When building an engaged author-audience, there are 3 main components.
- Audience– The audience is whom you are targeting. This is the most important part of any marketing campaign and can represent between 40-60% of the success of a campaign.
- Offer – The offer is the second most important component of a marketing campaign. The offer is how you present the products and services that you sell. Offers can be presented in different ways. Creating an offer that solves your audience’s wants, needs, and desires can make a huge difference in how many products you sell and the success of your business. The offer can be responsible for up to 40% of the campaign’s success.
- Creative – the creative aspect of a campaign includes any images, graphics or videos, the colors, and any copy. The creative aspect of a campaign represents up to 20% of the success of a campaign.
Of these 3 components, why is the audience the most important?
When building an audience the most important activity is advocating for the audience.
Advocating for the audience includes:
- Choosing the topics and content for your blog, and emails
- The advertisers
- The offers in each email
- The guest authors and experts that contribute content
- All other email activities need to be beneficial to the audience.
Advocating for the people on your email list builds a loyal following of readers. When you build trust with an audience over time, they will continue to be engaged, open the emails, and click on the links inside each email.
Providing content and offers that your list finds interesting creates a win-win-win situation.
How does advocating for your audience benefit the audience, the advertisers, and you the list owner?
The Audience
Advocating for your audience means that you will only create and share content and offers that are beneficial to the audience. Only including content that is relevant to the list will ensure that readers look forward to your emails.
This means that you do not share or promote content that does not provide value.
If your email list focuses on parasailing, then you are probably not going to want to share content or make offers about natural ways to eliminate insects in the garden. It is just not a good match.
The key is to create content based on topics that the audience is interested.
Doing this will create trust with your audience, and they will continue to look forward to your emails.
The Advertisers
When selling paid sponsorships like banner ads and dedicated emails to the list, advocating for the audience is still paramount. Advertisements and offers need to be beneficial to the email subscribers. The list owner should only promote ads from companies that are going to deliver on the promises of the ads. The list owner needs to do their due diligence on the companies buying the sponsorships. Plus, they need to make sure that any company purchasing ads is going to provide a positive experience for the people who click, opts-in or purchase.
Three questions that the list owner needs to answer are:
- How is the product delivered?
- Does the company honor refund requests?
- Does the company have positive reviews online?
Accepting paid sponsorships that are targeted to the list is beneficial by:
1) The audience benefits by purchasing products and services that are valuable.
2) Advertisers benefit by people clicking on the ads in the emails, opting-in to their email list, and then purchasing the product or service.
3) The list owner benefits by maintaining engagement with the list, while having happy advertisers who will purchase more ads in the future.
This results in a healthy list that creates a win-win-win situation for everyone involved.
You – The List Owner
The list owner’s biggest benefit of advocating for the audience is the email subscribers will stay engaged.
Advocating for the audience will yield higher open rates, click-through rates, and revenue. This will develop loyal advertisers who will advertise on a consistent basis. By advocating for the list of subscribers, the list owner can ensure that it will maintain a profitable, healthy, growing business of email subscribers and advertisers.
Finally, here are some other examples of why the audience is the most important part of building a business.
If you present a great offer with great creative to the wrong audience, you most likely will not sell very many products.
An example is selling bathing suits in the artic during the winter versus selling bathing suits to beach tourists during the heat of the summer. It could be the exact same bathing suit. Obviously, you will sell more bathing suits during the summer to beach tourists.
Having an okay offer with bad creative and selling to the right audience will yield revenue. You will have some success. An example is selling water in the desert. All you need is a sign to let people know that you have water. It doesn’t matter how pretty the sign is advertising the water. If someone is thirsty and in the desert, then the only thing he or she cares about is that there is water available and you have it. The sign can be handwritten or any other type of sign. As long as the people in the desert know you have water, you will have people buying the water.
Understanding your customer is essential to your businesses’ success. Understanding your customer can affect every aspect of your business and how you make decisions.
It can impact the:
- Content you create
- The offers you make
- The other businesses that you associate
- Joint venture and affiliate partners
- Who guest blogs on your site
- Media Buys
- The types of emails you send
- How you reach new prospects.
- It affects your copy and how you create and present your offers, products, and services.
An even more advanced way of creating solutions to solve your customer’s challenges is to do research first and then create offers that are based on your customer’s actual problems.
Creating products by doing this research first, gives you an advantage when marketing and selling your product. Most companies create a product and then try to sell the product to an audience. This can create constraints and limitations when selling the product, and the product may not solve the customer’s needs exactly.
Creating the product after the research allows you to tailor a product specifically to the customer. This will allow you to sell more of the products, reach more people, and have fewer constraints when creating the offer, and presenting the benefits of the product.
In conclusion, remember if you want a thriving business always focus on your customers. Always provide value and be a customer-driven business.
Are you building your email list?
Today, when it comes to building your audience one of the most profitable marketing channels is email.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing yields a 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States.
ExactTarget reports for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25.
One of the most profitable ways to build your audience is to increase the size of your email list.
Discover 101 Ways to Increase The Size of Your Email List. Download the Free Report!
