Have you ever looked at your audience stats on Google analytics or Instagram and been overwhelmed by the following thought:

Of course, you love to see those numbers grow! They’re here for your kick-ass products, (how could they not be!) but do you know how best to serve them where they are?

Understanding who makes up your digital community can help you plan your marketing strategies with precision and set your product launches and events up for success.

As a business owner, you spend so much time planning robust marketing strategies so making sure you understand the different facets of your audience is essential ::Julie Andrew’s “Getting to Know You” plays softly in the background::

Broadly, your brand’s audience can be broken down into two categories: direct and indirect.

Your Direct Audience

Your direct audience is comprised of your customers and future customers who you have the ability to contact directly via email, phone, mailing address etc. At some point along the way, your direct audience has given you permission to contact them (by joining your email list, for example) – opting-in to hear from you. This removes obstacles like algorithms from getting in the way of you getting in touch with your customer. Love that!

Your Indirect Audience

Followers and subscribers on your social media channels are your indirect audiences. Essentially, you are “borrowing” this group’s attention from Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube etc. Your access to these customers is conditional on the host platform – without the platform, you don’t have those contacts. This is a great way to build awareness around your brand, but not always the best place to do the hard sell.

Communicating With Your Audiences

Reframing how you communicate to and engage with your audiences will help you put out the right content for the right audience, helping them go from casual follower to loyal customer.

Businesses tend to rely heavily on social media (and therefore indirect audiences) which is understandable, due to their wide availability and potential for exposure.

What gets tricky is assuming that those followers have bought in to the same degree as a direct audience member: a follow doesn’t guarantee a membership to your community. At any point, these platforms could shut down, change their algorithm, or create a new policy that could limit or remove access to the audience you’ve built in their spaces – we don’t want that!

Building Community

Rather than trying to do all of the things all over the internet, we suggest finding a way to serve your direct audience like the kings and queens they are – offering incentives, perks, exclusives and plenty of value for being down for the cause. A great example of this is creating and sending must-read emails with sneak peaks, great content and other surprises.

This gives you the opportunity to entice your indirect audience to becoming direct – opting in to your emails, making their first order, slowly becoming community members.

Your social channels, while they certainly support the sale, can be tailored more to storytelling – why should followers want to be more involved? What makes your shop different? What can they expect more of?

By intentionally diversifying the content you create for these audiences, you build an ecosystem where your audience member – no matter where they are – understands exactly what to do next to become a member of your community.