Building an Audience for Your Online Business
Are you a business owner who is struggling to find people to talk to about your online business?Are you having a lot of awkward conversations with your friends and family when it comes to explaining what your business does and how it helps people?Affiliate Disclaimer: This page may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to make a purchase, I will receive a small commission. However, using these links will have no effect on you or your purchase in any way. For more information refer to our disclaimer page. Are you struggling when it comes to building an audience for your business?This is a common issue for people who are beginning their online business journey or even business owners who have been active for a while.
Making the Transformation Is Important
Making the transition from a friend, family member and coworker to business owner with something to sell is a challenge faced by lots of people who want to earn online.Lets talk about making an important transformation when starting an online business. There's a right way to start, for example with authority, versus thinking that you can sell to everyone without taking specific steps to build a solid foundation. We'll talk about this issue more in the third installment of this series. Transforming is one of the hardest things for new business owners to do. Some business owners never make the transformation. Yet without making the right transformation, you can't have a thriving online presence.One of the biggest mistakes new business owners can make is to think that once they get their products and services online, they will automatically be found, generate sales and enjoy the benefits of earning a consistent stream of income. Even when you have products on platforms that claim to send you traffic, you still have to promote, to build targeted traffic... people who are truly interested in your business. However, getting your products online is just the beginning. Yes, you have a presence online, but the next steps, like promotion to follow up and you can't leave things like exposure, follow up and closing the sale, up to chance. Yet this is what lots of online entrepreneurs do.
To have a thriving business, it's important to consistently promote your products.That means your job is to create awareness and promote your products and services to current customers. It's also your job to identify people who have never heard of you but have a need for your products. Otherwise, your business stands a huge chance of being lost in the shuffle in the growing sea of online competitors.As a business owner, you need a strategy that helps your business accomplish and automate or incorporate systems that handle (1) audience attraction, (2) lead generation and (3) client transformation.
Video Tutorial
Part One of a Series
This article is part one of a series that will walk you through building a thriving online business. For example, the words you choose in your messaging (throughout your entire audience building process) will either attract your ideal customers to your business or drive them away. And a lot of people are terrified of driving people away from their business, but if you follow us you'll learn that this is a necessary part of the business building process. So as a business owner it's important to think of what you want to accomplish with your marketing. Next, create messaging that helps draw your ideal customers to your business. To get better at creating on point messaging, it's important to understand your ideal customers. Taking the next step, selecting a niche will help you narrow down your niche and understand your audience much better.
Listen on the Go
Here's our most recent podcast episode that covers the items in this article. If you don't have time to read, you can listen while you do other things. Listen to the Creative Impulse here on Spotify or where you get your podcasts.
Selecting a Niche Market
A niche is a segment of a larger market, part of an industry. Industries track data that can be used to understand a niche and help business owners grow.And by narrowing your messaging to appeal to a particular niche you can actually reach people who are a good fit for your business.
Generate Interest in Your Products and Services
Many people are confused about how to generate interest in your products and services. Once you know who your ideal customers are, you will have a better idea of how to generate interest. Here are a few ideas:- Offer value first content
- Educate them about your products
- Give them industry news
- Strategically use sales and discounts
- Sell 20% offer value 80% of the time
People who have done business with your before
People who have bought items that are the same or similar to yours
People who have a need for your products (whether they know it or not)
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How does your social media feed look? Are your posts leading people to valuable content or are you constantly selling (spamming) without adding value?
How does your profile look and where does it send people? Do you have a compelling image, text and message on your social media profiles? Are these profiles sending potential customers to a place where they can become a lead, learn something new or obtain a freebie to get started engaging with your company?
What can you do to improve your social media activity? Are you offering your followers a buying journey (sales funnel) that they can benefit from? If so, write out the primary steps and benefits your social feed gives potential customers when they get started, including any freebies.
Is the information in your feed valuable to your ideal customers? If so, write 3 or more sentences about why your social feed is valuable. Have a friend or family member to evaluate what you write.
Does your messaging attract the right people to your business? Are you attracting people who never take action, tire kickers, nay sayers and people who are total mismatch for your business? If so that's an indication that your messaging is off.
Is your social media activity consistent? Are you posting each day, week or will potential customers have to hold their breath until you make another post. If that's the case, you may lose people who might be a great fit for your business.
Where does your data say that most of your traffic is coming from? The platforms that send you the most traffic, should be a priority. And if you're not using Google Analytics or the data you can obtain from your social platforms, you may be missing valuable information that can help you make informed decisions. You might have a few questions of your own that you can add. It's important to evaluate the social media feeds for each account to make sure your message is attracting the right audience. If you're totally lost and you need a solid social media strategy to build your online business, click the button below to learn more about our course 30 Days of Social Media Posting for Business.
30 Days of Social Media for Business
Video Course: 30 Days of Social Media Posting
Are you lost when it comes to promoting your online business on social media? This course has training videos, templates, planners and guides with over 30 days worth of post ideas and tools you can use to grow your online business.
