Building a loyal Audience is not Magic, it’s hard Work
Growing and maintaining loyal audiences is one of social media and content marketing’s biggest challenges. There are no magic spells to do the trick, it’s all down to honest work and well considered strategies.
Quality Rules
The media industry continues to shift more and more away from pure vanity metrics. In other words, the number of fans, followers or readers you have matters far less than the level at which those you have engage with your content.
As priorities shift from quantity to perceived audience quality, it is better to have 500 who actually spend some time reading and engaging with content than 5,000 visitors who exit your pages in a jiffy. This makes tracking audiences (Do they spend time with your content? Do they come back for more?) acquired through paid distribution campaigns crucial.
Content is King
High quality content tailored to specific user types is still the best way of attracting and retaining audiences. This obviously includes highly clickable, compelling headlines. Just make sure the content delivers on the promises of those headlines.
E-mail is Queen
While quality content is undoubtedly king, e-mail distribution is definitely the queen, and one that wears the pants around the house at that. Shifting the focus of your audience acquisition campaigns onto e-mail will provide you with audiences you own, as opposed to borrowed or rented ones like those on Facebook, for instance.
Power of Unity
Partnerships with similar, like-minded sites are an excellent way of introducing your content to new audiences. What’s more, they also help to bring in those precious e-mail addresses. Naturally, to make sure your campaign resonates, you need to trust your partners’ understanding of your audience.
Design Matters
Good design is not just about looking great, it’s about making sure your site and e-mails are positively mobile responsive. Having e-mail sign-up modules hidden in some inaccessible location, for example, could lose you hundreds, if not thousands of e-mail addresses a week. Remember their value? Then make sure it’s easy to sign-up on any device.
Testing, Testing
Never just post your content and hope for the best. Instead, continually test everything, from who reads what when, where and why to where they came from, how long they stay, how they engage and more. Analyse your data and use it to optimise your content, social media and e-mail campaigns.
Long Road to Success
Taking shortcuts is not an option. Successful audience growth is based on continual evaluation and improvement of design, content and strategies based on collection and analysis of relevant data. It may be a long road, but there’s a pot of gold at the end of it. Now that’s magic.
