There is no magic wand to grow your audience!
This week’s episode takes you through some very practical tips for growing your email audience and your social media followers. Based on a client Jenny has been working with for the last 12 months it includes content planning, channel strategy, posting frequency and all the ways we have grown a highly engaged email list. The client in question is a small organisation, so the tips and the numbers involved should be highly relatable!
Sharing the numbers
Over the last 12 months we’ve grown the LinkedIn audience from under 40 to just about 550 at the time of recording. I know that doesn’t seem huge numbers but I hope that’s something that you can relate to in your business. It’s a really relevant and really engaged audience so when I look through who those 500 plus people are they are working in the industrial sector or the heritage sector or they are local to the charity. If you can imagine 500 people in a room supporting your organisation then that feels like a really good number.
The mailing list has grown from just over 300 on an out of date list to over 600. So again not huge numbers but hopefully the numbers that are relatable to your small business. It’s an audience it is very relevant, it’s a really clean list and it’s been segmented in very useful way.
Practical tips for growing your mailing list
Once we’d cleaned the list (not an easy task in itself), we started to ask who else needed to be on the list. We brainstormed some of the key contacts we had as an organisation. We added some of the local councillors that we work with and all our current stakeholders. I also set up a GDPR policy to make sure that the list that we were growing had good governance and stood up to scrutiny. Even with a small list, you need to get the foundations right and get the right permissions in place.
After that every time we give a presentation, every time we have meetings with people within the industry we were saying and “can we add you to our mailing list, can we keep you up to date with our developments.”
On social media probably once or twice a quarter, just before we’ve issued the newsletter, I’ve put out a post that says if you would like to receive our newsletter please sign up here.
Listen to the episode for tips around content planning and growing the number of followers to the LinkedIn page.
The book “Marketing for Introverts, How to love it, plan it and do it so you can quietly (and successfully) promote your business in a noisy world” is available to buy on Amazon
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/jennyprocter/
