Do you feel like your audience doesn’t respond to your offers and pitches?
That your conversion rates are in the gutter?
That you pour everything you’ve got into building excellent products and services but your audience shrugs them off?
I feel you. I’ve been there.
Have I ever told you the story of my biggest, dumbest mistake?
When I launched my digital marketing agency in 2015, I wanted to walk the talk and build enough SEO-friendly content to get most of my leads organically. I wrote like a possessed fiend, dozens of great blog posts, all of them heavily researched and optimized.
How to Write a Landing Page
How to Write a Sales Page
Your Checklist for a Flawlessly Optimized Blog Post
X Biggest Mistakes in SEO Copywriting
These are just a few examples of blog posts I spent ages on. In a couple of short months, they started ranking in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and getting organic traffic too.
The only problem? No leads. Nada, zero, zilch.
I guess you can spot why this mistake was extra dumb with a sprinkle of short-sightedness on top: that coveted organic traffic did NOT come from my ICP, my ideal buyer, but from my peers — fellow copywriters and content writers looking to hone their skills.
I got traffic but no sales. Instead of leads, I received job applications.
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It took me three months to figure it out (now you see why I think it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done?). When I figured it out, I changed the content I was creating to:
How to Work with SEO Copywriters
X Ways to Hire Rockstar Copywriters
I had a minor drop in traffic but the leads started pouring in. I could finally walk the talk for real!
Shocking no one, when you bark at the right tree, things change for the better. Not sure your bark is directed to where it should be?
Are you barking at the wrong tree? A checklist
- Most of your audience consists of your peers i.e. you write copywriting tips and nearly everyone who engages with your content is a copywriter too. [Note: you can sell to peers but if you do, it usually has to be something more than the 101 of your trade.]
- Your content and your offer don’t align: you talk about advanced tactics but you offer entry-level products.
- The reverse may also happen: you sell products for people with advanced challenges but you talk to them like they’re fifth graders. The most common LinkedIn example: you talk about building a 7-figure business and you sell hook templates.
- You get a ton of cheerleading (go, [YOUR NAME], that product sounds awesome!) but no leads or sales.
- You offer your services or products for free and your audience still doesn’t want them. This one hurts like all hell but it’s perhaps the clearest sign of audience mismatch or bad product. Sadly, people value their money more than their time, so if they won’t even give you their time, you need to re-assess things.
How do we end up with an audience-product mismatch?
You start with all the best intentions but building a relevant audience, whether it’s on social media or an email list, is hard and time-consuming. You get jittery, impatient, and somewhat jaded by speaking to the same one thousand people day after day.
So you find easier ways, shortcuts — it’s what we’re wired to do. We all chase dopamine hits and new likes, comments, or subscribers are some of the easiest ways to get your fix. This is how you end up peddling entry-level things like “101 hook templates” or “50 free stock photos websites” to attract an audience, any audience.
Another common pitfall I see is chasing the “easy” channels:
Getting views on TikTok is easy, I need to be on there.
Everyone in B2B is on LinkedIn, I’ll start there.
You get views, reach, subscribers, and a few friends. But very few leads and even fewer sales.
Why?
What you’re selling is for people who have more complex issues. They don’t need hook templates to attract minnows, they need a clear strategy so they can sell their own things.
Your marketing and your offer are misaligned with your audience’s needs
You see a ton of success stories out there so it’s only natural to think that all you have to do is build something and it will sell like hotcakes. That’s survivorship bias, not reality.
Ask yourself:
- Did you build it because you can or because your audience needs it?
- Does your audience need a service or a product? Do they need support or do they prefer to DIY their pain cure? Read this before you productize your services.
- Are you pitching at the right level of market sophistication? Is your audience aware of their pain and aware of what your solution can do for them? If not, you may need to start with education before you pitch anything.
Balancing Quantity and Quality Out
“I sold $100K worth of product/services in a week and I only have a 2K audience” — have you ever seen flexes like this?
I’m sure you have. They’re half true as well. You don’t need a huge audience to meet your goals. But if you can make $100K on a 2K audience, imagine how much you could make on a 10K audience.
