Building Audience vs. Building Buyer Confidence

Question came through the other day on building your audience:

“Hey John, I’m not sure if you can answer this. I finally got stuck into the Book of Worlds, and it’s been really helpful. Already the engagement is going way up. I have a question though about how to bring more people into my ‘world’. Or I guess it’s how do I grow my audience more with this world building approach?”

- Iwanna Grow

Iwanna,

Right off the bat, I’m not the ‘audience growth’ guy.

We’ve always had small audiences in the scheme of things.

And while we’ve helped a few clients when they wanted to really grow on Instagram, it was looking at what worked, and doing more of that, and they went viral or whatever, and grew. But I’m the opposite of the social media growth guy.

Why?

Truth is, to an extent, I’ve found it rarely matters.

In my humble opinion, most people focus way too much on having a bigger audience, and way too little on building the most important asset there is with the audience they do have…

Buyer confidence.

Let’s look at some math:

Let’s say you have 1000 ‘followers’ on social media.

Well, 60% might be real people, and not bots, company accounts, or people from random countries that have no relevance to your offer.

That’s 600 people.

Let’s say one person has 20% of that group as an existing customer: they’ve come to an event, or bought a one-off session, paid for something small, or bought the main offer.

That’s 120 people.

Now, if you have over-delivered to those customers with those offers, and given more (tangible) value than the customer paid for the offer, now you have 120 people where they have instilled ‘buyer confidence’ into their psyche. These people know that when they buy from this person, it’s well worth it. Which means they are likely to buy again (in particular, higher priced offers).

Now person B has 10000 ‘followers’.

They don’t have much to sell, a premium program that starts with a zoom call.

“Get your free strategy call”, probably.

And maybe some lead magnets they offer.

Otherwise they just post on social media.

Now, they do have a few clients they’ve served in the past with the premium program.

But whether or not they ‘over-delivered’ is a little harder to answer, at that high price point.

This setup is very, very common.

So this person has a bigger audience, but less people where they have instilled the ‘buyer confidence’ into their belief system.

To get more clients, they’re trying to build their audience more, hoping that with more people around them, surely more people will jump across to this premium thing and book that call.

But they aren’t creating more buyer confidence within their list or audience each day.

Well, in many ways, especially today in a saturated market, the person with the smaller audience, but bigger pool of customers with high buyer confidence, comes out in front.

Of course you want to increase both.

But if you only increase audience, you can end up with a bunch of views and even viral videos, but no net change in your sales, revenue, or profit.

You could triple your audience, polish your social media and tweak your funnel until the sun goes down, but make no more sales in your premium service.

And it sounds crazy but this happens all the time.

I know plenty of folk with 20k, 60k, 1.2M followers on social media, but nothin’ doing on the sales side.

I’ve seen audiences double and sales decrease!

And this it the whole “customers are better than leads” thing.

Instead of trying to get ‘leads’ from a big audience base… create more customers for a smaller, more more potent ‘effective’ audience.

Who look forward to buying your stuff.

Especially in the case of coaching, consulting and even service businesses.

Anyway, all that is to say that you can use content, events, collabs, or even hack the algorithm to bring new people into your world…

But in today’s biz-ness world, one of the most important things will be systematically increasing buyer confidence.

It ain’t just that people lack confidence in the businesses…

They are starting to lack confidence in themselves that they are even able to follow through.

How to create offers that buyer confidence exactly?

You’ll have to wait for the next book in the line of ‘all in’ books to implement.

But if you look at how we’ve used events, t-shirts, books and other small offers over the years you’ll see clues.

Something to think about.