Why It’s All Going To Be Ok When You Grow An Audience
If you can grow an audience who care and want to buy, everything else will follow.
When it comes to building an audience where you are in control, that leads to others committing to you, is a strong place to be.
However, where you look around today, it paints a different story. Your timeline is filled with misinformation, people knowing better and others having happier lives than you.
Everything is becoming systematic. From AI, automation, data led decisions, lack of connectivity, and just a detachment from interaction with others represents a world of the shortest route possible for the greatest prize. Let’s just be realistic for a minute, it is not going to happen. It is easier for a computer to make a decision than it is to do the groundwork about what someone else wants.
Tom Goodwin mentioned it perfectly recently when looking at the role Instagram in our lives by adding ‘life is for living. Not curating, broadcasting and seeking validation.’
The world we portray on social is detached from real life. At the same time, it is proving more difficult to be heard and like two angry dogs fighting over a bone, there is only a finite amount to go round.
Then again, it is all going to be alright.
Finding your place and for others to come on board and stick with you provides a real opportunity to build from.
You have every reason to be optimistic when it comes to creating content and building a base where responsibility is 100% on your side. It can help to build a stronger business. You have the channels in front of you that we never had a few years ago to build a dialogue with others and to have a rapport and nurture a sense of kinship.
It all comes down to creating something people haven’t seen before, but they can connect with, where you take the bull by the horns.
This is the moment to share the low pitched ‘booos’ and then the loud ‘hoorays.’
It is going to be ok.
Throw In The Eggs, Then The Chocolates
BOOO
According to BuzzSumo, in their Content Trends Report 2018 (published in March) very few people will share what you create and produce. That hard work and effort will just sit in an empty vacuum gathering dust. Social sharing has halved between 2015 and 2017. From 100 million posts published in 2015 and then again in 2017, the median number of shares was eight, two years later this was four.
HOORAY
Why always wait for strangers to share your content? It is time to find your allies.
If you can create an active audience where relationships are formed ie. people who subscribe, those who interact beyond online, come to events you put on, this is a far stronger place to be. If you can build a relationship with someone that isn’t wrapped in an agenda but people can associate with what you believe in, this is where others can extend your message.
You have to find a way to make an impact on someone else (they associate with what you say), the way you communicate (consistency of message) and be able to persuade (want to work with you and share their side).
BOOO
Trust has hit rock bottom in the UK, according to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer. It is safe to say that trust is now a scarce commodity. So how can you mine within a space that isn’t plentiful anymore?
HOORAY
If we are all at the bottom of the pit, it is now time for a clean slate. We are all on an equal playing field. Let’s see who can grab the momentum.
Mark Schaefer (speaker at the You Are The Media Conference), summed it up very simply on a recent {grow} article, “marketing today, especially through digital channels, has to be more customer-focused. You can’t interrupt them and say “buy this.” You can either be in the camp where people have resided for generations and being pure product/service message led, or you can look to become the value to someone else.
BOOO
GDPR is going to alter the way in which you reach out to people. From 25th May, gone are the days of exporting the LinkedIn email contacts and throwing out the next, soon to be gone, special offer for a free audit of some kind. If you want to communicate with people from this summer, you have to have their permission first.
HOORAY
The messages you communicate is stronger when you send to people who have made a decision and are subscribed. When someone subscribes they see something worthwhile to subscribe to. What you do and say has to matter to someone else. When someone recognises a belief, point of view and a stand that they want to be a part of, they are more likely to give consent.
Seth Godin said this gem, “Online voices that were seduced by the promise of a mass audience are coming back to the realization that the ability to deliver their message to people who want to get it is actually the core of their model.”
BOOO
There is no such thing anymore as organic reach. 55% of marketers, according to Buffer, are now seeing a significant decline of their organic Facebook reach. The audience reach is declining to a place where you sit on a lonely island and living the life of Tom Hanks in Cast Away becomes a B2B reality.
HOORAY
Look at organic loyalty, where you create something believable and of interest, this means it becomes easy for others to become attached to. It flows in this way: you create something that is in-tune with others that links what you believe into what your business stands for; you transmit this via email, website and social channels. You balance with paid and earned media with the objective to widen your reach, with a message that resonates with people. If people can see a healthy dose of consistency, it feels safer to make a commitment.
BOOO
The experts are fully here abundance. LinkedIn now has over 500million members in 200 countries. When content is relentlessly pushed with the interest of someone else at its heart, rather than sharing lessons learned, it can become a monotonous exercise directed towards everyone. U2 did this in 2014 when they added an album onto 500 million iTunes music libraries. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t stand U2, you got it both barrels.
HOORAY
The democratisation of media means that we can take to channels that have no editorial or vetting process and share the fact that we should be seen in higher regard than someone else.
The trouble is, everyone else is doing it. It is now time to find your own insights, answer something that has your stamp on it and you have the ability to continually validate and provide insight. Have a read of this article that looks at a framework based on fact, experience and opinion. Everything that you share has to come from a place of validation and more importantly, context.
BOOO
Frequency and the chase for volume have been regarded as the stamp of legitimacy and traffic. According to HubSpot, “Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.” It comes down to the empty mantra that the more you do, the more people will see.
HOORAY
Stop thinking about volume and that you need to get out a mound of blogs as quickly as possible because they have a few links in them and you start putting them anywhere and everywhere, what about if you thought about creating the least amount of work/content as possible.
For your message to resonate, you have to live an approach. It doesn’t matter whether you own a bakery or a law firm, both apply the same behavioural system where a problem is identified within a marketplace and a company is dedicated to serving an audience who will, in time, turn in their direction. Volume doesn’t come into it, it is about going deeper, not wider.
More just means you can, it doesn’t mean it will lead to anything, apart from the time you won’t get back. Even if you commit to two solid articles per month, whilst that month may look a paltry effort when compared to someone else who is in free flow three times a week but saying nothing, over time an asset base is growing before your very eyes.
BOOO
Communication from the B2B space is devoid of meaning. According to Havas Group and their Meaningful Brands study, 60% surveyed (from a population of 300,000 people), recognise that the content created by companies is ‘poor, irrelevant or fails to deliver.’ What companies say may mean something to them, but means nothing to everyone else.
HOORAY
As a business, your audience is never you. Just because you can send a message and think that reach is the ultimate goal, you still have to be interesting enough for people to be bothered. Then someone might do something ie. click, open, react, converse. You can’t go heavy on substance when no one is bothered in the first place. What you can do is find alignment between what you do and what you believe in. When you have something that is believable, honest and with purpose, people start to listen. Have a listen to this You Are The Media Podcast with Daniel Willis, that is exactly what he has done.
Let’s Round Up
The audience you build and the loyalty you create, doesn’t have to be handed over to the robots or someone else’s algorithm, it’s much simpler than that.
The resource is your audience.
Content gets you closer to the audience.
Content builds better connections.
Connections nurture trust.
Trust grows the resource and profit.
If you can grow an audience who care and who want to buy, everything else will follow.
You have every reason to be cheerful.
