Audience Building – ConversionXL, Phil Nottingham

A summary of the contextual importance of building an audience for brand marketing, and the difference between audience building and customer acquisition.

Topics covered:

• The flaws with conventional approaches to brand marketing and why audience building can offer competitive advantage as a brand marketing strategy.
• The difference between audience building and customer acquisition, and how they need to be considered as complementary but distinct marketing disciplines.
• how audience building needs to be measured differently to performance marketing, and how bad measurement can create bad strategy.

A breakdown of the effective approaches to finding a brand audience, with B2B and B2C examples.

Topics covered:

• What makes a good brand audience distinct from a product audience, and why these two concepts need to be differentiated in your marketing.
• The options for where to build an audience, and the pros and cons of using your own website vs social media channels, including why your own website is the best choice for most businesses.
• How to use SparkToro and Reddit to find insights about a potential audience and why these insights can indicate a promising opportunity

A summary of the principles behind creating a focus for your audience building, including the importance of championing a particular cause or idea. How to construct an audience positioning statement which guides your audience building work

Topics covered:

• What a brand needs to stand for in audience building, and how this is distinct from a product value proposition.
• The pitfalls with being too abstract or vague with audience positioning and why failing to be specific at the early stage can lead to poor creative execution.
• How to construct and refine an audience positioning statement, which ties together your chosen audience and your brand with a mission.

A breakdown of audience building principles applied to different media types, and how this execution can be applied across different marketing channels.

Topics covered:

• Understand the concept of “hub and spoke” approaches to marketing channels, and how to apply this idea to consolidate a disperse audience onto a single platform.
• Understand what sort of length and depth of content works best to build an audience, and why this necessitates rethinking traditional approaches to blogging, email and video creation.
• How to develop a tone of voice for audience building and why speaking with the language of your audience helps build trust and rapport.

Tips and structures for creating and distributing the content required for audience building, looking at publishing, quality, curation and finding creative partners.

Topics covered:

• The options for publishing content for audience building and why certain cadences are appropriate for certain types of creative execution.
• The importance of a high quality threshold with audience building content compared to other content marketing, and why fewer high-quality pieces will always outperform more numerous lower quality ones.
• How to find talent to collaborate with in creating and distributing content, and why finding out who influences your audience is incredibly valuable to make better decisions around promotion.

Applying growth marketing principles to brand marketing, using email, gated content, and advertising to drive audience engagement.

Topics covered:

• How to implement lead scoring based on audience engagement triggers, and why tracking “fan” levels, parallel to “lead” scoring allows for a more personal approach to brand marketing.
• How to use social media advertising to build an audience, and why adopting the marketing strategy of a media company works well for audience building.
• Why growth marketing strategies, applied to brand marketing, represent the most effective and measurable ways to build an audience.