How To Grow and Serve Your Audience Better

Find out how you can help them by asking them

What are your biggest pain points? What is the business problem you’re trying to solve? What’s holding your team back from reaching your goals?

It’s important to continually ask your audience about their challenges. Those challenges change over time, so you need to make sure your content is matching those needs.

If you really want to grow your audience, you really need to know your audience.

For example, HubSpot, a marketing automation software company, asks on their landing page forms: “what is your biggest operational challenge?” They ask this question because it helps them put together products and services that serve their customers’ inefficiencies.

Let’s dive into how you can grow your audience by asking yourself these five important questions.

1. Who Is Your Audience?

You probably don’t know as much about your audience, customers, or followers as you could. You may know their name, email address, social media accounts, blog post, or content piece they consumed. But do you know who they truly are?

When you ask someone how you can help them, it creates an opportunity for you to figure that out. Their answers will reveal things such as their passions, what they work on, and what challenges they are experiencing. These details will give you a better picture of your audience.

When you know your audience, you’ll be able to better connect and communicate with them. They will become more engaged and your views and reads will go up.

2. What Are You Doing To Attract Them?

It’s important to attract the right people, that is, the people who hold the same values and beliefs as you do. You need to have a clear mission for who you are and what your values are.

Are you writing the right headlines that attract the audience you want? Your headlines are your welcome mat for your audience. The right headlines can draw in disinterested and skeptical readers, making them feel “welcome” to your home.

To attract your audience, you need to be consistent, provide high-quality content, and take them on an adventure with your stories. The key is to take them on an adventure they want to go on and then when they are on that adventure, deliver an experience that will have them coming back for more.

3. How Did They Discover You?

It’s important to find out how your audience discovered you. When someone subscribes to your email newsletter, do you know their journey from when they first heard about you to when they provided you with their email address?

When you determine how people find you, you can invest more in those channels. For example, did they find you via social media, through Google search, or by reading information on content publishers on apps like News360?

It’s important to know how your audience growth is happening. If your audience is coming from word of mouth, find the people who are spreading the news about your content. With limited time and resources, you need to invest in the places where a majority of your subscribers come from and then place your bets there.

4. How Are You Serving Them?

Once your audience finds you, how well are you serving them with binge-worthy content? Do you have enough content for them to stay with you for a while?

To make sure you can answer these questions, think like a media company. For example, Progressive Insurance, one of the biggest car insurance companies known for its name-your-price tool, runs its marketing like a TV network. It does this by always having content, characters, and context.

You must also connect with your audience on an emotional level. If you can make them smile, cry, and laugh, you are connecting with them emotionally. You can learn a lot about connecting and serving your audience by studying comedians.

The value you provide will turn casual observers into your biggest fans. They will tell others about you because you are serving your community by being helpful, entertaining, and educational.

5. How Are You Communicating With Them?

It’s important to choose your words carefully. Everything you say and do communicates to your audience. For example, if you have a YouTube channel, you need to pay attention to your body language.

When you are communicating with your community, find out if they are more interested in their goals or their problems. Are they struggling with not having enough time? How do they talk about themselves?

These little things can make a big difference. Once you understand the language they use, how your audience thinks, and the mindset they are in, you can better communicate with them. These details will better help you describe yourself, your products and services, and the value you provide.

The more you speak with your audience instead of at your audience, the more likely they will agree with what you have to say. How you communicate with them is critical to your success.

Bringing It All Together

The best way to grow and serve your audience is by asking them directly how you can help them. This way, it doesn’t turn into a guessing game and you don’t have miscommunication. The more you know about your audience, the more you know about their goals and problems. This will help you better communicate, provide solutions, and paint a vision of a better future.

Asking your audience consistently what they want increases your knowledge about them, improves your chances of success, and empowers you to grow faster. Don’t wait for them to provide feedback to you, ask them first. You’ll be glad you did.