What is an audience when selling a product?

In this training you’re going to learn the typical mistakes most businesses, small, medium, large, make. So, instead of jumping straight into a sales pitch with your potential customer base, what we want you to do is grab the audience’s attention first.

What do we mean by that?

Well in this section we are going to learn about what an audience is, why it’s overlooked, and show you what to do in later sections to attract the audience’s attention. During our own experience working with clients of our digital marketing and digital consulting business, our biggest challenge has been growing an audience. We spend a lot of time educating and consulting with clients. We spend a lot of time teaching them that if you jump straight to a sales pitch, you may not necessarily get the results your looking for. 

And what do we mean by that?

“Hey this is my business, come and buy it, this is my product, come and buy my product.”

You’re presenting the audience with a sale, without warming them to what value you may bring to the table, and before even identifying if they’re you’re ideal audience. 

So, let’s dive into discuss audience in more detail.

Identifying Your Audience

Before we start to discuss what an audience is, let’s understand where it fits into the BATON (Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network) model that we use. 

So, we have a business, a viable business. In the BATON model, Audience comes after Business.

Audience is grabbing and showing our product to an audience out there. That could be on social media, in the public domain, or through advertising. What we want to do is get eyes on our business. And initially, it may not necessarily be eyes on or our product or service. The key thing is to teach the audience who we are, to build authority. 

The second thing is, at this stage we are not going for an exact audience. We are not going to be targeting exactly the people who are going to buy from us. The first thing we are going to do is cast a wide net. Because in this net of people, there are going to be a few categories. 

There are going to be people who don’t care about us, they don’t ever want to see us again, people who are seeing us for the first time. There are going to be people who may be interested in what we have to say. And then there are going to be people who later become our own fans in the tribe section.  

So, we are going to cast a wide net and then in the tribe section we are going to pull in that net, and make the audience smaller. Think of this in terms of an Olympic Stadium. You walk in and you’re a new athlete, about to run a relay race. You walk in and there are a lot of eyes on you. Suddenly you’ve captured the audience’s attention and now it’s up to you to do something in order to turn them from the audience into a raving fan.

So wide net, narrow net. What does this look like in the traditional sense?

Casting a wide net could include putting your services on billboards, leaflets, newspapers, those kinds of mediums. It could include radio as well and potentially television adverts. Traditionally, this is how people have advertised. 

This is because the marketing space only included offline tools. But now we have an ever growing marketplace of free and low cost tools online available to us.

So, now we can move out of the offline space and into the online world. What tools do we have available?

This is where it gets overwhelming. There are so many tools – SEM, pay per click, SEO. There are so many different tool acronyms, and we are going to break these down over the coming BATON trainings. But it causes overwhelm. Because not only do we have these individual tools, we can then create a combination of tools to increase the positive outcome we get from using the digital marketing tools. 

And our hope is not to overwhelm you. So we’ll start with one method – social media. 

Social media is a tool. Many people misunderstand social media as an entire business, or as an entire marketing funnel that they should be drawing their business and revenue customers from. But we are going to be using it as a tool as part of the business model. We are not going to rely on it completely. But in level one, we are going to spend a lot of time in the social media realm. 

What does social media mean?

It means using tools like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 

So, why social media?

Well social media has two of the biggest benefits that we see compared to the traditional media. Number one, it’s laser focused. That laser focus allows us to target people directly based on the data that these platforms have collected. 

Compare it to a billboard on the street. That billboard could be a male-oriented advert. And the foot traffic is 50% female. It could be a female orientated advert on the way to the train station, but the foot traffic is 50% male. This unnecessarily wide net can be eradicated. That loss in attention can be eradicated by using a laser focused approach on social media, and further into the trainings we will explain what the laser focus means, and the tools available to us to achieve those goals. 

The second thing on why social media is fantastic is it is completely low cost; it is so low cost, that you can start using it for free. We are going to encourage you and show you the benefits of putting a small budget behind your social media posts. But right now at the time of filming, it’s very low-cost and very cost effective for small, medium, even solo entrepreneur.

How to Reach Your Business’ Audience

So, we have spoken about what an audience is. Further along in the training, my business partner Kyle will get into the nitty gritty of digital marketing online tools as how to use them. For now, we’re focusing on introductory concepts. 

So, as part of the BATON model Audience comes after Business. Once we have a viable business, now we show it to the audience. We get some eyeballs on us. That’s what we’ve spoken about in the last section.

And the focus and the biggest mistake most will make is they don’t focus on warming that audience up and presenting themselves to the audience before they make them an offer. They really just have a business and offer to that business straightaway. Overtime learning with us, we hope you will start to understand why this is not the best move. 

Whether it’s in business, marketing, sales, whatever the situation is, the idea is to slowly have the right audience, which we call tribe and then present them with an offer. 

What we also want you to be able to implement everything we are teaching in small parts. We appreciate you may have a job, you may be working full-time, you’re a parent, you are a business owner, you’ve got staff. Taking incremental steps allow you to do this in an achievable way. Build it around your schedule but do work hard on it. Your results will come based on how hard and how much you actually implement over the course of this training. 

• So finally, how do we grab attention?
• How do we grab the audience’s attention?
• And what’s the point of this?

All of this will make sense as we progress. So for this part just remember that we are now at the phase of attracting the audience’s attention, and one of the best tools we are going to use is social media and the ability to laser focus. 

So, let’s move on to the next section.