Build an Audience First

July 22, 2023 / 133 Comments

What comes first, the audience or the products? Starting a business is exciting, so it is easy to get ahead of yourself and put a lot of energy into creating products that are going to change your customers’ lives. We’re guilty of that at times too. However, products come from either getting your products or services in front of an audience or from advertising. The former method allows you to keep your business costs low when you’re starting your business. That is why we encourage new business owners to build an audience first before launching a product.

What Do We Mean By “Build an Audience First”

When you have a business idea that you are excited about, build your audience first. By posting on social media or even creating a blog around your business idea, you can get a concrete answer to the question “Is my business idea good” from the most important people: your customers.

That doesn’t mean you have to build an audience on every single platform in existence (we’re getting exhausted just thinking about that) – pick one platform and build an audience there. It gives you time to figure out how to find your ideal customers and what they respond to before you jump into your business idea with both feet. There is no right number of followers you need to have before starting your business. The aim is to start building a relationship with your ideal customers.

5 Reasons to Build Your Audience First

There are many benefits to building an audience for your business before getting too deep into starting your business. Here are the 5 main reasons why we recommend building your audience first.

Test the Market

As we alluded to above, building an audience is a great way to do a little market research. You can start researching what your ideal customers like, where they hang out online, and see what kind of content and topics they interact with.

A business idea is essentially a theory. You’re saying I think customers will like X product or X service and be willing to pay enough money for that product or service so I can turn a profit. Building an audience on social media or even through blog content allows you to test that theory to a certain extent. You can see if there is interest around those topics and if customers take action (through engaging with content or navigating to other pages) to learn more about those topics and possible solutions to the problems they are experiencing.

When you build an audience on social media, in particular, you can also interact with your ideal customers and gain informal insights. For example, on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook, you can poll your audience on any topic you would like. You could ask these customers how they currently solve a specific problem or if they would be interested in the solution you are working on. We recommend taking those poll results with a grain of salt. Plenty of customers may say they would be interested in something but won’t necessarily buy when you launch that product or service.

The benefit of being able to test the waters in this way is that you don’t have to find out the hard way that there is no interest in your topic or solutions before you put a lot of time, energy, and money into creating your product or service.

Your audience gives you a pool of ideal customers who can inform your product development and become your first clients.

Have a Pool of Customers Ahead of Launch

One of the most important benefits of building an audience first is that you have a pool of ideal customers that you have already built a relationship with. This means that you will have an easier time selling your products or services when you launch them. You may even be able to get their input in the product development process.

Getting paying clients for any business loosely falls into two categories:

Organic client acquisition – This is promoting your product or service for free to your ideal customers. You might set up a “shop” on a marketplace where customers go to find products or services in your category. You also could build your own audience or client list so you can promote your products or services directly to them.
Paid client acquisition – This is where you pay to promote your product or service to your ideal customers. You might run Google ads for search terms that show buying intent or even pay affiliates to promote your product or service to their audience.

Many business owners use a combination of organic client acquisition and paid client acquisition to sell their products. Ideally, as a new business, you want to start with organic client acquisition so you can keep your costs low while testing and developing your products. Once you have proof of concept, you can then develop a paid client acquisition strategy to maximise your results.

Learn more about turning your audience into clients.

Diversify Your Business by Monetising Your Audience

Having a pool of engaged followers puts you in a powerful position. Just as you want to get your product or service in front of your ideal customers, so too do other businesses. By building an audience first, you can build additional revenue streams for your business. For example, you can develop a low-cost offer to promote first, you can promote affiliate products related to your niche, or you can sell advertising to people who want access to your engaged audience.

This money can help fund your product development or even cover your wages until you start making money from your product or service.

Access Opportunities for Your Business with Your Audience

Your follower numbers are social currency. When people are looking for guests for their podcasts, speakers at their events, or even partners to collaborate with, one of the first things they will look at is your audience. Having an audience, especially an engaged and nurtured audience, will give you access to opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise receive.

The people or businesses offering these opportunities want to collaborate with businesses with large audiences because of the same reasons that you do. Some of your audience will join their audience, and some of their audience will join your audience. In the case of events, when you have a large audience, that means more paying customers for the event.

Some of these opportunities have the potential to take your business to the next level, all because you built your audience.

Start Building Your Business in a Low-Cost Way

Building your audience first allows you to take significant action towards starting your business for no or very little cost. You can build your audience around working your job or any other responsibilities you may have. You don’t even need to register your business to start a website or a social media profile.

As mentioned above, your audience will give you organic traffic, thus lowering the cost of client acquisition for your business when you do launch your product or service.

What If I Already Started My Business?

If your business is already established, you can still benefit from focusing on building your audience. Do a cost-benefit analysis to decide if it is beneficial to pause or reduce other business operations in order to focus on growing an audience for your business. There is no right answer because it will differ between businesses. Remember building your audience gives you more data for product development and will provide you with some initial organic sales (as opposed to sales that come from advertising.)

How to Build an Audience for Your Business

The great news is you don’t need to build an audience everywhere in order to see the benefits. We recommend picking one place you want to build your audience and going all in on that. Producing content and managing your presence can take a lot of time and energy, so it is best to focus on one platform until you are ready to hire a team for your business. (If you’re worried about losing your username, you can create a profile on different platforms to reserve your username – just don’t post content there.)

Weigh up the pros and cons of different platforms to see which platform would be the best place to build an audience for your business. This should be based on where your audience hangout, the kind of content you enjoy creating, and ideally, a platform you are familiar with. Building an audience takes time, so you might as well pick a platform you like to spend time on.

From there, it’s all about creating content that your audience will enjoy. People enjoy or engage with content that serves a purpose. That purpose is usually to entertain or provide value. So, make sure the content you are creating does one of those things. Ask yourself the following question when creating content:

Would my ideal customer find this entertaining?
Does this feel like it was created specifically for my ideal customer? (Rather than general content)
Is this helpful for where my ideal customer is with this specific problem?
Is this the best way to present this concept/idea, or is there a better medium or approach?
Do I believe that this piece of content will get me closer to my goal?
Have I articulated my advice in a way that my ideal customer can act upon?

Keep learning as much as you can about your chosen audience-building platform so you can develop your strategy. Your strategy will change as you move through the various stages of audience building. The things you need to do to get your first 100 followers will be different from the things you need to do to grow past 1,000 followers.

Interacting with people on your chosen platform is key to building an engaged audience. That means engaging with people in your chosen niche and your ideal customers. Don’t cold message them, but comment on their content, respond to comments on your content, and solicit responses from your audience as often as possible.

How to Leverage Your Audience to Kickstart Your New Business

Once you have built your audience, get them involved in your business. Not everything will be appropriate to show them, but your potential customers will love to see behind the scenes of your business and get sneak peeks of new products or services. People love being asked for their opinion, so run polls, ask them to help pick designs, colours, or names for products. They’ll feel more invested in your business and what you do.

Got questions about building an audience for your business? Ask them in the comments below.