For any marketing campaign, the ultimate goal is to gain new business. Sometimes, this means earning new business from new customers. Other times, it means expanding your audience outreach to attract new customers.
So, how do you reach as many people as possible? There are several ways, and people spend years earning degrees in marketing to answer that very question.
That said, there are some tactics that work, and others that don’t. Here are four proven tactics that will widen your audience outreach, and improve results from your existing audience.
Know Your Audience
Before you do anything else, it’s important to understand who you’re trying to reach. A big part of this is choosing the right channel of communication. If you’re putting all of your effort into social media ads and none of your potential customers are on social media, you’re just wasting your money.
This is often the case when dealing with businesses. If you’re offering B2B services, building your email list is essential. Businesses prefer email to almost any other means of communication, other than industry magazines and personal recommendations.
Contrary to stereotypes, email is also still popular with the public at large.
Better yet, emails are virtually free. Sending an email to 100,000 people costs only pennies more than sending one to 100 people, so you can cast a very wide net.
Harness Social Media
That said, if you’re trying to advertise to the general public, you’ve got to go where the people are. These days, that inevitably means some type of social media outreach strategy. Keep in mind, though, that everyone else is also on social media. You need to make your content stand out.
This means two things: consistency, and engagement.
Consistency means posting on a regular basis, and keeping the tone and type of content consistent. For instance, if you have a fun, playful brand, posting a serious video, even one that’s relevant, is going to confuse your audience. Stick with the same type of content, and people will come back for more.
Engagement means responding to people’s comments. This is a great opportunity to interact one-on-one with potential customers! And when people feel noticed, they’re more likely to share with their friends.
Reach Out Regularly
Just because you’ve emailed or called once, don’t assume you’ve actually gotten through to the person. In fact, it can take as many as six to eight cold calls or emails to reach an interested customer. If you give up the first time, you’re leaving a lot of business on the table!
Provide Useful Content
Don’t just advertise. Do something to make people want to share your content. One way to do this is to provide something of value.
For instance, you could send out an email advertising your online branding course, and it might net you a handful of sales. But what if you instead offered an invite to a free virtual summit?
This would motivate people not just to engage with your content, but to share it with others.
