Engage with Your Target Audience and Learn More About How You Can Help
Once you discover where your target audience hangs out, this is an exciting time for you and your business. The main reason is when you know where they are, you can go there anytime you want to, to learn more about them. You will no longer have to make a guess. Now you can do real research that will lead to real ideas to help you engage with them even more. Plus, you’re going to get a lot of content ideas.
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Read Their Questions & Keep an Ongoing List
When you find your ideal audience, your job is to listen and pay attention. Read their questions, write them down, study them, and explore. Read other people’s answers and how the audience responds to them, too. You can get a lot of insight from a disagreement. Just don’t join in.
Read Busy Social Post Comments
When you see one of your competitor’s groups get busy, it’s a good time to go read the discussions. If one post is getting a lot of action, you can read between the lines to find some really good ideas for content, products, and even services based on other people’s loud complaining or venting.
Read Your Competition’s Blog Post Comments
Don’t forget that blogs have comments, too. A very popular blogger still gets useful comments on their blog today. Therefore, go look at your competition’s blog posts each time they come out and read the comments. The comments will have good questions, answers, and insight into what the audience thinks about the topic at hand.
Engage Intelligently on Other People’s Platforms
When you do engage with others on other people’s platforms, be respectful. Follow the rules of engagement that they have created. Don’t try to take their customers. Instead, learn from them and use that information to create engaging content that will draw them to your information when they search for information. When you answer a question freely giving useful info, they will look at your profile – so be ready.
Check Google Search Suggestions
Another way to get some good information is to ask Google for suggestions. When you type information into Google, it always gives suggestions for searches. Try some of those to find more audience members to learn from and topics people have searched to find.
Look up relevant hashtags
If your audience uses hashtags in their posts, including your competition, use those hashtags to search for more information. You may find a lot of new posts and comments to look at when you search for a hashtag on a platform. Those are all good content ideas to start off with.
Invite Ideal Audience Members for an Interview
When you see someone who is a member of your ideal audience who is open to answering questions, invite them to be interviewed without any pressure. Incentivize them by giving them something free or by entering participants in a drawing.
Be a Helpful Resource
Of course, you are always going to be helpful – after all, that’s what you do – but if you can focus only on being a helpful resource and not as much on the selling aspects when you are engaging with your audience on a human level as a helpful person, they’re more likely to seek you out for paid work.
Avoid Overselling Yourself
Whether you find your audience in person or online, it’s imperative that you become a resource to them before you try to sell to them. People do not like feeling as if every time they ask for help, someone is selling them a product. Of course, you are selling them a product, but if you want them to buy it, you need to be a lot more careful so that you don’t seem like a stereotypical used car salesman.
There are so many ways today to explore your ideal audience even before you have your own followers. The main thing to remember is that while you are looking for your ideal audience and learning from them wherever you find them, you want to be productive. Getting on social media and chatting all day is not productive, but asking the right questions and taking the right notes while creating a list of ideas that you will implement will get you far.
