When is the Right Time to Prioritize Audience Growth?

This transcript has been automatically created and minimally edited/formatted. As such, there may be some errors in the text.
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[Episode preview]
Is now the right time to grow your audience only, you know, but you get to make that decision. And then from that decision, you get to choose, what am I prioritizing right now? Am I ready to prioritize growing my audience or am I ready to actually prioritize the things that will set me up to then in the future, grow my audience and in doing so see really beautiful aligned business growth, business expansion because of that now larger audience.
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[Podcast Intro]
Hey, welcome to the Sustainable Success podcast. This is your home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I’m Carly Jo Bell, the Sustainable Success mentor and your guide on this journey with self trust as your North Star and foundations under your feet, you’ll be able to look external for ideas, internal, for answers and build your business your way. Let’s dive in.
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[Episode begins]
There is a productive time to focus on audience growth and a distracting time at the beginning of December 2022 my audience size was about 600 people total. I had 600 people in my Facebook group and less than 400 on my email list through one bundle. That month, I grew my audience to about 2500 people. In fact, I actually drew my audience way beyond that, but 2500 people is the number that have since stayed on my list for the next year or so. Just a few months prior, I had wrapped up four years in business, four years in business, a six figure and a multi six figure year all with an audience of less than 600 people. And during that time, I put basically no energy into growing my audience because from where I stood, not only did I not need to, my business is doing just fine. I also knew that I wasn’t ready to when I submit to this bundle though, which I knew would have a very large impact on my audience size. I did so because I knew that finally four years into business, I was ready or rather, I knew that my business was now ready to expand beyond our small audience and bring our solidified message to even more people. And now I want to share with you how to tell if you are actually ready to prioritize audience growth in a big way too before we fully jump in. I want to have this conversation because I really feel that audience growth can be kind of one of those like when then moments, right? It’s one of those, you know, when my audience gets to this size and then I will be successful or when I grow my audience in this way, then I’m finally going to get more sales, get more clients, whatever it is. But that when then thinking is such a hallmark of the culture of speedy success. And when then thinking also often really limits what we are able to do because it distracts us from what we actually need to do. So I’m gonna really show you here again. Is it time for you to actually prioritize growing your audience in a big way as well? Again, before we jump in, I just have one note of nuance. Everything that I share here in this conversation today is about how to tell if you’re ready to prioritize audience growth by all of this, everything we’re about to talk about. I absolutely do not mean that you have to wait until you have everything in your business. Perfect to even grow your audience at all. Or that let’s say if your Instagram audience is naturally growing, that you then have to go make those people unfollow you because you don’t have everything in your business perfect yet first, because of course, nothing in your business will ever be perfect. And the moment that you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out is usually the moment where you have the most opportunity for growth or expansion. But also because simply by doing a lot of what we’re about to talk about. Your audience will naturally grow probably in relatively small ways. Yes, but it will grow nonetheless. All right. How do you tell if you are ready to prioritize audience growth? First and foremost, do you know who your right foot client is? One of the toughest things that I have walked a few clients through in the last few years, is them having kind of a lucky break where they massively grow their audience over a short period of time. But then when they try to sell something that audience isn’t at all actually ready to buy. I mean, they’re not even paying attention because they simply weren’t the right audience in the first place. How that happens is a little bit of a different conversation. But growing your audience without knowing who your right fit client is isn’t helpful because you end up bringing wrong fit people in and wrong fit people aren’t going to buy. Now, of course, to some extent, you will always bring people into your audience who aren’t the right fit. That is a fact of doing business and it does not matter how well you know your audience, it’s going to happen, but you can limit the amount of wrong fit people that you bring in by first knowing who your right fit client is. But then second, adapting every other part of your sustainable success system to attract this specific person. I’m not gonna go super deep into who your right foot client is. But if you’re curious, I do have a free training on that topic called Dream Client Discovery. I’ll link that in the show notes. So that way it’s easy for you to get to next. Do you have offers set up for your right foot client? And do you have messaging that has already proven to bring those right fit clients into? Right for them work? When I look back at my journey, this is one of those places that I’m just so grateful that I waited to prioritize growing my audience because instead of growing my audience, I was able to really focus my energy on honing and refining my offers and messaging to make them as effective as they can possibly be. I think it’s really fair to say that a lot of us business owners experience imposter syndrome. I certainly was one of them. I’ll say sometimes my imposter