Two Great Ways to Nurture Your Audience

Every good comedian knows how to work the crowd. It’s important to know what works so that a performance isn’t a huge flop. Great comedians know how to nurture their audience.

This analogy holds true for businesses trying to reach their customers. It’s important to know the most effective ways to nurture your audience for businesses too. Don’t go on stage without doing your homework.

Two Ways to Nurture Your Audience

1. If you have an audience of 10,000 email contacts, then you could just email them a list of your latest offers once a month. However, this isn’t nurturing your audience. Consider emailing your clients something that is a simple mix of content that adds value, a call to action, and one of your latest offers. Depending on what we’re doing, we’ll often use a ratio of eighty percent content and twenty percent offer. Occasionally, you’ll need to vary the percentages. Focus on sending email newsletters with content like blog post introductions instead of just pushing offers to your contact lists. Giving more content to get more responses is the name of the game and a great way to nurture your audience.
   
2. Sometimes audience nurture can be more detailed. We are currently doing a campaign with 64 different emails with each including different paths to take depending on the response from the recipient. Based on customer’s actions, we will identify how interested they are in the client’s services. This type of nurture is not for customers who are ready to buy. We are focusing on customers who might be in a research mode and need to receive information appropriate for somebody earlier in the buying cycle. This type of nurture is especially good for complex sales. Sales that include a longer research cycle and probably some back and forth following an expression of interest.

Know Your Audience

Now you know two ways to nurture your audience. Conceptually, there are an unlimited number of ways to nurture an audience. Your approach and level of sophistication should fit your ability to execute the program and the complexity of the sale itself. If you're selling a product that is a known and understood thing in the world (like a car), then you should probably have a simpler audience nurture approach that gives and gets. If you’re selling something complicated (like mortgage refinancing), where you have to collect information from a customer and identify a number of different options for them, then you’re going to have to take a more detailed approach. You should use online marketing tools that respect the audience with a more sophisticated audience nurture campaign.

Know your audience and nurture them accordingly. That’s the bottom line. Do the kind of audience nurture that fits what you’re doing.

Find more information on our website about how you can properly nurture your audience and reach your business goals.