In this episode of The Trust Podcast, Zoe Cairns is on the show to share her tips to building a target audience from zero. Many people are interested in gaining an audience, especially targeted ones when starting a business from scratch. Zoe shared her key steps on building an online audience and engagement and converting it into sales. Common mistakes on starting a business [0:52] When analyzing why people are not getting any results, they are often on the wrong platforms and are too scattered on a lot of social media platforms. [1:24] It’s also about not engaging with your audience. You are only constantly sending messages, which results in one-way communication instead of two-way communication. Engagement is the key for you to gain an audience in your online community. Knowing your audience [2:41] Five years ago, we set out our goals and business goals; thus, we know what services or products you want to advertise out there. [3:22] In business, it is important to know and acknowledge your short- and long-term goals. [3:36] Knowing your focus areas means knowing your target audience for each service and product. After that, you start to analyze your audiences’ interests. This helps to separate each potential customer into different platforms. Creating buyer personas [6:13] When you have a new product or service, putting your target audience into a character helps an ideal client for that particular focus area. [8:17] Keeping up to date in terms of changes in every social media platform helps you to distinguish which audience would match the best for each of your products and services. Social media platforms [9:46] Facebook has a great tool called Facebook Audience Insights, wherein it shows you all the demographics of everyone on Facebook. You can also select a location of your preferred audience. Facebook Insights also enables you to learn their interests and pages that they like. [11:42] Once you know your audience, you can then determine what platforms you're going to use because there's no point you're using platforms if your audience aren't hanging out on there. In small businesses and corporate organizations, you need to be thinking about where the time is allocated by your team members and for business owners. [12:43] Another tool for Twitter is a tool called Followerwonk. It is a tool that enables you to go and search all the bios of everyone on Twitter to find your audience. [13:10] On LinkedIn, you can look for different people under the Advanced Search by their job title. You start by reaching out and connecting with everyone and then sending them your sales pitch. What you want to do is go and engage with them, go and look at their posts, start commenting on some of their posts, and not stalk them, but start to engage with them. [14:27] With Instagram, look at the different hashtags and find out if your audience is hanging out and engaging on different posts under the relevant interest hashtags. Using a tool called Flick.tech, which is a great tool to find relevant and trending hashtags and find hashtags that are relevant to your target audience, it's a great way to check them out engage with your audience. [15:46] Don't be on every single social media platform. If you thinly spread yourself across too many, what happens is you're not active on other platforms. Use only one or two platforms. Engaging content [16:57] Once you’ve known your audience and their interests, your next step is to create engaging content that enables them to engage with you. Research is important to know their challenges and create a solution to their problems. [18:04] Check out the pages that your audience is interacting with and how it puts across their content to your possible audience. This will give you ideas for creating your content. [19:18] Engaging is an important process to building your audience. Key Quotes: [1:49 – 2:00] “Algorithms on the social media platforms want you to be engaged in on their platform and keep people longer on their platforms to make them feel part of a community. So, engagement is key.” [19:42 – 19:57] “You need to be going into the platform and engaging with your audience on a consistent basis. Go and find them. Go and engage with them. And I don't mean go and bombard them with sales messages. Go and engage, build rapport and build conversations.” Learn more about Zoe at ZC Social Media Visit ZC Social Media and Academy: https://zcsocialmedia.com/ https://www.zcsocialmediaacademy.com/