syndrome does flare up a little bit but nowhere near what it used to. What I’ve learned over the years though is that imposter syndrome is one of those things that can often be rooted in a heck of a lot of patriarchal and white supremacist fiction. But also in a decent amount of fact, what I mean by that is that when you’re selling an offer that you aren’t confident can reliably deliver results and or you’re using messaging that is perhaps overpromising on something that even with the best offer. You can’t actually promise will be possible for the vast majority of your clients. You are going to feel like an impostor. Of course, I say this with no myth of perfection, you’re not going to have 100% success rates with clients. And also you are going to use messaging that you later realize needs to be shifted a bit. This is all part of the journey, it’s all normal, it’s all OK? And yes, when you realize, oh, I need to make that shift or I need to adjust this offer or you know, I did actually overpromise here a little bit, didn’t mean to, but I did when you realize that it is an opportunity for repair, however, that looks in your situation, but there’s nothing wrong with you or bad about you. If you landed here again, it’s very normal. And this is why we build foundations because from the foundations, we can be so much more confident that we are selling offers that are set up to reliably facilitate results for or with our clients. And then also be really confident that we are using messaging that speaks accurately transparently to the intended outcome, transformation or result of your offer. So before you start really prioritizing audience group, you want to know that you are solid in your offers and in your messaging, you want to know that you have offers that can and do reliably facilitate results. And you want to know that you have messaging that reliably brings right fit clients into right for them work. When you do have both of those things growing, your audience will pour gasoline on the fire of what’s already working and you’ll already have the things in place that then allow you the time space and energy to really truly focus on growing your audience. Instead of trying to build out your course, fix your group program, shift your done for you offer into more of a consulting offer all of these things. And also figure out the messaging for all of the above that will actually help to sell those offers and drawing your audience. And there’s just way too many things to be focusing on one time. And again, that audience growth can become a really big distraction from doing the things that you actually need to do. It’s so easy to think. Well, my offers aren’t selling because I don’t have a big enough audience. But the truth is if you have even a tiny audience, when you have strong offers, when you have strong messaging and also marketing sales lead gen which we’re gonna talk about here in a second when you have those foundations in place, your audience size actually doesn’t matter as much because you will sell people into those offers. Of course, I say this with nuance. Again, there is a right time to prioritize audience growth, but you do want to get your offers, your messaging to about 70 to 80% solid before you’re actually now prioritizing really growing that audience and bringing more people in to those offers. Finally, do you have systems set up to move new audience members into paid offers? You’re gonna see with a lot of business owners who go viral on tiktok or through reels that they don’t actually have these systems in place. And so their virality is kind of this moment of overwhelm, but it’s also like, whoa, this is cool. But then that virality doesn’t lead anywhere after that, maybe one or two days. Whereas the business owners who do already have these systems set up to move new audience members into paid offers. See this big moment of like, wow, we’ve really expanded our reach here, turn into an uptick in sales initially, but then also an uptick in sales that is consistent after that, it leads to an increase in revenue and a consistent level of increase in that revenue. Of course, when I say systems here, I do not necessarily mean automated systems like yes, sure. A welcome sequence can be helpful. But do you need a welcome sequence? Not necessarily if you don’t have a welcome sequence though. Are you at least emailing your list regularly already and doing so consistently while intentionally inviting them to work with you, you have to have these marketing lead generation and sales systems set up to make the most of audience growth otherwise it becomes audience growth for audience growth’s sake, which isn’t actually helping anyone or let’s say if you’re focusing on growing a social media audience, right, rather than it be directly growing an email audience. Do you have simple ways for that social media audience to opt into your email list? And are you consistently marketing those ways? Yes, you want to be consistently marketing the ways that people from your social media can get onto your email list before you go viral. Otherwise you’re gonna grow your onions, but you only get that small window to capture new people’s attention. And so if you haven’t already been talking about how people can get onto your email list and naturally move deeper into what you do, then you’re going to have this little window of whoa big virality, big reach big, you know, now audience growth. But those people aren’t moving into the other ways of staying connected with you, the deeper ways of staying connected with you again, like your email list. On this note, I see a lot of business owners with missed opportunities in the content that they create in an attempt to go viral. This whole conversation today is not about just growing your audience through going viral. Like I have never gone viral and yet I have still grown my audience substantially, especially in the last year. But just because I see this happening a lot, I do just wanna mention this because a lot of people’s goal in specifically Instagram and tiktok, I also see this sometimes with people on linkedin because a lot of their goals is to go viral that ends up impacting the type