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Why I Started Too Many Hooks
I started using too many hooks in my creative work because they captivate and engage the audience from the very beginning, making it hard to look away.
#CreativeHooks #Engagement #AudienceAttraction #CaptivatingBeginnings #StorytellingTechniques #WritingStyle #ContentCreation #NarrativeSkills #HookedOnHooks #ArtisticExpression.
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Grow Your Captive Audience With Instagram
From: Byron Horde of Knowledge is Powah
Date: February 12th, 2020
Subject: Instagram
Grow Your Captive Audience With Instagram:
Did you know that Instagram has more than 300 million daily users and amazing user engagement levels? In fact, according to Buffer App, https://blog.bufferapp.com/Instagram-marketing, there are more than 95 million photos and videos shared every day. While that may seem like a lot of competition, there’s also a lot of opportunity. Your audience doesn’t just share one photo a day or engage with one instagrammer.
They engage with the ones that capture their attention. And
the instagrammers that capture their attention day after day build their
audience. So, the question is, how can you grab attention on Instagram and hold
attention so that your end result is a large and captive audience? That’s what
we’re going to take a look at in this report.
The Five Fundamentals
On Instagram, there are five fundamentals of any successful
audience building strategy. We’re not going to go too much into a discussion
about why Instagram works to build an audience. It’s highly effective and when
you embrace these five fundamentals, it’s a powerful channel to add to your
marketing strategy.
Fundamental #1 Goals
and a Mission
What do you want to achieve via Instagram? This may sound
silly, you want to grow a captive audience, right? But it has to go beyond
that. What do you want to do with that captive audience?
For example, are you growing an audience on Instagram to
drive traffic to your sales page? If so, your content strategy might entail a
large number of product photos.
Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream, for example, includes a link
on their Instagram page that takes visitors to their website - often to their
“what’s new” page where they promote new flavors. The goal is ultimately to
motivate purchases.
If your goal is to build your list, then your content
strategy on Instagram might entail sharing quotes, inspirational messages, and
tips with a link to your email sign up page.
The website ThinkGrowProsper.com leverages Instagram to
grow their email list. They post inspirational quotes and invite viewers to
visit their website. At the website, in the header, visitors see a sign up
offer for a free mindset course. The goal and mission for ThinkGrowProsper is
to attract people who are interested in learning more and ultimately growing
their email list.
The blog, CoolMomPicks.com earns income for affiliate sales and income from advertising. Their Instagram goal is to drive you to their blog so you click on links and make purchases. If you look at their Instagram page, https://www.instagram.com/coolmompicks, you’ll see an abundance of photos that are related to holidays, back to school, and other trending parenting topics. Posts often invite viewers to visit their website.
Common goals include but aren’t limited to:
Showcasing your products or servicesBuilding your community Increase awareness of your brand or strengthening
your brandBuilding your email listDriving traffic to your site - to earn affiliate
commissions or to build your blog following and earn income from advertising
So, while your goal is to grow a large audience on Instagram,
you also want to know what you’re going to do with that audience. It helps you
achieve the remaining fundamentals.
Fundamental #2 Content
strategy
Once you have a solid mission and goal for your Instagram activities, you’ll then have an idea about how to achieve it. This is your strategy. What type of content do you need to share to achieve your goal? Take a look at CoolMomPicks on Instagram and contrast that with those of ThinkGrowProsper, https://www.instagram.com/thinkgrowprosper.
You’ll notice a definite difference in content.
CoolMomPicks is highly visual and relates to the season, holiday, or often the
subjects they’re talking about on their blog. The content posted at
ThinkGrowProsper singularly focuses on offering followers a motivational or
inspirational quote of the day. ThinkGrowProsper has 2.3 million followers.
Yes…million. And their content is quite simple.
CoolMomPicks has 16 thousand, they also have coolmomtech
and coolmomeats as they grow their audience and following. Their content
strategy is a bit more diverse.
What message do you want to communicate with your audience
and what type of content supports you to achieve that? Consider:
QuotesProduct photosTipsFactsPhotos of happy customers (with or without testimonials in the description)Pictures of yourself (if you are your brand and are using Instagram to strengthen your brand this could be a terrific idea. Check out Joel Comm on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/joelcomm.)Videos. If you head to Ben & Jerry’s on Instagram, you’ll see that many of their posts are videos…of ice cream. Fun!
Think about it from your audience’s perspective…what do
they want to see? What would they appreciate? What would they share?
For example, if your goal is to build your community, you
might share a number of images of your customers, your associates, and others
who are involved in your business. Create a sense of community by visually connecting
your company to others.
Okay, now we need to look at one of the most challenging
aspects of content, and that is consistency.
Fundamental #3
Consistency
No social channel is going to work well for you unless you
have some degree of consistency. With 95 million posts shared every day, there
are a lot of images competing for your audience’s attention. If you don’t have
a consistent presence, they’ll forget about you.
SO what does consistency mean?
In most cases, consistent content means that you post
something on Instagram daily. Many marketers post several times a day and some
post every other day. You’ll need to find your balance. However, it is critical
that you post often.
