#84: Find Your Target Audience | Audience Growth Accelerator Challenge PART 1

Welcome to Episode 1 of the Audience Growth Accelerator challenge! In this exciting podcast mini-series, we are here to support frustrated artists and producers in their quest to expand their social media audience and engagement. Are you wondering why your social media following isn't growing? Do you want to learn how to increase your social media engagement? Look no further!

Throughout this five-part series, we will be providing you with actionable steps to make an immediate impact on your audience growth and engagement. In each episode, we focus on a specific aspect of this journey. Today, we kick things off by delving into the importance of establishing your target audience avatar.

Understanding your target audience is key to developing effective strategies that resonate with the right people. We'll guide you through the process of identifying your ideal audience, crafting a detailed avatar, and aligning your content to attract and engage them effectively.

But that's not all! To further assist you on your audience growth journey, we have prepared the "5 Essential Tips for Boosting Audience Growth and Engagement" guide. Download it here to get exclusive insights and valuable techniques that you can implement right away.

If you're ready to unlock the secrets of social media success, join us in this captivating mini-series. 

Transcript

Marc Matthews: 0:22

You are listening to the Inside The Mix podcast with your host, Mark Matthews. Hello and welcome to the Inside the Mix podcast. I'm Mark Matthews, your host, musician, producer, and mix and mastering engineer. You've come to the right place if you want to know more about your favorite synth music artist, music, engineering and production, songwriting and the music industry. I've been writing, producing, mixing, and mastering music for over 15 years, and I wanna share what I've learned with you. Hey folks, if you are new to the Inside The Mix podcast, welcome aboard. Make sure you smash that subscribe button, and to all the returning listeners, it's great to have you back. Welcome to episode one of the Five Day Audience Growth Accelerator Challenge. Now, you've probably heard me banging on about this at the beginning and the end of podcast episodes for the last two or three weeks, and hopefully you would've signed up. To the challenge. So what am I doing? I'm rolling out a special series of podcast episodes dedicated to growing your audience on social media. So it's a deviation from the usual topics, but it's one that I think is particularly important as in conversations with you, the listeners. On social media, et cetera. Uh, growing an audience and content creation is one of the biggest pain points, and I think this is a pivotal thing for us to cover. So for the next five episodes, I'm gonna hit you up with hot tips or tools to help you accelerate your audience growth. So what do you need to do? All you need to do is this. You just need to complete the action steps of which there are a maximum of three at the end of each episode, and then you're good to go. Okay, so what I wanna know is, are you up for the challenge? If so, here's what you can expect in the next five episodes to starting with this episode. We're gonna look at creating a social media plan. So we're gonna be defining your target audience. Then we're gonna look at social media trends and how we can use them to create content. Then we're gonna focus in on reels and tos and best practice in terms of structuring content. And then we're gonna look at understanding CTAs or call to actions and how we can use them. And then finally, we're gonna look at the. Probably the most pivotal part of this in being social as it is social media. So in today's episode of which it is episode one, we are gonna be starting with the first topic of this mini-series, this challenge, which is creating a social media plan and figuring out your target audience. Cel, let's dive in. So the first thing we need to do when we are creating our audience avatar is to think we want to get a clear picture, basically of their likes and dislikes and what kind of content they want to see. So once you've done that, once you know that you can create content that speaks directly to them. So we are in the game of music production. Okay. Or mixing, mastering, whatever it may be. So what you wanna do is put yourself in the shoes of your audience. If you were searching on social media online, what do you want to see? What would grab your attention? Okay? What would make you think, you know what? I wanna follow this account. I wanna see more content like this. Cuz what you don't really want to do is just sporadically put content out there. For example, it's great putting out videos of your music. But you really want to grasp the listener. What do you want to see? What would make you the audience? Watch one of your videos. Would it be a behind the scenes look at creating music? Would it be something funny attributed to the song? Would it be a behind the scenes where you're actually talking about you as an individual? Think about what you want to see. