The 4-part formula for audience growth (before you spend a cent on ads!)

As most business owners are experiencing, times are changing when it comes to growing your audience. It's no longer just about building your numbers, it's about attracting the right people for the business you want to build. In today's episode, I'm sharing the 4-part formula for audience growth that won't cost you a cent.

– Why focusing on building more followers and subscribers won't necessarily translate to increased revenue.
– The common mistakes when it comes to growing your audience.
– The questions you need to ask yourself to meet the *right* people where they're at.
– How using this 4-part formula can help you to share remarkable content with the right people at the right time.

 

 
Today, I'm talking about the audience growth formula. I know that standing out online and reaching the right people can feel hard at the moment. 

In today's episode, I will share the four parts that I think anyone needs to be on top of if they want to grow their audience in today's online world. 

I'm going to start with a little story from my very first business. So I love marketing like I'm a marketer at heart and before the launch of my first business, which was a product-based business, it was a subscription box. I spent a lot of time growing the audience on Instagram because this was the prime for small businesses. You could reach lots of people, you could grow your audience there really easily. 

And before I launched that product, I managed to grow the Instagram audience to, I think around 10, 15, 000 people and I was so excited about it because I thought, great, we've got this awesome audience. When I launch, it's going to be a hit. People were going to buy it but they didn't and I was like, Oh, well, this is weird. We've got, you know, 10, 000 people following and like maybe 50 customers. Why are they not buying? 

And in my mind, I was like, okay, cool. Let me just keep growing the audience. Let me just keep adding more people. So I kept growing it thinking that growth would lead to sales and at one point we had like 20, 000 followers and we're making maybe 2, 000 a month in revenue before expenses. So this was a physical product business. So I still had to pay for postage and shipping. I had to pay for the wholesale products that were going into the subscription boxes, all of that. So it wasn't turning much of a profit.

And I realise now in hindsight, I'm like, Oh, I know those mistakes that I made but at the time, I couldn't quite figure out why these people weren't converting and some of the mistakes that I made. 

So firstly, I relied purely on Instagram for this business audience and when the algorithm started to change, 2016 was one of the first big changes that people noticed with the algorithm. Suddenly, I stopped reaching as many people with my content. I wasn't thinking about how I would nurture those people in the audience. I was just focused on how can I get more people in. I also didn't focus on building my email list and I was sharing the kind of content that was attracting the wrong people. This is the big takeaway.

So I was sharing awesome recipes for yummy food because it was a food-based subscription box but the people who were following for that and they were just following for the yummy recipes. 

And then I made one mistake that so many people make because it leads to awesome growth, but those people don't buy and that was giveaways. I participated in loop giveaways. I participated in collaboration giveaways and they grew the following, but they weren't right for the product I was selling, they weren't the right people. They were freebie seekers and so I realised a big audience doesn't mean big sales. It's all about growing your audience with the right people.

A small audience of the right people is going to convert into sales so much more effectively than a large audience of the wrong people. 

So then after I closed that business down, I worked at a startup for a little while as head of marketing. While I was doing that, I started my next business doing marketing consulting. I knew that I needed to do something different to all of the other marketers out there because it was a pretty noisy environment.

I started writing long-form blog posts. I'm talking 2000-word blog posts, sharing unique perspectives that nobody else was talking about. I started doing videos and sharing videos on Facebook, which back then was a great strategy. Now probably wouldn't work so much, but nobody else was sharing videos then.

And then I would actively get those in front of the right people. So I would share those blog posts and those videos into Facebook groups where the right people hung out. Now, while that is the way that the algorithm has shifted, there's still one key takeaway there. You still need to be creating that content and getting it in front of the right people.

 

Audience growth formula.

So let me share with you the audience growth formula. 

It's still the same formula as it was back in 2017 and it probably won't change going forward, because it's not platform specific. It's not reliant on any particular type of content, but it's more about the strategy that's underpinning all of it. 

So the formula is content strategy plus remarkable content, plus visibility plan multiplied by consistency.

Let's break that down. 

 

Content strategy.

This starts with knowing who you are talking to and what kind of content is going to catch their attention, the attention of the right people and a content strategy isn't something like on Monday, we're going to entertain them on Tuesday, we're going to educate them on Wednesday. We're going to put a sales post up. No, that's not a content strategy. 

A content strategy starts with who is your ideal client. What is going on in their heads? What do they need to hear from you? And meeting them where they're at. It's about something other than, oh, well, my ideal client is age 25 to 35 and they live in Sydney and their favourite food is Japanese.

No, that's not an ideal client, that is a target audience. And knowing their favourite food doesn't help us. 

 

Remarkable content.

So then the second part is remarkable content, creating and consistently sharing that remarkable content. 

Remarkable content is not how-to content. It's not tips and tricks because those things, the how-to content, the tips and tricks, ChatGPT can replicate those so easily. Instead, it's the kind of content that makes the right person think, Hmm, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it like that. 

It's the kind of content that they're going to go and then tell somebody else about. And it's usually going to involve your unique perspectives, your unique experiences, your stories, that's more remarkable than five tips to grow on Instagram or whatever. 

 

Visibility plan.

So once you've created that content, you can't sit back and be like, Oh yay, the algorithm is going to show me to the right people because it doesn't anymore. I saw a statistic recently that Instagram's reach is declining by 32 percent year on year.

So that means that each year your content is reaching 32 percent fewer people organically than it was the previous year. So you can't sit back and rely on the algorithm to show your content to the right people. Instead, you need to be proactively getting in front of those audiences. The other reason, of course, is that Meta, who owns Instagram, doesn't care about your business, they want you to spend money on ads to promote your business. So they're not going to show your stuff to the right people unless you pay them. So instead we want to look at how can we intentionally get in front of the right people. 

 

Multiply all of this by consistency.

Consistency is that multiplier. The more consistent you are, the more you will see results from all of the audience growth things you are doing when you put them together.

It's not something you can do just once and then be like, cool, I sent five pitches out to be a guest on someone's podcast and I'm done. No, it's something you need to be able to stick to consistently over time. It doesn't have to be something that you do a lot of every week but it's something that you can do sustainably over an extended time.

 

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