to join. Each channel you own (owned channels) are places that funnel your community into your dedicated gathering place.

SmartURL is a fantastic tool for growth & acquisition marketing.

SmartURL enables you to link to multiple destinations depending on the device of the user all through the same link. Audience Acquisition is about providing people with a simple, clean and seamless onboarding user experience, so giving them a dedicated destination depending on their device is an excellent strategy.

For example, if you click on your link using your iPhone, SmartURL recognizes their device and brings them to the Apple App Store to download the app. On the other hand, if you’re on your computer and you click the same link, it’ll take you to the registration page on the web.

Marketing Website

Your marketing site is often discovered through search engine optimization (SEO), organic traffic, referrals, and/or ads that’ll bring traffic to your site.

Marketing sites are an exceptional landing page to inform and educate people about why they should be apart of your community.

If used in the right way, your marketing site can drive lots of growth and audience acquisition to your network.

By adding a “Sign Up,” “Log In” and/or “Enter ‘Community’” buttons that link to the appropriate registration/ login pages, you’re making it easy for folks to join right from your marketing site. These buttons should grab a users attention by being placed in the top navigation of the page or in the main menu items.

Blog

If you have an existing website then taking your content game up a notch with a blog is the logical next step. Your blog can be a place to talk about topics that your target audience is most interested in and each blog post should mention your community and link to it!

Blogging gives you a chance to expose your content to broader audiences and lead to more opportunities to grow your brand.

Embed content using an iFrame or social share button to link content in your network directly to content on the blog. The deep links will perform well with SEO and give Google’s crawlers the right paths for SEO.

Social Channels

Take advantage of your existing owned channels for audience acquisition on the social channels that you already own. Leveraging the network effect that exists on larger social platforms with existing communities is a strategic path to funneling folks into your own network. Showcase UGC from within your app as part of your content strategy.

Jump into relevant groups on different social media platforms and open forums to talk about your community and invite people to join. You could also consider paid advertising on social channels to target your desired audience with your best content.

Audience Acquisition is About Consistency

Organically, your ability to reach your entire audience, even through your owned channels is very weak.

Even when Zuck shares content, it doesn’t reach more than .05% of his audience on Facebook:

Social platforms are a pay-to-play space. So promotion of your community is all about creating consistent ways for people to find and engage with your network; until it’s at a place where growth happens on its own.

The more promotion, the more downloads & acquisition you’ll see over time.

Reach out to Honeycommb today to get started on building your own white-label social network or Book a Demo to see what we can build together for your audience.