What Not To Do When Building A Loyal Online Audience

Buy them.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t use paid advertising on platforms that make sense for your brand.

But it does mean that you shouldn’t rely solely on paid advertising to cultivate an audience for your brand when, with a little elbow grease, you can do some of the work and see a big benefit.

When you market your business online, it’s important to remember that you are essentially renting attention from a group of people that may not know you, and doing it for an incredibly brief amount of time.

In those few seconds, you have to say who you are, how you help, and why they should care. And you have to say it in the right place at the right time.

Building an audience, be it on social media, through email marketing, or whatever the online channel, takes time and energy, and you’ll want to avoid these common mistakes.

Don’t target everyone.

Everyone is not in your target audience. And Facebook ads are a perfect example for this.

With well over 1 billion users, it’s fair to say that your customers are on Facebook in some form or fashion. But, just because they are on Facebook, doesn’t mean they want to be sold to on Facebook, or Instagram for that matter (Facebook owns Instagram).

But, Facebook is a viable channel to generate interest and sales for your brand with the appropriate content marketing strategy. The secret is in the custom audience feature in Ads Manager.

Building a custom audience lets you take a customer list that you already own and use it to find more people you know on Facebook and/or create a look-alike audience that mirrors your best customers.

This is what you want. Not random people from all over the world who have absolutely no intention of buying and will click “like” on just about everything but never click-through to anything. The money is in the click-through.

Don’t buy lists.

In addition to the fact that some email service providers (ESPs) like MailChimp have strict rules against this, sending emails to people who didn’t give you permission to solicit them is uncool.

Remember the elbow grease. Use it.

Build incredible content on your website, for example, that makes people want to learn more. Install tools like SumoMe List Builder to grab the attention of website visitors just before they roll off your site.

As you build a great list, the onus is on you to keep their attention by consistently delivering value into their inbox.

Don’t push too hard.

Consider LinkedIn. It’s tempting to spam the daylights out of the members of the 25-50 groups you’re in with content you’ve written, but don’t do it.

LinkedIn wasn’t designed for that, and true LinkedIn fans don’t support or appreciate it.

Your content strategy on this platform – in fact across the board – should follow the 80/20 rule. With your content being the latter.

Participating in LinkedIn groups is a phenomenal way to demonstrate thought leadership and build authority by commenting on discussions or starting meaningful ones yourself. It’s ok, after a while, to toss in your latest blog and ask for feedback. But, that shouldn’t be the only time you show up.

Final Word.

Everyone is tired of being sold to. Including you if you’re honest. So don’t do your audience that way. Show them that you are interested in getting to know them and want to earn their business. Share stories not sales pitches. In time, you’ll shed your transient audience for one that sticks around.