Why Building An Audience Is So Hard (and Why I'm Still Trying)

It’s easy to feel like you can grow a loyal audience in no time using the latest growth hacks or Twitter and Facebook tricks. But the truth is, it’s not that simple.

Growing an audience is hard.

You have to have talent.

You have to put in a lot of work.

And there’s no 1–2–3 solution.

In this post, I’m happy to share some of our experiences from building an audience at Buffer alongside six key ingredients to successfully building an audience.

Let’s get started!

Why it’s difficult to build an audience (and why there’s no shortcut)

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

It is no secret that we live in an age of information overload. Yet many of us are in search of a larger audience. More readers on our blog. A bigger following across social media. A group of people who read, engage with and amplify everything we share.

The problem is, we live in an attention economy. Everyone is vying for consumer attention, and there’s only so much to go around.

Attention is limited

We all have 24 hours in a day. There’s nothing we can do to change that.

Each day on Facebook alone we are potentially exposed to 1,500 pieces of content. When you add in Tweets, Snapchats, Instagram posts and all the other content we’re exposed to daily, it’s easy to see why it can be so hard to break through as a content creator.

The below graphic from Moz shows how content fatigue could start happening very soon:

It takes a lot of swings

Each day we have a tiny window to grab people’s attention and make an impact with our content. And many of us are in search of that one, elusive thing that’ll get us rolling on the path to success. But that’s not how it works.

Think of yourself as a Major League Baseball player, for every home run, for every cheer from the crowd, there are thousands of practice swings and plenty of strikeouts. Content is no different. You need to step up to the plate and bring your best every day if you want to be a success.

There’s no shortcut to building an audience. It’s a long, winding road. And it takes a number of elements to succeed. Below I’d love to share some of the key ingredients to building at audience.

The 6 essential ingredients needed to build an audience successfully

1. Look for what’s next

The World is moving fast, and opportunities are arising everywhere. New platforms and new trends breed new opportunity. And for early adopters a unique chance to build an audience as Gary Vaynerchuk explains on Medium:

If you play close attention to the people who popped on Vine, or the people who popped in the early days of Snapchat, or Instagram, they all happened to be the Christopher Columbus of their platforms. They were early. So as those platforms took off, they developed disproportionate amounts of followers as new users joined and found them.

First mover advantage

A study from Harvard Business Review found that companies identified as believing strongly in the benefits of adopting new technologies receive a “first-mover advantage” — and are more likely to lead in both revenue growth and market position than their peers.

The same theory applies to new social platforms too. As an early adopter, you can gain first mover advantage and, as Gary Vaynerchuk said, you have the chance to become “the Christopher Columbus” of that platform.

By focusing on what’s next and experimenting with new platforms and technologies, you have an opportunity to jump ahead of the competitionand build an audience before the platform is too crowded.

Hone your skills

Shaun McBride, better known as Shonduras online, is one of Snapchat’s first homegrown celebrities, and brands are spending upwards of $30,000 for advertising deals with him and other Snapchat stars.

Before Snapchat, Shonduras honed his skills as an artist. Snapchat merely provided a platform for him to share his skills with the world.

The biggest opportunities ahead probably aren’t on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube but on platforms we don’t even know about yet. That doesn’t mean you can’t start preparing for these opportunities, though:

• If you want to be an influential writer, practice writing: on your blog, on Medium, on Twitter, or anywhere you can scribble down a few words.
• If you love to create video, experiment with Vine, YouTube, Snapchat, and Beme.

Whatever your skill set, find new ways to be creative. Hone your talents. And then when the next big platform launches, jump on it and set the trends there.

2. Have a voice

Everything has been said before, but it’s never been said by you. Your point of view is what makes you interesting. — Jory MacKay

For periods in my writing life, I’ve relied on content that is ‘good enough’, content that gets a point across. That ticks a box. But doesn’t reflect me or my personal beliefs.

On reflection, this doesn’t feel the way to break through and build an audience. Great content should make you feel vulnerable and a little discomfort upon publishing.

As Jory MacKay points out over at Crew, when you approach a new subject, ask yourself ‘how can I cover this in a way that only I can?’  Your voice is what will make you stand out from the crowd.

Saying the same things as everyone else, in the same style will only add to the noise. And you’ll get lost in the endless sea of content published every day.

