Developing your audience, unfortunately, is not like a yeast dough. You can’t just knead it, leave it in a warm place for a few hours and enjoy a risen, fluffy dough ready to bake. What I mean is that our efforts to attract potential customers to our business are often like talking to a wall. It is neither pleasant nor motivating. But don’t get discouraged, just because something can’t be done quickly doesn’t mean it can’t be done at all – here are some oldie but goldie strategies you can use to grow your audience in a reasonable amount of time, and most importantly, organically. It is confirmed that 53% of website traffic comes from organic search.
Who are you waiting for?
If you expect your customers to take their valuable time to get to know your business specifically, at first you need to take some of your time to get to know them. You can’t just throw content at some random people. You must dive quite deep into their interests, know what they are looking for, what content they respond to the most, and what ways of communication they use. Understanding your potential client’s needs and behaviors is basically the key to any further actions.
Being original is never out of fashion
I am highly aware that being original when it feels like everything has already been created is difficult. But the truth is, your audience (or potential audience) loves original, especially when it comes to content. When you look around your competition bends over backwards to deliver high quality and original stuff, and so you must do the same to meet the audience’s expectations. Besides, creating content allows you to align your brand with how people feel when they interact with it. Let’s make it clear, Stock pictures are okay, but just imagine what would happen if you’d invest a bit of your time to provide recipients with your own photos?
SEO later
Ask yourself a question, are you using the full potential of SEO? I do realize that it is not the most ”organic” way of possessing a valuable audience, but definitely worth implementing. While it’s of course super important to optimize your content for readers, optimizing it for search engines is what can bring you real traffic and therefore, grow your audience for good. 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps. Optimizing for on-page SEO doesn’t have to take forever, and it can help you increase organic traffic.
Sweet but psycho
Who doesn’t love psychology? Especially psychology applied to marketing. Some time ago I wrote a few articles about very important principles from the marketer’s point of view – Reciprocity, and Scarcity. In short, the first one says that if you do your customer a favor (e.g. give them a coupon card), they will return it, by making a purchase in your store. The second principle deals with the fear of missing out (FOMO), so when an offer is limited, the customer is more likely to buy it. There are of course many more psychological games, used on often unaware consumers. These include:
- authority principle – tendency to follow recommendations of experts or influencers,
- novelty principle – urge to buy something new on the market,
- the paradox of choice – limiting options as people get lost when they have to choose from many,
- herd mentality – customers love to have, what everyone has,
- confirmation bias – the tendency to lean toward information that supports your beliefs while rejecting information that contradicts them.
These are just a few examples of how to use psychology to attract and keep your audience, and while used well, can work wonders if not abused.
Wanna be my guest?
Each month, approximately 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages. By guest blogging, you increase your chances of being noticed by those who have not yet stumbled upon your website/social media page/profile. By becoming visible on other sites or collaborating with people with larger audiences, you simply increase your chances of being noticed.
Video killed the radio star
These days, simple text and pictures are not exactly what drives your potential audience to you. Video content has become more popular than you could imagine. Want proof? YouTube has over a billion users, that’s almost one-third of total internet users! Besides, statistics show that video content is blooming. I could go on and joke that it’s because movie theaters are mostly closed, so people are looking for video content elsewhere. That being said, 70% of marketers want to increase their investment in video. Referring to the title of this paragraph, radio isn’t entirely dead, since 75% of Americans are now familiar with podcasting. By investing in video and podcast content you can get yourself a large group of observers.
Why does it take so long to load!?
I’ve already said a lot about the content tactics you should wrap your head around, but what about the technical issues that cause users to withdraw with distaste instead of attracting attention? 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. Furthermore, a very slow site can be a negative ranking factor for Google, causing people to simply not see your site in a search.
Be on the top of the world
These are of course not the ultimate recipe for attracting and growing an audience. I would go even further and advocate that there is no universal rule for success in this matter. But there are some hidden gems of how you can act to make the job easier and drive your brand from zero to hero, establish a voice to it, and drive traffic to your website.
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