Build An Audience Fast With Frequency
When you’re looking to build a large audience online quickly (and who isn’t these days?), there’s really only one thing you need to focus on: Frequency.
Your intuition may be to work for hours in the lab to produce the highest-quality products, services and/or content, the best website or the coolest design. You could research for hours, spend days on pre-production, go back and forth with multiple revisions until everything is perfect. That strategy can work if you already have a large audience who’s hungry for your wares. But when you’re building from the ground up, and you want to do it fast, the quality of your output comes second to the frequency of your output.
Whatever You Do, Do It Often
What’s the most basic reason why frequency matters most in building an online audience quickly? Quality will arise organically from frequency. In other words, posting four off-the-cuff Tweets per day will reveal what your audience wants from you far more efficiently than workshopping a single daily Tweet for 30 minutes before posting.
Building an audience fast requires quickly finding out what they want from you, and you cannot go into this assuming you know what they want. That’s the path of quality-before-frequency. Let the audience tell you what they like, that’s what the digital infrastructure is there for. The most efficient way to do this is to be posting about your product and service constantly, backed up by a steady stream of cool content marketing and social engagement.
The Law Of Seven Touches
An old marketing adage is that it takes an average of seven “touches” before a potential customer will “pick up” your product or service, or subscribe to your content.
These “touches” can be anything in the digital marketing pantheon: Facebook or Google ads, emails, social media posts, billboards, direct mail, and so on.
You should spend lots of time producing blockbuster services and products. You should plan to invest serious effort in carefully planning and working on novel and viral content. But these endeavors are best pursued when you’ve already made your “seven touches” and are ready to open wallets. Until then, frequency will allow your audience to indicate what it wants to see, hear and feel from you. And more importantly, you will develop the kind of connection that a large investment in time and money can find a payoff for.
Feed The Online Beast
Another simple reason why frequency works: Internet users have a voracious appetite for new content, products and services.
The digital ecosystem is centered around sharing and consuming a neverending waterfall of new and novel stuff. The ratio of sharers to consumers is very uneven. Simply by becoming one of the sharers, you already gain an edge over everyone in your field who is ignoring this obvious opportunity to connect with customers. When you become a high-frequency producer of “touches”, you are playing ball in the big leagues.
Transitioning From Frequency To Quality
Here’s the thing about frequency: It’s really easy at first, then really hard for a long time. Putting out a decent YouTube video every day for a week is something anyone can do. Putting out a decent YouTube video every day for a year takes a special kind of person. Yet it’s the people who do the latter who consistently succeed.
If you want to avoid burning yourself or even your audience out, consider planning a transition from frequency to quality. Set benchmarks for audience growth, and develop a content strategy that weans you away from daily or hourly posts and engagement. Move towards a focus on high-quality, totally unique content, products and services that people will go crazy over. As you start to build a significant following, start to think more along the lines of monetization and high-value, high-effort content marketing.
Frequency And Consistency
This idea is nothing new. Many successful people have extolled the virtues of working toward your goals consistently and frequently. Doing something every day, no exceptions, builds an incredible amount of grit. If you stick with it in the long-term, your chances of succeeding in your pursuit begin to grow exponentially.
Frequency is not interchangeable with consistency, however. Consistency requires more than just frequency, and this distinction is critical.
To be consistent, your output must have a uniform, branded presentation. It must have decent production values. The video and audio must be clear. The website must be reasonably easy to navigate and free of technical issues. The text needs to be accessible to your target audience. The product or service needs to work as advertised.
You don’t need professional-grade everything to build an audience. You need the bare minimum, which will take time and possibly money to produce. It’s certainly possible for anyone with basic computer knowledge to learn all the skills needed to achieve a minimum level of professionalism. Contact me if you’d like a few hours of training in these skills, I’ll have you off to the frequency races in no time.
