You’ve got your website and social media pages set up: wonderful! Now comes the big question: how are you going to get people to notice?

Building an audience is an essential first step to reaching any of your goals online. Whether you’re looking to build brand awareness, increase your reach, promote your products or services, or increase your conversions, you need an audience to do that.

With over 3 billion people online every day, the digital crowd is more than large enough for everyone to have a decent-sized following. Your job is to make sure your page is direct, unique and effective enough to capture the attention of the types of people you want to attract to your pages.

While there are numerous ways to attract people to your pages and build your audience, here are 5 practical things you can do right now to get started!

1 – Have a Content Marketing Strategy

You need to create content that will spark interest in the right people. For example, if you’re trying to sell clothing to young, professional women, your strategy could include lots of photos of your clothing, photos of models wearing your clothing, promotional posts with sales information, and calls-to-action to drive users to buy outfits.

The strategy you define needs to be clear. Decide on your audience and then create content that caters to their interests and needs. If you’re being inconsistent or not making posts that your audience finds valuable, then you won’t be able to build the audience you need. So make sure that your strategy is solid and that you follow through.

2- Use Hashtags

With the recent (2020) change in Facebook’s algorithm, hashtags are now essential for reach across basically all major platforms. Users search for certain posts based on hashtags and follow different hashtags. When you include hashtags in your posts, this increases your chance of finding new people who would be interested in your business.

There is a strategy and method to using hashtags as well. Since Facebook’s change is newer, it’s better to use fewer and more defined hashtags. With Instagram you can load up to 30 hashtags, but you need to make sure that you’re using a good combination of broad and more specific hashtags, as well as local ones. On Twitter you can get noticed by using trending hashtags, as well as TikTok. But these often require some flexibility as trends change literally every second online.

3 – Have a TakeOver on your Page

Have you seen trends online where celebrities will take over an Instagram page for a day? It’s a promotional trend where a business or brand will have a celebrity, influencer or local well-known personality take over their page for a day and interact with audience members.

By collaborating with someone who has a bigger following than you, it helps widen your reach and increase your brand awareness. People will also trust your brand more too if they see a well-known figure supporting your business.

You can do this by hosting a Q and A, having this well-known person go live with you on your page, having them cross post and interact with your audience in the comment section, post videos of them interacting with your business, etc. There are so many ways you can get creative with this kind of content!

4 – Content Content Content

If you never post on your page, people will assume your business is not active and won’t follow or engage with your social media pages or website.

This is why posting content on a regular basis is key to keeping and growing the size of your audience. It’s a lot of work, but if you keep posting and putting your information out there every week, your audience will follow along.

You can get ideas from your competitor’s pages, from trending posts, or from your social media manager 🙂 There’s a whole wealth of posts at your fingertips online, so get creative, check your insights to see which posts your audience seem to enjoy the most, and get posting on your pages!

5 – Post at Optimal Times

This one is so easy, but often overlooked if you’re in a time crunch. Take a look at your insights and see when your users are online, and schedule your posts to go out at those times. By posting when your audience is most likely to be online, your posts are more likely to be seen.

On most major platforms you can find this information in your analytics. Or your social media manager can provide you with that information as well!

And there you have it: 5 ways to grow your digital audience and increase your online presence

It’s a lot of work, but well worth it once you start experiencing results, like getting your first viral video or finally getting conversions.

If you need help with growing your audience I’m always here to help! Click here to set up a free consultation to chat about your business.