The below graphic from Sean McCabe illustrates how to find your unique voice perfectly:

3. Do things differently

At Buffer, we’re super lucky to be well-known for our content. But our rise wasn’t an overnight success — and certainly didn’t come easy.

It took some trial and error. And a few years back we found a recipe that started to pay off.

From day 1, we have invested in content marketing at Buffer. Leo kicked things off on the blog back in 2011 and since then we’ve been through quite a few evolutions and tried many different tactics to build our audience.

Here’s a quick at the development of our content over time:

1. Twitter tips: January 2011 – October 2011
2. Pivot to social media tips: November 2011 – June 2012 
3. Pivot to lifehacks, writing, customer happiness and business: June 2012 — March 2014
4. Pivot to social media marketing and content tips: March 2014 to now

And a fun gif showing how the blog design has changed:

If you check back through our first posts, they contain great content but they weren’t distinguishable from other social media blogs out there.

At this stage – when we weren’t getting hundreds of thousands or millions of views per month – we could’ve decided to focus elsewhere. Instead, we tried to do things differently and create our Buffer style of content.

We pivoted from Twitter tips to broader social media tips. And in June 2012 we pivoted again. We began focusing on in-depth, well-researched posts that broke down potentially complex subjects into clear, understandable and highly shareable content. Things started to take off after this pivot.

Here’s an early example of one of these posts:

After some success with this style of post, the biggest jump in traffic came whenBelle Beth Cooper joined the Buffer team, and we doubled down on producing unique content.

If it wasn’t for our early experiments, we may never have discovered the potential of this type of content and may never have unlocked all of the traffic (and conversions!) we see today.

You need to keep evolving

Leo and Belle were so great at discovering the potential of in-depth content. Another shift for us occurred a year or so ago when we came to focus social media marketing and content tips – paying particular attention to the visuals and images within our articles.

More recently, Kevan shared that our social referral traffic has nearly halved over the past year. This post sparked a ton of discussion about our content both internally and externally.

The below Tweets from Rand Fishkin especially resonated with our team:

This debate gave us a chance to reflect and re-evaluate our content. It also inspired Leo to share our marketing manifesto. Since then, we’ve re-focused and started experimenting again. As Kevan explains: our blog is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it.

Only time will tell if our new experiments will pay off. However, one thing is for sure – the hard work from the past years will go to waste if we don’t continue to push ourselves and figure out how to continually keep evolving our content.

4. Hard work

I’ve learned from experience that if you work harder at it, and apply more energy and time to it, and more consistency, you get a better result. It comes from the work. — Louis C.K.

Success comes from the work that no-one sees.

If you want to build an audience you need to put in a lot of hard work.

Let’s take Seth Godin for example.

Before he was a best-selling author and marketing thought leader he was Seth Godin, just another blogger.

Godin’s blog has posts going back to 2002. But, as Ailian Gan points out on her blog, it’s around 2006 where Seth Godin hits his stride and starts to sound like the Seth of today. That’s four years of finding his voice and honing his skills.

Another example is Nils Wagner, the man behind Hoopmixtape. Hoopmixtape’s website and YouTube channel receive millions and millions of views each month.

What’s not clear is the work that goes on to ensure it stays that way. Sam Laird explains over at The Classical:

To stay on top, Wagner travels tens of thousands of miles yearly to gather footage of elite prospects, sometimes driving thirty hours straight and living out of his car for weeks at a stretch.

Building an audience is hard work. And you’ll need to put in the hours if you want to succeed.

5. Focus on quality

In our Buffer marketing manifesto Leo explains:

Sometimes we think that just putting out a consistent number of things will just create some outliers that’ll help us win. Heck, I even believed this for a long time and advised people to just focus on quantity. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Yes, we need to output things at high quantity, but we need to treat every single piece of output as the one that’ll be a breakout hit.

Going back to the baseball analogy from earlier on, every time a batsman faces a pitch, they’ll see it as a home run. Everything they have will go into the next swing. And to build an audience you need to feel that same way about every piece of content you share.

You need to feel that everything you put out is excellent. Every post, every video, every image has the chance to be a hit. Without this feeling, you’re not going to break through the noise.

Quality shouldn’t be confused with perfectionism. Perfect sits in your drafts for too long. Perfect causes delays. Quality is published consistently, without lingering.

