Why You Should Own Your Audience

Three Levels to Your Audience

When it comes to building an audience for you to market to there are three levels.

1. Buying Attention
2. Earning Attention
3. Owning Your Audience

1. Buying Attention

When it comes to building an audience, the first level buying attention. This is where you spend money on advertising. This allows you to reach people you wouldn’t normally have access to. This can be done both in physical ads as well as digital ads. Here are a few of the methods you can use to advertise your business:

• Print Advertising
• Outdoor Advertising
• Broadcast Advertising
• Paid Search Advertising
• Social Media Advertising
• Native Advertising
• Display Advertising

Depending on the type of business you have some of these forms of advertising will work better than others. However, for optimal effect, it’s best to utilize these in tandem. Remember, the goal is to reach an audience you normally would not have access to. So the idea is to spend your ad money in a manner that optimizes your reach, qualifies your audience, and ultimately leads to more conversions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Access to an extremely broad audience
• Quickly get in front of new people
• Doesn’t require any previous connections

Cons

• Can be very expensive
• You may not have access long-term
• The platform used for ads owns your audience

2. Earning Attention

The next level to acquiring an audience is to earn attention. This might sound confusing, but earning your audience is simply acquiring attention through content. This can be done in many different ways, but here are a few ideas for you.

Guest Writing

Podcast Guest

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a broad concept, but essentially you are creating value-added content to draw attention on platforms that already have an audience. This means creating educational or entertaining content on major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.

The goal of content marketing is to have audience members find your content (through various strategies such as hashtags) and lead them to your website. This can take a long time, but can ultimately become an excellent asset. The best option is to create content for a platform you control (such as your own blog) as this will ensure protection against the closing, blocking, or banning from other platforms.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Access to a broader audience
• Doesn’t cost you money (with exception of travel expenses)
• Doesn’t require any previous audience
• Can become evergreen and long-lasting method for gaining attention

Cons

• Doesn’t guarantee access to their audience
• Takes longer to gain attention
• Can be time-consuming
• Could result in very few conversions

3. Owning Your Audience

Finally, we’ve gotten to the most important level, owning your audience. This is where you have continual and direct access to your fans. So what does this mean? This means you have acquired an email, phone number, or physical address of a potential customer or client. This means Facebook can shut down tomorrow, that podcast channel could be deleted, and you would still have access to your audience.

Ultimately, this is the most ideal way to build an audience. It is also one of the most difficult as you must gain the trust of your audience in order to acquire this information. This can be done by sharing your knowledge as an industry expert in order to convince your audience you are worth trusting. Many of the methods shared above are great ways to do this.

You could create a commercial or video content sharing your knowledge and pay to advertise it on Facebook Ads, for example. You could share more knowledge on a podcast you own or one you are a guest on. There are a number of ways to do this, but ultimately you will need to ask this audience for their information.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• You never lose access to your audience
• Once you have access, it costs you nothing to reach out
• Highly vetted audience and more easily converted into customers
• An email list is considered an asset and increases the value of your company when seeking to sell or acquire capital

Cons

• It can take a long time to accumulate
• It may be uncomfortable to ask for this information

Moving Forward

If you’re looking for ways to grow your business online, here is a FREE Resources I’ve been working on to help small business owners and entrepreneurs expand their reach and build brand awareness. 🤩 Click the link to download now and let me know what you think. If it helps you or your business, feel free to leave me a review.

Also, if you have any questions about lead generation or want tips on more ways to gain your audience’s attention, shoot me an email. I’d love to help! ❤