One of our clients has an audience of 3,000 attendees that he built over 7 years. His strategy is to sell 10% of the tickets to his inner circle — the audience — before any public announcements. Then he uses that money to book artists, and venues and run some errands.
We learned from him that your audience is your most valuable asset—it is money in the bank. Organising an event is so much easier with an audience than having to run ads and hope that people come.
In this newsletter, we will explore 3 ways to build a captive audience:
1. Free Events
Free events are the best way to introduce your brand and experience before a paid event. You can also partner with local restaurants to get a free venue, in which case they benefit from a new audience, and food and beverage sales, while you build your brand and audience.
Critically, especially with free events, ask your attendees to RSVP. That way, you capture their details so you can invite them in future events.
Capturing your attendees details is the easiest and the most valuable thing to do for future events.
2. Email Newsletter
If you are a thought leader or like to share behind the scenes work, this is the way to go. Email newsletters are highly underrated. Most people think nobody reads them, but this is not true. The key to writing a successful email newsletter is having a good structure, a clear topic, and consistent frequency — like daily or weekly.
Platforms like Mailchimp and Substack offer the best tools for sending regular emails to your audience. Remember, though, you still need to promote your newsletter to get subscribers.
To learn more about newsletters, follow Justin Welch. Notable examples of excellent newsletters include James Clear, who has sold millions of copies of Atomic Habits, and Basecamp, which is behind one of the world’s most successful project management platforms.
3. De-platforming
If you have a social media following, it is best to de-platform your followers. De-platforming means getting your followers off social media to sign up to a list where you can reach them directly.
Why is this important? When Facebook launched Pages, almost everyone got your latest posts. Today, however, only 3% of your followers get your posts. Then, depending on the reactions from that 3%, the algrothim might show your post to more people. So, if you have 10,000 followers, expect that only 300 might get your posts.
De-platforming means getting them to a contact list or email list where you can reach 100% of them whenever you need to. De-platforming is about maximising your reach and removing the noise.
Conclusion
In his seminal work, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin pioneered audience building. His theory is that back in the day, people only had a few radio stations, newspapers, or TV channels to watch. So, broadcasters could pump whatever content they wanted and people would consume it. Today, the internet has flipped the model on its head. There are millions of channels and they keep growing. People are spoiled for choice.
This warrants a fundamental change in approach for dealing with an audience. For starters, one cannot broadcast to an audience and expect that they will consume whatever is provided. So, Seth Godin prescribes creating content that is specific and is bold in its point of view. Secondly, audience members now enrol to a channel — they are not compelled to listen. So, it is equally important to acquire their permission and to honour their presence with consistent content that delivers on the promise every time.
All this points to one conclusion: your audience is your most valuable asset.