On quality vs. perfection, James Clear explains an excerpt from Art & Fear on his blog:

The ceramics teacher announced that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, grading time came and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat around theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

6. Be consistent

It takes patience to build an audience, and it takes courage to keep putting yourself out there time and again.

Consistency is key, and it doesn’t come easy as Sean McCabe explains:

I think people believe that those who show up consistently have some sort of magic power or inherent ability. “It must come easy for him,” they say. “For others like me, it’s hard.”

Here’s the reality: it’s not easy for anyone — even the people that make it look easy. In fact, if someone is making it look easy, they’re probably working all the harder.

When Unbounce launched, consistency played a big role in the growth of their audience as Co-founder, Oli Gardner, penned 300 posts for the Unbounce blog over a six month period.

Consistently creating content was also critical to our early growth here at Buffer. Within Buffer’s first nine months, Leo wrote around 150 guest posts, which were vital in helping us acquire our first 100,000 sign ups.

Leo explained the importance of consistency over at Search Engine Watch: “Of course the early ones barely drove any traffic and only very gradually did things improve, I think that’s very important to understand. It will take a while until you can find the right frequency of posting.”

Another great example of the power of consistency is Youtuber, Casey Neistat.

When Neistat started daily vlogging he had around 520,000 subscribers on his YouTube Channel. Now he has over 1,500,000 subscribers.

You can see the impact his consistent, daily posts had on his subscriber growth from March — July 2015 below:

One of the best ways to achieve consistency is to set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Most of us only create content when we’re hit by a moment of inspiration. But if you’re looking to build an audience, you need to be putting yourself out there regularly. 

I’ve always struggled with this one myself. But now, knowing I have to create content on a regular basis, means I can’t skip writing. Instead of sitting down and wondering which days I’ll write, I now have a schedule in place.

Over to you

Building an audience is something I’m continuously working on both personally and at Buffer. The rewards make it feel worthwhile – seeing people share your content and enjoy your work is priceless.

In a way, this post serves as a public reminder to myself that I need to be dedicated and focused every day if I want to succeed and continue to build an audience.

To summarize, here are six action points to keep in mind when it comes to building an audience:

• Hone your skills and keep an eye on what’s next
• Find your voice and create content in a way that only you can
• Discover what makes you different
• Work hard
• Strive for quality and avoid seeking perfection
• Be consistent and put yourself out there every day

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too. What are your feelings about growing an audience? What have you tried? What’s worked?

Drop a note below in the comments and I’ll be excited to join the conversation.

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21 Essential Strategies for Growing Your Business With Inbound Marketing [Infographic]

From content creation, SEO, and social media to lead generation, lead management, and analytics, marketers who follow the inbound methodology have a lot of different channels and tactics to manage and master.

But the great thing about inbound marketing is that it pays off over time. It sets businesses up to get found by their target buyers more easily, and then helps them through every single stage of the buying process -- from stranger to brand advocates.

Which of these channels and tactics are involved in which stage of the buying process? What do inbound marketers need to do -- and when -- to attract, convert, close, and delight?

Check out the infographic below from ELIV8 to learn about 21 inbound marketing strategies that can help move future customers down the funnel and accelerate the growth of your business. (And click here for an interactive guide to inbound marketing.)

How have these inbound marketing strategies helped you grow your business? Share with us in the comments.

13 Growth Hacking Techniques You Can Apply Right Now

Growth hacking is the idea that an entrepreneur can take a clever non-traditional approach to increase the growth rate and adoption of his or her product by ‘hacking’ something together specifically for growth purposes.

Most startups find themselves facing the same problem: they build a product that no one ends up using.

Say you have a startup idea. You assemble a team and in six months, you have a product you are actually confident to release. When that day finally comes, you launch and nothing happens. If you are lucky, you get an article on Techcrunch, a top spot in Product Hunt and several thousand users, but most of them stop using it after a few days.

I bet you were hoping for a huge, viral growth curve. Instead, you face with the harsh reality: you only have handful of users registered, and they are churning incredibly fast.

At Piktochart we went through the same problem, that’s why in this post we’ll analyze 11 different growth hacking tactics that actually work:

Before You Start Growing: Define Your User Personas

Defining your user personas is something every business should do as early as possible. Customer development, understanding your target audience and being able to segment them correctly and talk to them differently is the secret sauce to startup success. This is the driving force behind major strategic, product and growth decisions.

