Nurturing your audience is so important to do as a business owner. You need to be able to show your audience and potential clients that they can trust you and your business before you try to go straight in with selling. It can seem quite daunting to think of ways to nurture your audience and what that really means but we’re here to help!
By nurturing them, you are showing them what you offer, why they should trust you and your business and it gives them a chance to get to know you before fully committing to anything. So when the time is right and they are ready to purchase something, they will purchase it from you.
To help you nurture your audience, we have come up with 3 things you can do:
1. Send them Relevant Information
One way to nurture your audience is to send them relevant information. This could be articles that are specific to your target audience or free resources to help them in life. By doing this you are showing them that you are actually wanting to make their life easier rather than just wanting their money regardless if it’s suitable or not.
So if a potential client signs up to your mailing list, before you go straight to selling to them hoping they will buy your most expensive product or service, you can start by sending them some free resources that will benefit them.
For example, for us, our target audience is small business owners. They need help with running, growing and scaling their business and everything else that comes along with being a business owner. So every week, we will send our mailing list a free resource they can use which will help them within their business. This could be worksheets to help them with their content, planning tools, goal setting. Anything we feel will benefit them. And because we are a small business also, we use these tools as well.
We also like to keep our audience updated with anything that’s going on in the world. If we come across an article or website which has helped us, we know that it will probably help some of the other businesses we work with so we share it with them. This could be things on ACAS or the Gov website.
2. Virtual Groups
Another way to nurture your audience is to set up a virtual group. This will usually be created through social media platforms such as Facebook. By creating a group, you are creating a community for your audience. This can really build trust with your potential clients.
As the facilitator of the group, you will be the one to encourage engagement and relationships within the group. When starting a group it can seem like you are putting lots of effort in to encourage conversations and holding relationships but you get nothing in return. But you need to stick with it. Keep giving them advice, keep growing the group and keep conversations going. Eventually the group will start to take a turn and will end up running on its own without you. This is definitely what you want!
You can also go into other people’s Facebook groups and be as active as you possibly can so that you are the ’go to’ person in that group for your industry. So if you own a marketing business, by going into others groups and answering questions to do with marketing and being present in the group, when people are ready to do something with their marketing and take it to the next level, you will be the first person to come to mind because you have been there and helping them throughout their journey.
3. Meetups
Meetups are another way to nurture your audience. They are great to build trust and relationships with your audience and potential clients. You get to meet them face to face or over a video call and you can really show your personality which can be difficult to do over the phone or social media. The meetups can be anything from holding small informal catch ups at local coffee shops, having 1:1’s with people or even holding actual events and workshops.
All of the above can be great to get to know your audience that little bit more and really getting down to the nitty gritty of how you can help them. By meeting up, you will be able to see if you even want to work with this person or if they want to work with you. You will be able to get a feel whether they will benefit from using your products or services or if it doesn’t quite fit with what you do.
By holding your own events or workshops, this can also really help with your credibility and show your potential client that you know what you are doing and if it’s the right fit for them. Sometimes they need to see you in action before committing to anything so events are great to build trust and relationships.
Building relationships with your audience and potential clients is probably the most important thing you need to do as a business owner.
The worst relationships are the ones that are:
- One sided
- Inconsistent
- Take, take, take
- No help or understanding
But the best relationships are:
- Give and take
- Consistent
- With people who are helpful and understanding
- With people who genuinely care
You want the BEST relationships with your audience!
