Digital marketing has forever reshaped advertising, with the area having already overtaken its traditional alternatives in popularity. Companies will need to be especially good at this, as their revenue can often depend on it. That doesn’t mean that everyone’s as effective as they could be.
Growing an online audience offers a significant number of benefits to a company. Some of the more notable of these include:
With those kinds of benefits, you’ll want to know how to grow your online following. That’s much easier said than done. Most of this will focus on social media, as this will often fuel your overall growth by feeding traffic to key revenue sources.
How do you grow your social media audience? You can take advantage of multiple tips and tricks. Some of this can vary somewhat depending on which platforms you want to focus on. There’s a difference between growing a Twitter audience and establishing one on LinkedIn, for example.
There are still multiple things that can spa each platform, however. While this will take a significant amount of effort, it’ll be more than worth it in the long term.
Proven Ways To Grow Your Online Audience
Create Consistent Content
Consistency is vital to growing any online audience. A following will want to know roughly when to expect updates from you. If you have a scattershot approach, you’ll find that your online growth will also be scattershot. Being more methodical about when you post is much more recommended.
After a while, you can take advantage of your analytics to determine the best time of the day to post. That’ll help you maximize your overall visibility and reach. It also encourages further engagement from your followers. Typically, this time will be when most of your audience is online.
As such, you should see a spike in engagement during this period. That doesn’t mean posting for the sake of posting. You’ll need to make sure that your posts are high-quality. You’ll need to give followers a reason to engage with your content.
Without it, you’ll lose them as a follower.
Use The Right Tools
Growing an online following isn’t as easy as setting up a social media account and starting to post on it. You’ll need to oversee multiple things, and possibly even several accounts. That could be difficult to manage. You can simplify this by using the right tools.
These will be spread across several areas, such as analytics. You could also take advantage of services that let you manage accounts from multiple platforms in one place. That’ll let you oversee your entire social media marketing efforts at a glance.
That’ll help make things much easier when finding and growing your online audience.
Use Multiple Channels
Many people would prefer to focus on a particular channel when they’re growing. If you want to know how to grow your online audience properly, however, you’ll need to take a different approach. You should use multiple platforms and channels to promote you and your company.
While you might have one ‘main’ platform, these other ones can be used to promote it. Think of them as ways to promote your primary channel. While you could go without them, that’ll make things much more difficult. Make things easier by having accounts on different platforms.
These will maximize your overall visibility. You could also be surprised by how beneficial certain platforms might be to your brand. By using the right tools, as mentioned above, that’ll be much easier to manage than you’d think.
Make Sure To Network
If you’ve already mastered the basics of growing your online audience, you could find that growth is still relatively slow. There are a few ways to speed that up. Networking and connecting with other accounts focused on your industry can be more than helpful.
While you’ll want to avoid competitors, there could be multiple other accounts that could be helpful with you. Joining in with their conversations could increase your overall visibility. You’ll need to be strategic with this approach, however.
You shouldn’t join in simply for the sake of it. Instead, you should have something to add to the conversation. Doing so will show that you have something to add to the conversation, which encourages engagement.
With that, you could develop more relationships within your industry while also increasing your brand’s visibility.
Understand Your Popular Content
Some content will inevitably do better than others. You could be surprised by what might prove popular and go viral. Once this happens, you’ll need to take time to analyze it. You’ll need to try to figure out why it performed better than your other posts.
In many cases, you’ll find that it’s because your audience prefers that type of content. If that’s the situation, then you should aim to make more of this content going forward. By doing so, your online following will be much more engaged with it.
That’ll have a positive effect on your overall visibility. It’ll then have a further boost in sales. You’ll need to make sure that you understand your popular content, however. Knowing why it performed the way it did will be essential to your growth strategy going forward.
Ask Loyal Followers For Help
Your loyalist followers can often be your best marketing strategy. Word-of-mouth marketing has often been the most effective way of generating more sales. Think of this as the digital approach to that. Asking your followers for some help can be more helpful than you’d expect.
The followers you’ll want to target are the ones who have been with you for a while. They’ll typically already engage with your content regularly. That makes them more likely to share your content when asked, which will help to maximize your reach.
For small businesses and startups, this extra help could be more helpful than you’d realize. These types of followers will also be more than happy to offer feedback. That’ll typically focus on your products and services, although it could also include what kind of posts you make, among other things.
Expand On Referral Sources
Analytics will be one of the most essential tools you have at your disposal. While each platform will have its distinct versions, there’s also the likes of Google Analytics to take advantage of. You should use this to find any referral sources to your online platforms.
If you’re getting a lot of traffic from specific places, then you should try to capitalize on them. By doing so, you should be able to maximize the traffic you get from it. You should also rank your referral sources depending on how they perform.
Focusing on the ones that offer you the highest return on investment will be one of the more recommended strategies to take. The same can also be said of high-performing content, which can be replicated and reshared several times.
Doing so will improve the overall impact they have on your following.
Wrapping Up
If you’re starting a business, you’ll need to know how to grow your online audience. By doing so, you’ll develop an active and engaged community based around your products or services. That’ll have significant benefits straight away while also having long-term advantages.
It’ll take a significant amount of effort to do so, however. While you’ll have a significant amount to look after when you run a business, your marketing efforts should be one of the more important. It’ll be one of the main sources of leads and revenues, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.