Let’s take a look at Groove. They had a great product and customers were happy, but their landing page barely worked – the conversion rate was 2.3%. They knew something needed to change, so they decided to test a new landing page and re-think their design strategy. They started by talking to power customers on the phone and via Skype, and ask them about what they loved and hated about Groove. This led into a copy-first approach to the landing page, centered around users needs and objections. After testing it, conversion rate doubled to 4.7%, where they are today.

Another great example is KISSmetrics. After years of talking to customers and learning from them, they discovered that their target audience is segmented into two user personas: SaaS startup founders, and eCommerce managers. Their understanding of user personas can be appreciated in their live demo (image below). As soon as you visit the page, it prompts you to select two main configuration: SaaS and eCommerce.

A great way of doing customer development is to use Qualaroo, the company co-founded by Sean Ellis. It offers a simple way of embedding customer surveys and contact forms to uncover customer insights you might not be aware of.

Somethings to look for: why people hesitate to sign up, what information is missing on your site or what are visitors’ objections to making a purchase.

Send paid traffic to targeted landing pages instead of the homepage

Pay-per-click ads is one of the most effective acquisition tools in terms of ROI and speed. The problem is you must know how to use them. One of the most common mistakes is sending paid traffic to your homepage. This is a huge no-no. There is a principle in copywriting called ‘consistency’ and essentially, it means that visitors need to move swiftly through your funnel or they will get out. By having a landing page that addresses or matches the copy in your ad, visitors will feel compelled to buy or know more.

Double-sided Referrals

After launching, Dropbox faced a huge issue: their initial pay-per-click test had a whopping $233-388 cost per acquisition for every new customer, but their LTV (life time value) was $99. That’s when they implemented their referral program: invite a friend and both get extra free space. The results: 100k registered users grew to 4M registered users in just 15 months. That’s a 3900% growth increase.

Airbnb also recreated that technique successfully: whenever a friend uses your $25 coupon, you’ll get $25 off when they travel or $75 when they host someone in their apartment.

Hacking the Supply Side

When building a marketplace, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face is getting the right equilibrium between the supply side and the demand side until you hit mass adoption. Let’s picture Lyft, the ride-sharing app that competes with Uber. Having too many users on the demand side will negatively affect wait-time and pricing for passengers; and having too many users on the supply side will upset drivers as they will have no customers. If they aren’t making money, they’ll start leaving the platform.

The most elegant solution for this problem is to fake the supply side. What Lyft did in the beginning is pay drivers an hourly rate to just sit in their cars and wait for passengers. The result: passengers were thrilled to find out that every time they opened the app, there was a free driver around.

Abandoned Cart Emails for eCommerce

Sometimes, customers are willing and ready to make a purchase, but something gets on the way. If they forgot their credit card upstairs, or the baby is crying, you just lost a customer that was 99% sold. Now it’s time to get them back using email messages.

Cart abandonment emails are extremely effective as a sales recovery technique. According to Salescycle, half of these emails are opened and one third lead back to a purchase.

Posting on Product Hunt

What started as a side-project for Ryan Hoover, become one of the top startups in 2014. Product Hunt surfaces new, interesting products every day. Getting featured on the daily list of products will have a major effect on your initial users base. Yes, I’m talking several thousand users.

But that’s not it. If your product is fascinating and you are lucky enough, the press and major influencers will pick it up and share with their respective audiences, amplifying the effect at least 10x.

People have written about this extensively here, here and here.

NomadList’s analytics 2 weeks after hitting #1 in Product Hunt.

Discover your ‘core product value’ and build it into your onboarding process

Every product is different, and has a unique core product value to users. Discovering what this is and helping your users reach to that point will skyrocket your engagement levels and lower your churn rate.

For instance, Twitter realized that their real value is experienced once users follow at least 30 accounts. That’s their ‘aha moment’. In response to that observation, they completely re-designed their onboarding process to encourage new users to follow as many active accounts as possible.

Facebook applied the same tactic. They discovered that users get the most value when they have at least 14 friends. That’s their own, unique ‘aha’ moment. As soon as they discovered that metric, the growth team’s entire approach shifted: from that point forward, their job was to get as many new users to 14 friends in less than 10 days.