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience, and from that, you can then get a clear picture as to what you should, content you should be creating to drag, to draw those people in. Drag's probably the wrong word. You don't wanna start dragging people, but to really draw them in, think of the content. That you would want to see, okay, what really sparks your interest. And from that, you can start to generate. So what I suggest you do is get a piece of paper and a pen if you want to go old school or use someone like Google Docs and just start writing down. Or maybe scroll through social media, check out some accounts and see what stands out to you, what grabs your atten attention. Just scroll through reels on Instagram. I'm probably gonna say Instagram a lot cause it is the main platform I use. And I'll go into more detail further in this series as to why. But just scroll through what stands out, mag Pie ideas. What you don't wanna do is just sort of haphazardly put content out there thinking, I think this is what people want. Actually go through and look and see what's engaging th see what you've commented on most in the past few days so that there is how you're gonna create your avatar. So, as I said, get a piece of paper and a pen if you want, or a ring binder. Let's go. Totally old school. Or just use Google Docs and start brainstorming or mind mapping, rather, all of the content ideas you think your audience would want to see and start there. That's tip number one. So the next tip is this. Think about where does your audience hang out online? Is it on Instagram? Is it on Facebook? Is it on TikTok? Discord, wherever it may be. And what you wanna do is you wanna identify these online stomping grounds, these watering holes if you like, and go in there and see what kind of content is being created. Have a look at the content that's being created and see which content is getting the most engagement alternative. You can look and see at what content. Isn't getting the most engagement, and that'll give you a good indication of probably what you don't want to be doing. It's also an opportunity as well to ingra yourself, ingratiate rather yourself into that watering hole for one of a better way of putting it and getting more active and involved, and then you'll start to develop. Sort of an awareness with other people that you exist essentially in these places. And you can start building yourself a profile. And when you're doing this, make notes once you can go back to that document I mentioned earlier and start making notes. Okay, this is where my audience is hanging out. This is the content that's really engaging them. And from that, you can start to develop your plan. So that's number two. So here's the third one for this first episode. This is the third tip, and I think this is probably most important. And I got my fingers burnt a lot. Over the last however many years, whether it was when I was in the band and I was promoting, whether it's I'm promoting the podcast and it's spreading yourself too thin. There is an abundance of social media platforms out there, and you kind of get this fomo fear of missing out you. You spread yourself on all these platforms for fear of missing out on opportunities on these different platforms, but by spreading yourself too thin, You're not dedicated. You're not giving your all to one platform, and you, what you're probably experiencing is a lack of engagement. So what I suggest doing is this pick one platform where your audience hangs out so you can use the research that you've just done in terms of watering holes and where you get the most engagement, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, discord, whatever it may be, and then dedicate for the next 30 days, starting today. Dedicate all your time to promoting yourself and pushing content, and engaging in networking on that one platform. So the one I chose is Instagram. Yes, I'm active. It's probably still and shouldn't be on these other platforms, but you'll notice that most of my content, most of my time is dedicated to generating content on Instagram. And I have noticed a difference over the last two or three months in terms of engagement. I get a lot more dms, I get a lot more comments, I get a lot more sharing as well. Um, now notably I haven't seen the number of followers go up, but to be honest with you, I'm not overly bothered about follow account. I don't think you should be either. I think it's all to do with engagement. If you've got, I dunno, 500, a thousand or even less than 500 followers, but you are getting a lot of engagement, that is a lot better than having thousands and thousands of followers, but nobody's bothered about your content or engaging with you. So that's the way I would look at it. So don't look at vanity metrics like numbers of followers. Because in reality, what you want is engagement. You want people engaging with your content. As I say, it's great. You can have all these numbers, you can have all these followers rather, but unless anybody's actually talking to you, what does it mean? So my challenge to you is pick your platform and for the next 30 days, dedicate your time. Don't worry about the other ones. They'll still be there in 30 days time. Okay? If. It doesn't work out on the platform that you choose. Try another one, but at least give it a go, folks. So dedicate to one platform. Okay, so now it's time to take action. Okay? These are your actionable steps. Here's what you have to do. Off the back of today's episode. I want you to do this today. Number one, define your audience avatar. Number two, figure out where they hang out online. And then number three, pick a social media platform and go all in on that one platform for the next 30 days. I know that is gonna be hard, but trust me, you will reap the benefits of doing so. So in the next episode, or rather part two of this five day audience Growth accelerated Challenge, we move on to social media trends and how to use them.