Audience size isn’t irrelevant and bigger is nearly always better.
You can read more about building a BIG audience here. Today, we’re focusing on relevance, so I won’t dwell too much on it.
I will mention, though, that minnows have their place too. A large audience is social proof in itself. As a rule of thumb:
- You can get by on a smaller audience if you sell services because you can’t take on too many clients at once anyway.
- You need a larger audience if you sell products because the size of your audience is directly correlated with the number of products you can sell and you are not limited by delivery time.
If I had to start from scratch, I’d focus on padding the numbers quickly for my first 1-2K followers (irrespective of platform) so I can have that coveted social proof, then switch focus to relevance.
Because neither products nor services can be sold to the wrong audience.
So how the heck do you build a relevant audience?
1. Lord, give me patience but FASTER
It takes time to build a relevant audience, so patience is the first thing I advise my clients. Growth hacks will bring you an audience, but it will probably not be the right one.
Fewer hooks, more substance.
Trust me, people who need your products will take the time to read more than one paragraph. When you pay, you pay attention. Very few people spend more than $10 after reading a hook or a headline alone.
Expect to spend 6-12 months building a core relevant audience. It’s always those first months that feel like teeth-pulling. Progress is always much slower than you’d like but as long as you see an uptick in sales along with an uptick in audience growth, you’re on the right path.
2. Look for substantive engagement
Does your audience ask relevant questions? Are your social media comments more than cheerleading?
Foster real conversations on all your marketing channels, well beyond “great post –> thank you”. Meaningless comments and interactions are a given everywhere but you need to have something more than that too.
If your audience asks pertinent questions about your offers or about your content in general, you’ve got something there. If not, go back to the drawing board.
3. Ask before you build
Fake internet positivity and cheerleading from your friends won’t add a dime to your bank account. Before you build an offer, ask your audience and your best clients if they need what you’re building.
I spilled the beans on how I built my latest product, The Guided Strategy Template WITH my audience here. TL;DR: create polls, surveys, and strike deeper conversations with your best clients. If there’s a majority that votes they want it, start building. If not, look into why they don’t want it and start rebuilding from there.
4. Document your strategy and use it as a beacon light
The easiest way to stray away from your relevant audience is to NOT document your strategy and your long-term goals. Without a documented strategy, you will fall for every growth hack and shiny object the internet throws at you.
Build a strategy and match everything to your goals: does going viral serve your long-term goal? Does the social media post you’re about to publish speak to a qualified audience or to minnows?
A strategy is a living document, something that you can go back to every time you’re not sure whether you should invest in a new tactic or a new approach.
My Guided Strategy Template is designed to do just that: help you meet your long-term goals without detours and without barking at the wrong tree. Grab your copy here and start documenting everything before you build a large and largely useless audience.
One final piece of advice: don’t compare your audience to someone else’s. You don’t have access to their bank account, so you will never know for sure if the size of their audience is directly correlated to their profit. Remember that most of what you read online is inspirational, not actionable.
Building a relevant audience takes time and it’s a never-ending quest.
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Adriana’s Picks
- I’m speaking at Masters of Email Marketing on October 19th. It’s an all-day virtual event by Smaily. If you’re serious about email marketing, you’re going to love the line-up of hand-picked experts! My presentation will be about growing and monetizing an email list in a crowded space. Join me here, it’s 100% free!
- Threads is struggling to retain users but still faring better than X. Does this mean it will finally be available in the EU as well?
- The EU is going after X because, lo and behold, it’s the platform with the highest rate of misinformation. Who would have thunk? Except Elon, of course.
That’s it from me today!
See you next Thursday in your inbox!
Here to make you think,
Adriana
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Need me in your corner? There are three ways I can help you:
- Boost your chances of success by 400%: document your strategy with The Guided Strategy Template.
- Get my product launch email templates that sell: 5+1 emails you can send to your list in 45 seconds.
- Book a 1:1 strategy session with me. Let’s unlock your growth in 60 mins!