of content that they are creating in terms of, they often end up creating content for that audience rather than creating content that is in alignment with the work that they love doing in the way that they love doing it with the people that they love working with. They end up actually. And often this happens accidentally, they end up changing what they are doing in order to try and satisfy the needs or the wants or just frankly the desires of this audience that they’ve now reached through virality rather than staying true to their own alignment and frankly doing the things that actually are going to create sustainable success in their business. This is almost a separate topic, this idea of creating to the audience rather than creating an alignment. But I do think it’s worth mentioning here in our conversation on when to prioritize audience growth. And what I’ll really share here is that the reality is almost never an aligned primary goal. Of course, it can be part of a goal, right? Like you might be in a place of, I have this message that I know that so many people need to hear. And I’m so I’m gonna keep crafting content that shares this message authentically and continue to find more and more ways to have it reach more people. But that’s a purposeful goal. That’s an aligned goal. The goal there is not going viral. Just recently, I participated in an online summit. I shared a workshop that I had built very intentionally in everything from the title to the topic to a lot of the actual language that I used inside of the presentation to the call to action. At the end, everything I built this workshop very intentionally to bring in my right fit client. It wasn’t a training that would necessarily resonate with everyone who attended that particular summit. But I truly did not care because I don’t want to attract everyone at that summit. I want to attract my right fit clients pretty much exclusively. Literally within days of that summit ending, not only had my email list grown pretty significantly, but one of the people who joined my email list as a result of that summit signed up for one of my courses, literally a paid course and not even the freebie that I pitched. At the end of that training. A few weeks later, this same person was in my inbox asking about expand our comprehensive business training program that equips you to sustainably call in a steady stream of clients and stabilize your cash flow while providing you with the foundations to build a business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. This person watched this training and then they got onto my email list and then they purchased a course and then they a few weeks later, after actually doing that course, stepped in to expand as well. They were a right fit client and this is what happens when you know who your right fit client is and you build your offers and craft your messaging to bring that right fit person in. And you set up the marketing, the lead generation and the sales systems to move any new audience members into your paid offers. I know that growing your audience often feels like and is even talked about sometimes in the online business world as a need to do. I also know that small yet aligned audiences are often some of the mightiest. So often I see business owners chasing more and more and more audience members sometimes because it’s a little bit of a vanity metric, right? Like we start to feel like we have all of these followers, we have all these email subscribers and that means something about us or on the other side, it’s like I don’t have a big audience. And so now that means something maybe negative about me. And sometimes though people get really caught up in this, what I would classify as a shiny object of growing their audience because they’ve been sold a message that a larger audience is what creates success to that. I’ll say that a larger audience when it is aligned certainly contributes to expansive success but a larger audience on its own does not actually create success. And when an audience has grown before you’re actually ready to grow an audience, it often ends up turning into frankly a little bit of a trap. Not least because it skews numbers and data in such a way that even if you are putting out aligned things into the world, you get very little traction sign ups or even engagement on that stuff, which is then where that trap comes in because it’s so tempting in those moments where you have this larger audience and you’re putting stuff out into the world that you believe in, but it’s not selling, it’s not converting. People aren’t seem to be interested in it. It becomes this trap because you start getting tempted to build toward what you think that audience wants rather than building what you truly desire to build and building those things that are going to create sustainable success in your business. Sustainable success is created by doing work you love doing in the way that you love doing it with the people that you love working with sustainable success is not having a large audience that you have to mold yourself to their likes and dislikes in order to be successful. Frankly, that self abandonment, that is not real lasting sustainable success. So I’ll leave you with. This is now the right time to grow your audience only, you know, but you get to make that decision. And then from that decision, you get to choose, what am I prioritizing right now? Am I ready to prioritize growing my audience or am I ready to actually prioritize the things that will set me up to then in the future, grow my audience and in doing so see really beautiful aligned business growth, business expansion because of that now, larger audience.
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[Podcast Outro]
Thanks for listening to the Sustainable Success podcast. You’re home for honest conversations about building and running an online business that brings you as much joy as it does revenue. I truly believe that these are the conversations we need to be having more of in our online business community. If you know too, would you leave me a review and/or share this episode with the friends?
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