Share your users activity on Twitter/Facebook

Whenever a user interacts with your application in a way that can make them feel proud of what they did, you should prompt them to share the achievement to their friend on Twitter and Facebook. Instagram did this in the beginning by allowing users to post to Facebook via their API, but in my opinion, the best example is Quora: every time you answer a question, you can choose to post it on a social network with a single click.

As a daily Quora user, I love taking advantage of this feature. What’s even more impressive is that those tweets get twice the engagement (favorites and retweets) than whatever I post during the day.

Minimal Landing Pages

There is an endless debate about the comparison between long-form and minimal landing pages. As a growth hacker myself, I’m all in for minimal landing pages. First, they are great for single-action events, like capturing email addresses. This piece of information gives you endless possibilities – for instance, you can get them on an email drip campaign.

What’s even more important, they are extremely useful for rapid iteration. Building a minimal landing page like the one below takes significantly less time than a long form page, so your A/B testing and iteration rate will increase.

Integration with Other Services

Integrating your app with other external services can be a powerful growth driver. It allows you, as a small startup, to leverage on someone else’s already established user base.

One of the most recognized examples is BranchOut. Although the story doesn’t end well, Branchout managed to signup 33 million users and raise $49M using Facebook as a virality platform for their social professional networking service.

One word of caution: putting your eggs in a single basket might be dangerous. As soon as your startup takes off, you should start looking for alternative sources of growth. When Facebook changed its virality algorithm, Branchout growth stopped, leading the app to crash and burn.

Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences To Acquire New Customers

Since March 2013, Facebook started offering one of the most powerful yet underutilized targeting options: Lookalike Audiences. In short, it allows you target ads to users who are similar to their actual customers away from Facebook. Advertisers can ask Facebook to find the top 1% or 5% of users in a specific country who are similar to your existing customers. This is a great way of reaching new potential clients that couldn’t be found in any other way.

Some of the powerful targeting options are:

• upload your subscriber list and target ads to people similar to them.
• target ads similar to your existing customer by uploading your customer list or finding users similar to the ones who converted.
• find users similar to any visitor to your site, or specific pages.

Build A Community Around Your Product

If you could create a site that for you users and potential customers to visit everyday, would you do it? The best way of doing this creating an online community where your users can discuss, engage, and showcase their work around your product and your industry.

Let’s take a quick look at Unbounce. Their web app allows you to create and easily A/B test landing pages without writing a single line of code. The product is clearly targeted to founders, marketers and anyone related to grow. That’s why they created the Unbounce Community, an online forum where marketing-related people can connect, learn and engage with each other.

Restrict Signups To Business Email Addresses

Restricting the amount of people who can signup to your product seems counterintuitive, but let explain using an example. Slack, the new hot team communication startups, only allows you to register with your work email address (yourname@piktochart.com, instead of yourname@gmail.com).  This serves two major purposes: first, it makes it ridiculously easy for you to invite your co-workers effortlessly, which drives growth. Second, it allows their sales team to automatically filter incoming leads, and only deal with real businesses.

“Free for Bloggers” Hack

Founders love it when someone writes a story or blogpost about their startup, but almost none makes it easier for bloggers to write about their product. Well, Hittail does. On their pricing page, they make it really clear that their tool is free for bloggers to review. Once they enter their email,  Hittail qualifies the blogger and sends them straight to a well-crafted ‘press’ page with all the necessary information, graphics and metrics to write a high-quality story.

Before You Leave, Something To Remember

On this post we’ve given you 13 different growth hacking tactics you can apply right now. You can copy them exactly, or you can use them as inspiration to come up with your own, unique hacks. Both options are valid.

However, there’s one thing you need to remember: growth is a mindset.  You need to think every growth experiment in terms of:

1. Make a hypothesis. This is when you actually come up with the idea. 
2. Build it. Once the idea is right, you need to implement it. You can code it yourself, get your team to do it our outsource it to a good freelancer.
3. Execute/drive traffic. If you are thinking about growth, you probably have some traffic now. If not, the best way of testing new hacks is pay-per-click ads because they are immediate.
4. Test it. Use Google Analytics, KISSmetrics or Mixpanel to decide if it works or not.
5. Kill it or maximize conversions. If it doesn’t work, start over with a new idea. If it works, then keep optimizing conversions for maximum results.

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