Coaching call: What to do when your existing audience is for a completely different niche to your new one

Today I am coaching Ashley Roberts who is a practising attorney who also runs a completely unrelated business. Ashley is struggling to work through the best way to grow an audience for her new business away from her current social platform, which is all law-related. We address this in our chat along with tips on creating high-value content rather than noise!

In this episode, we chat about
– How understanding the mechanics of social platforms and managing your strategic presence can be a game changer in your business
– How engaging in collaborations and networking opportunities can boost your growth
– The benefit of amplifying your long-form content and capitalising on the endless ways this can be repurposed
– Not all growth happens online – how to secure in-person partnerships that offer new audience interaction
– Staying the course and analysing your strategy success

You can connect with Ashley @the_bliss_queen_ and learn about her '33 Days to Feminine Radiance' challenge or over on Youtube at The Bliss Queen

 

Today is a coaching call with one of my Launch Magic students who is currently a practising attorney but is launching a new business called the Bliss Queen, where she's working with women who feel stuck in a rut. And obviously, these are two very different audiences. 

So the challenge that we are workshopping today is how Ashley can begin to grow an online audience from scratch when it's so vastly different from the platform she's currently built up as an attorney. 

So this is a really useful topic for anybody who is starting from scratch or anybody who is beginning to serve a brand new audience that is unrelated to what they've already been doing in their business. It's a great look into strategy and audience growth, and also systemising your content so that you can really start to expand that reach a little bit more. 

Steph, here's my dilemma. I am currently an attorney and I am also launching a spiritual feminine energy business. And so the dilemma that I'm working through right now is how do I start from scratch on social media platforms, gaining a brand new audience when my current social media, my Instagram, my Facebook email, everything is totally unrelated to the new feminine energy work that I'm doing.

I'm definitely open to starting new, for instance, I've already started a new handle on Instagram called The Bliss Queen, and I'm actually planning on rolling out 33 days to Feminine Radiance kind of media rollout where I start sharing content every day to just add value and gain followers.

But I also know that's something you're really good at, Steph, is talking really about quality over quantity when it comes to content, so definitely interested as well as I start this 33-day rollout on this new platform, how to make sure that I'm adding value to the space instead of just adding noise, which I know is something that you speak about a lot.

 

The mechanics of social platforms

I really would encourage you to think of Instagram as not so much a place for you to grow your audience, but for you to reach those people who will become your audience. Not so much as it is a place for you to share that content so that when somebody comes across you elsewhere, they'll land on your Instagram, and they'll follow you. That's where they stick. They see, oh, Ashley's sharing great content. I'm going to follow her. But it's not so great for discovering and reaching those new people. 

Unfortunately, the algorithm has made it really hard these days. I was looking at a post that I shared the other day where I think it reached 5,800 people, and of those 5,800 people, only 80 people weren't following me. What's going on with the algorithm? 

Boost your growth by engaging in collaborations

So then we need to look at the outside of Instagram, what else can you do and what else are you already doing to try and drive people back to either follow you on Instagram or sign up for your email list or connect with you in some other way that essentially gets them to stick and then they become part of your audience.

Then we also want to look at how can you get in front of your audience in other places where they might be online and that might be podcasts that they're listening to. It might be other YouTube channels that they're watching. It might be Facebook groups that they're in. It might be brands that they're buying from or that they're consuming other content from.

I think that there might be a few options. I know that I get a lot of my feminine energy content from YouTube, so that could be a potential to kind of reach out to those YouTube channels.

I think my first tip around this would be to start with your network. So if you have anybody in your network who might have a show like that or who knows somebody who has a show like that. Reach out to them, ask for an introduction or ask if you can be a guest on their show. If you don't have anybody in that sort of space, then the next step is to start with some smaller podcasts, because you want to start to build up a little bit of experience.

Being a podcast guest takes a bit of practice, as I think back to my first podcast interview and it's really bad. But after a while, you build up confidence. You learn what messaging you should be sharing, and what content you're sharing in these interviews.

And when you have these examples, you can share these with bigger shows when you start to reach out to them. Probably the most effective is going through your network because podcasters get a lot of pitches every single day. 

So really make sure that the shows you're pitching take interviews first, but really take that time to try and build a relationship if you can first. And then really pitching them with a very specific topic for their listeners. So rather than going really broad and saying, okay, we're going to pitch a hundred podcasts and maybe we'll get five interviews out of this.

