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Many people and brands have successfully created a solid online audience for themselves. However, it’s easier said than done.
If you’re interested in growing an online audience but want to do it as organically as possible, consider applying these techniques in this article.
1. Create high-quality, engaging content
Many digital marketing strategies employ content marketing to help create a solid foundation for organic traffic. Whether you’re focusing on creating content on your website’s blog or social media platforms, high-quality content will significantly help you grow your online audience without resorting to paid followers.
With that in mind, creating engaging content depends on different factors, but knowing your audience and researching them is the best guide. After all, they’re why you’re creating content in the first place.
It would be best if you did some audience research first to determine the types of content they like consuming the most, where they consume content most often, and many other things.
Once you’ve built a solid and loyal following, you can start experimenting more with other types of content that might not have shown up in audience research. However, at the start, it’s best to stick to what your audience tells you they like.
2. Use alternative channels for growth
Most of the time, when it comes to building an online audience, social media platforms are a great choice. It makes sense since many people lounge and hang out on these platforms. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider looking for other avenues where you can foster your audience, especially if you want to create a more specific and tight-knit community.
For example, many businesses have an active newsletter that fosters a more intimate community outside of what may be on their socials or blogs.
Speaking of socials, don’t always focus on creating a community on social media channels you think are most popular. Again, base this on your audience research.
If you’re interested in reaching an online audience of 45 and older who are planning their retirement, TikTok may not be the best place to seek them out. (But you never know! So, check your audience research results.)
3. Building authentic relationships with your audience
Nowadays, people who engage in any online community do so while looking for authenticity in their communities. With that said, if you plan to grow an online audience, a sense of authenticity is vital, even if you’re a corporate entity.
Establishing a brand personality is one of the best ways to create authentic interactions between you and your audience consistently. Your branding strategy will ensure you don’t go out of bounds as you create genuine relationships with your online audience.
After you create a clear and consistent brand personality, you can start interacting with your audience. Respond to comments on your posts. Respond to direct messages wherever appropriate. If someone mentioned you online, consider replying to them in a manner befitting your brand personality.
These interactions help you reinforce your brand personality while creating an audience that feels the authenticity behind your online interactions.
4. Cultivate user-generated content
It can be hard to think of ideas for content constantly. If you need the buffer, consider engaging and using user-generated content.
User-generated content, or UGC for short, would be content that your audience created themselves, which ideally should be related to you.
To leverage UGC, you can create marketing campaigns that prompt your audience to create a particular type of UGC. A great example of that would be the many viral dancing videos that many brands have launched before. You can then choose a random winner to reward their efforts in creating content.
By doing this, you can occasionally post content that your audience created into your timeline (while crediting them) so you have content in your profiles. This idea works best for social media platforms.
5. Partner with influencers
It can be challenging to rise from the noise that is in social media platforms, but one shortcut that you can do is to tap into the audience of another, more famous person. Of course, we’re talking about influencers.
It would be best to look into the influencers you’re interested in working with first before you work with them. Too many brands and businesses only look at the follower count or an influencer’s popularity and not into the attitude, history, audience type, and content type that an audience is involved in.
To avoid any potential problems from associating yourself with specific influencers, doing your research beforehand is crucial.
Plus, it would be easier for you to move their audience to yours if you know that your target audience and their current demographics fit together.
6. Create an engaging content series
No matter what platform you’re using, many digital marketing studies and experiments agree that a continuous flow of content helps grow your audience.
You can get more eyes on your content when you consistently post online without overdoing it. If you have too big of a gap between when you last posted, building that audience can be more challenging but possible. It all comes down to whether you already have an established audience, the type of content you’re creating, and so on.
With that in mind, that doesn’t mean you have to post multiple times every day if you don’t want to. The critical thing here is to be consistent. For example, you may post on social media twice weekly every weekend at 5 PM. The important part is that you consistently do that rather than having many posts.
7. Post the right types of content
One type of content from another person might work well for them, but if it doesn’t fit you, your brand, or your audience doesn’t like it, consider leaving that content behind.
Aside from that, certain media pieces will attract more audiences than others. Video content is king these days as it is a great way to flesh out your brand personality fully. Thus, it makes it easier to attract a specific type of audience that goes with it.
8. Enhance your hashtag game
Hashtags help push your content to the right people interested in your hashtag’s topic.
Some platforms benefit more when you have a thorough hashtag strategy than others.
Pinterest, for example, would work well if your hashtag game is precise. Consider using a Pinterest description generator to help enhance your hashtag game and your Pinterest description. Given the volume of pins you probably need to make, an AI generator like that can help cut the time required to finish this task.
Conclusion
Using these techniques, you can have an audience that you’ve grown organically. With an organic audience, you’ll get a more loyal community behind you that you can grow further. So, if you’re interested in developing an online audience for personal or business reasons, consider the techniques in this article to help you achieve that.