You can approach this however it fits into your goals and
your available time and finances. For example, if you need professional photos
of your products and you have a tight budget, you either hire a photography
student who can take 30 photos for you each month or you post one professional
photo a week and fill in the other days with different content.
Like other types of content, don’t get bogged down with
consistency at the expense or relevancy or quality. Yes, it is important to
make sure that you post something on Instagram often, however if the daily
posts are blurry, dark, or completely irrelevant to your audience, then you’re
doing more harm to your campaign than good. Find a consistent schedule that you
can stick to. Later, as you grow, you can incorporate more posts into your
schedule.
Let’s talk about schedules quickly before we talk about
quality and relevancy…
There are a few tools that you can use to schedule your Instagram
posts in advance. They include, but aren’t limited to:
Schedugram - http://schedugr.am/Hootsuite - https://hootsuite.com/InstagramOnlyPult - https://onlypult.com/Later - https://later.com
Leverage a tool like this so that you can stay ahead of your
content, plan and strategize, and adapt as your audience grows and changes.
Many of those tools also contain analytics to help you better understand the
type of content your audience is connecting with.
Fundamental #4
Quality & Relevancy
We just mentioned quality. Your images need to represent
your brand and your company. That means that if you’re taking photos at an
event and sharing them on Instagram, share the ones that are clear, not the
dark or blurry ones. It also means that while you don’t have to be a
professional photographer, you want your products and images to look good. They
have to be appealing to your viewer.
They also have to be relevant to your audience. Make sure
that your audience is engaging with your content. Leverage those analytics. Pay
attention to the images that get the most engagement and the images that increase
followers, drive people to your website, or sell products.
Take a look at Mistoboxcoffee https://www.instagram.com/mistoboxcoffee. They are a monthly coffee delivery membership. Join and you receive a bag of fresh coffee beans from a number of roasters around the country. The monthly choice is hand-picked for you by their barista based on your preferences. It’s a bit like Stitchfix for coffee lovers. Their Instagram is beautiful. Simple pictures of coffee and they share an image every day. They have consistency, quality, and relevancy locked up.
Fundamental #5 Your Instagram
Profile matters
Your account with Instagram comes with a profile, right?
It’s where you put your logo or picture, your website address or a link to your
blog, email sign up form, or sales page. You can add a bit about your company,
and a call to action.
You can also include hashtags and invite followers to use
that hashtag to be added to your Instagram feed. For example,
Notice that Mistobox coffee includes a link to their blog,
a logo, and a quick tagline, “fresh-roasted coffee shipped to you.”
Here are a few more examples of what a profile can be.
CooMomPicks uses a picture of the two owners. Their names
and faces are at the forefront of their brand and business, so this is a good
move. Additionally, they have a blog post link for viewers to visit. Remember
that they make money through affiliate sales and advertising sales, so blog
traffic is a key goal.
As you can see, there are a variety of different image
choices with the examples. Some use a logo. Others use their face. It depends
largely on your business and how you brand yourself.
Every example includes a link in their bio. Unlike other
social channels, you cannot add a link to a post. What you can do is invite
viewers to visit your profile page and click on the link there. It’s the only
place where you can include a clickable link – take advantage of it.
Finally, spend some time crafting a quick and dirty
description of who you are and what you do. It needs to be relevant to your
audience, attention grabbing, and a good representation of who you are and what
you’re about.
Your profile is a key opportunity to gain followers. It
motivates people to become a part of your Instagram community and perhaps to
take the next step with your business. However, your posts have to engage them
enough that they take a look at your profile. SO let’s wrap it up by talking about
your image descriptions and how to leverage them to achieve your goals.
It’s all in the description…
Instagram is a visual content channel, right? People share
images and videos and that’s it. However, each image also comes with an
opportunity to share a description. If you look at the right-hand side of a
post, you’ll see that some instagrammers also share a bit of written content.
In the above image, Joel Comm is promoting his upcoming
seminar. It includes a link (not a clickable one) that viewers can type into
their browser, to register. Joel doesn’t promote his business often, but when
he does, he is transparent and leverages the image description area to tell
viewers what he is offering.
Contrast the Joel Comm post with the CoolMomPicks post.
They invite viewers to visit their profile page to click on the link and buy.
They leverage their description area to drive traffic to their sales page.
Notice all the hashtags, too? That helps Instagrammers find their posts. Don’t
forget to include a few relevant tags in your descriptions.
Finally, here’s a post from MistoBoxCoffee. It is a simple
conversational message that strives to connect with coffee lovers who may
appreciate their service. And again, look at all of those hashtags!
Conclusion
Following the five fundamentals will get you where you want to be with Instagram marketing. You can build a large, active, and loyal audience with this popular and growing tool. Start with your goals and mission. What do you want to achieve? From there, study your audience, decide on a posting schedule, and start planning your content. Leverage the tools that Instagram provides including hashtags, your description space, and your profile, and don’t forget to use that clickable link on your profile. It helps your followers make the connection to your blog or website and take those next steps.
Cheers to Your Success,
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