It's saying, okay, we're going to pitch 20 podcasts. We're going to spend a bit longer tailoring the pitch so that it's really specific to this person's audience. For example, if you were pitching me, you might want to pitch me around how you took imperfect action in starting your business because that's really tailored to my listeners.

 

The benefit of amplifying your long-form content

So I always say like, start with long-form content. Pick one, and if it's a podcast, great. If it's YouTube, great. Whatever lights you up and whatever you know that your sort of ideal client for this course or this launch is going to be. Then create that kind of content. And then from that kind of content, we can create other kinds of content.

We can take one podcast episode and turn it into Instagram posts. We can record the video of you talking into a podcast microphone and share that as TikTok or reels. We can turn your YouTube video into multiple little TikTok videos. Then that really starts to amplify that longer form of content. 

The other benefit of having that longer form of content is then if it's YouTube or a blog post, it's searchable. If it's a podcast, you can do things like interview swaps where you're bringing a guest in and you get to go on their podcast as well. So we can start to leverage that as a way to amplify that reach as well. But I really just love how long-form content positions you as an expert rather than you're just another person talking about the same thing. In ten-second clips, you actually have this opportunity to demonstrate what you know best. 

Marketing can be a bit different. We're not really out there like pushing and trying to get people, it's very much so about opening a space and showing our expertise and then having people come into our aura and into our content. So I really love that idea of long-form content, especially even thinking about something like doing a long-form YouTube video and then repurposing that into a podcast.

I know it's a lot. It can be really overwhelming when you think about it, I have to be doing reels and carousels and podcasts and blogs. Don't do all of them. But I really encourage you to think of what that process is going to look like for you. And if potentially, I don't know if this is where you are at in your business yet, but potentially bringing in a virtual assistant or somebody who can help you out with the repurposing because you need to be the queen bee in your business.

 

Not all growth happens online

Once you've got that long-form content, then when you start to get that in front of more people, so that's when you are posting in that Facebook group and you're sharing a few insights and saying, Hey, I talked about this in-depth on my YouTube channel over here. Or hey, I've summarised it in an Instagram post over here. 

So then we start looking at those external. And how we can add value to them and drive them back to that long-form content. It might be that you're on a podcast episode and you're talking about a topic that you talked about on YouTube and you'll say, oh, look, I'll share the link to this video with the host and they can put it in the show notes and you can go and listen to the full in-depth episode there.

You start to seed this content in front of these new people. And then this question might be kind of out there, but I feel like so much of our businesses these days is so much focused online. But for someone that works with feminine spiritual energy and things like that, there’s still that in-person component as well. 

You could think about doing women's circles or full moon gatherings or other events like that. I would really encourage you to write a list of all of the events that your ideal client is going to. All of the businesses that your ideal client is potentially buying from. You could partner with yoga studios, or you could offer to run a free workshop for their clients. And you go along and you teach a 90-minute workshop in person.

 

Staying the course and analysing your strategy success

Now suddenly you've reached all these new people, they've had that in-person experience. They are going to be so much more engaged than somebody who's just come across your Instagram post and you're one of the millions of people on Instagram. So really getting that list of events, businesses, places, and potentially even people who you know in your local community could connect you with others who are in.

We actually have to get out there and we have to talk to these people. We have to meet them. And that feels really scary, but it's so effective. 

It's going to take a while before you start to see traction from anything new. I would say 12 weeks, but every week look back and review what you've done. In isolation, that doesn't feel like much. You think, oh, only 10 people. But then when you start tracking it week by week and suddenly the next week, it's 20 people who watched the video, it's 200 people who saw your Instagram content. Over time, we start to see that growth, and that's how we can measure whether something's working or not.

It just might be really slow momentum, but that doesn't mean that there's no momentum. It just means that we maybe need to double down or we just need to keep going for a little bit. 

I guess your action steps from this are really to get clear on what that long-form content's going be for. And that process of how you're going to turn that long-form content into other little pieces of content in a way that feels manageable for you as well.

And then in a way, once you start to bring other people in, in a way that you can do more, but with more support, and then really identifying where what, what in-person events and people and businesses you can connect with to get in front of those people. 

 

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