Business Fuel: Growing Your Audience

When starting a business, one often does not know where to start, how success will be achieved and what to focus on. Being a small business owner in Westchester or beyond is hard work, especially as a working mother or spouse. There are obvious things that each business should have: licensing and incorporation, a website, branding and products or services to sell. But what about our audience? Are you cultivating it and giving it the utmost attention and care? It does not matter how good your offerings are if you do not have a solid client base to buy it. 

Your email list is golden and should be top priority in order for you to successfully market your business, generate leads, get new clients and keep customers. It takes time to build your email list, but with deliberate action you can see steady progress in growing your business.  You can do this by setting up drip campaigns, capturing emails through free product offerings or specials and just plain old marketing.

There are many ways to capture an audience including social media and inbound marketing. In order to keep your audience you must add value and provide valuable information. The size of your audience does not matter as much as their loyalty and engagement does. You can have an audience of thousands but if no one clicks your links, reads your blogs, engages with your content or purchases products, you have nothing. The relationship with your audience needs to be two-way because they are the fuel that allows your business to keep going and growing.

Your audience should always be top priority and their needs should be catered to. Listen to the wants and needs of your audience. What are they struggling with? What are they seeking advice and resources on? Your reputation and your willingness to help others is what keep people coming back to your site or business.

Here are some actionable steps to grow your audience:

1. Get feedback from your audience. Create a survey to discover what is working and what your audience would like to see more of.

2. Create a giveaway! Offer something free or an exclusive discount for signing up to be a part of your email list, opting in to your mobile list or connecting on social media. Incentives are the way to get your audience involved.

3. Blog with careful attention to SEO. Are you optimizing your posts for search engines? Help people find you.