ED

Building an audience is essential in the current economic scenario, and rests on the premise that an organization gets as many people as possible to read its content and eventually benefits monetarily and in other ways off that audience. In short, an organization with an audience is based on reach. It helps organizations reach highly qualified consumers based on the intent of the company, to satisfy a marketing objective.

As a business owner, you must know that learning things and growing is an almost daily experience.  In order to survive, you must find smart and efficient ways to market your organization to potential clients.

The internet is an entrepreneur’s dream come true. Online branding penetrates the market at a speed unheard of by using the latest tools available, such as blogs.  Of course, it goes without saying that you cannot just create a blog and leave it. The actual game starts after that. The important thing is what you do with these blogs.

Why is everyone clamoring to create an audience online?  Creating blogs using blogger, Free blogs from WordPress or hosted blogs, Ibibo, etc. is done to converse with an unknown proportion of people in full view of the world, which includes the competition. Your aim with blogging is to reach an audience of millions of internet users within no time.  Not just reaching an audience, but your target audience. There is a reason why many Fortune 500 companies maintain active blogs.

It will not be long before you see the formation of a huge audience. You get to know a lot about your organization through the comments and discussions posted by them on your blog.  Things can be improved by taking criticism positively and constructively. You no longer need to feel like you’re standing at the edge of the abyss with all that competition trying to be one up on you.

Let’s look at how having an audience can make your organization stand out from the competition:

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1. Access to customer thoughts through better communication

The world belongs to those who make an effort to stand out, and you can achieve this through communicating with your audience and enhancing your credibility. By posting industry news and keeping your blog updated about the happenings in your organization, you are reaching a larger audience in the easiest way possible.

Have you ever seen the whitehouse blog? You must! It can serve as a great model as a communications link with your audience – the existing as well as the future audience. Sounding personal and making every visitor feel like a bazillion bucks pulls competition down faster than any other marketing strategy.

2. Paving the path for clients to come looking for you

Organizations spend great amounts of money on advertising, towards building a sizable customer base and getting their name out there.  Your new audience will come to you and not the other way round.  People always love visiting already active portals. Through viewing the credentials of the company and reading the blog posts and interacting with others, your audience is formed, making it easier for you to communicate with all of them at once and turn them into customers.

3. Existing audience drives more traffic to your business

Over a period of time, your audience feels comfortable enough to trust you and recommend you to others too. Whenever you post new information that is of interest to them, they will let others know. When your visitors start posting, commenting or tracking back, it can have a viral effect – spreading across the blogosphere. You will even be linked to by other blogs, if you have interesting content. Visitors to those blogs will make their way to yours and there will soon be a flow of new visitors wanting to read what you have to say, utilizing your services or buying your products. This beautiful benefit of expanding your business outside of invisible geographical walls is easy to accomplish.

4. Audience development helps build a community

We all need different things in life. But the one most common thing that binds us is the need for information and the need to find business owners who are experts in their field.  You can draw an audience into conversations on your blog, giving your company an interactive forum.  They can now participate versus just reading/watching/listening passively. When you share ideas, you are engaging your audience in industry-specific dialogue that might not uncover through years of traditional market research and relationship building.

You will soon develop a rapport with your visitors, receive feedback and build trust. If you succeed in building a community, all news pertaining to your organization will travel fast. Over a period of time, a community of highly targeted and interested audience surrounding your business is developed – or should we say – future clientele. This will enable you to navigate to opportunities that offer the highest returns.

5. In the eyes of the media

The right audience is every PR consultant’s dream. Your audience is not going to be restricted to individuals looking for solutions but also the media that laps up interesting news, instead of them being passive recipients of press releases.  An active organizational blog with thriving audience can be a great outlet where media is informed about all news related to your company as well as your insights related to the industry. This will enhance your image in such a way that it can make it more attractive to potential customers, business partners and even employees looking for positions in highly visible organizations – such as yours.

6. Ability to attract better talent

Organizations advertize in newspapers or television to reach the best talent in their particular field of expertise.  What you must not forget is that such go-getters also look for highly motivated companies to make the best use of their skills and achieve the learning curve every intelligent mind seeks.

Needless to say, highly qualified and eligible job-seekers look for organizations with huge audiences and the feedback left by others over a period of time gives them a clear picture of who you are. Once your audience reads and discusses what you have to say, and you have established yourself as a thought leader, you will also be seen as an attractive employer.

Although, this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, the concept of Reckitt Benckiser’s blog is certainly interesting.  It is written by employees showing potential candidates how good it is to work at their company.

7. Better product and services development through instant feedback

Feedback is the most crucial aspect of any business. Since audiences are informal and have the power to comment freely on what they feel, organizations can get a measure of value from their blogs. You will be able to publish an idea or talk of a product to see if it generates interest.  Who likes it and who doesn’t? What are they saying?  A good-sized audience can bring the immense power of thousands of dollars worth of surveys.

The audience effectively leaves a record online of all the customer service comments and these can be reviewed by future customers.  At Adobe, which was Macromedia earlier, they had a strategy, where visitors were asked for product ideas. This makes the audience feel more responsible for helping in building the product, with the potential of turning them into future customers.

8. Improving the perception of your brand

The beauty of developing an audience online is that you have the power to influence online conversations by being actively involved.  Leading conversations on your blog with the involvement of thousands of loyal readers and raving fans will give you the opportunity to improve the perception of your brand, as well as position your company as a leader in your area of expertise, shredding the competition to bits.

9. Increased search engine visibility through audience interaction

You must have heard of the saying, “Content is king.” One of the key benefits of an increasing audience is search engine visibility for your organization.  As the audience builds up and useful content on the blog in the form of articles, comments, suggestions and discussions increases, your organization will be perceived as an authority in your specific area of expertise.

It is common practice to link back to an interesting thought or post.  Back links are a way for search engines to differentiate the better blogs from the rest.  All the new posts and conversations along with the fresh content added by your company help create natural inbound links along with maximizing your site’s visibility to the search engines; increasing the opportunity to connect with an even bigger audience. Higher search engine ranking means higher traffic. Google and other sites reward blogs/sites with plenty of inbound links, thus paving the path for multiplying your audience.

10. Monetizing your audience in several ways

Obviously, if you are an organization, you are also looking for monetary benefits. The best part of spending the time and effort on building a loyal audience is monetization. An organization can monetize the audience in a million innovative ways.

A new model being used online is that of retrieving highly valuable market data. One way that is considered to work is by asking a question or a series of questions through a pop up on the screen after the visitors have read a certain number of articles. They will be expected to provide an answer to continue reading.

These surveys would be easy to create as they would pertain to a particular target audience. This kind of information is proving to be extremely valuable for consumer brands to gain insight into the market. Traditionally, it would be very difficult to expect people to give such information, but here if you have created a loyal audience over a period of time, the viewer is motivated to give you information in order to enjoy reading what you have to say.
You’ll find this blog – interesting.

You know what your business demands – that you get maximum value from the time and money you spend in your efforts. This is exactly what creating an audience (especially through a blog) does. It does many things at once, much as the same way you use different marketing strategies to run your business – public relations, marketing, customer relations, sales lead generation and industry connections.  What better package deal can you get for making your organization stand out?