How to grow your audience | Promoting your creative work doesn’t have to feel sleazy

Promote your creative work without feeling sleazy | STOP skipping steps in the audience journey and grow your audience

Ok, so you’ve got a new project out—or maybe the release date is bearing down on you like a freight train.

You need to put a spotlight on it. You need people to know, to get interested, to buy. You need to grow your audience.

So, what do you do?

You can’t just throw up your hands and give up.

But it also feels impossible to actually do anything.

You’re not a sleazy marketer, and this all feels so abrupt and out of character!

Here’s why:

Imagine you’re standing on a street corner holding your creative work…a book, a comic, a CD of a podcast or music, a portfolio, a painting, whatever it is.

You’re holding it up and yelling, “Hey, buy my thing! It’s about vampires! I spent five years on it! It’s really important to me! I love vampires! Ten dollars!”

The vast majority of passers-by would cross the street rather than have to talk to you. Strangers don’t trust that your thing is worth their time and money. Why should they? They don’t know you, and that makes it impossible to like or trust that what you’re offering will be something work their attention.

How different is that feeling from sitting down at a coffee shop with your best friend and proudly announcing you’ve finished your new thing, that they’ve been hearing about since it was a tiny baby idea?

That’s why you may sell to a few friends and family, but no one else perks up when you post your new release on Twitter.

Before you set out to grow your audience…

Before you start asking anyone to commit money… and for many cultural products, even more important: before you ask them to invest time… you need to have built a bedrock relationship with your audience.

They need to know what they’re going to get from your work. They need to know how it’s relevant to them.

And getting to that point is a process with three distinct stages.

Friends buy from friends

Step one is to understand this key concept:

What does making “friends” look like in the context of sharing your creative work and growing your audience?

A friend is someone who knows you, likes you, and trusts you

Don’t talk to strangers.

Don’t accept a lollipop.

Definitely don’t get in the car.

You learned these rules when you were five, and, if you’re like most people, you probably still basically follow them.

Even if you’ll talk to strangers, it makes you nervous. What if you get stuck with someone who turns out to be boring or annoying or who you just really don’t like?

You’re not taking that lollipop.

And you’re absolutely not taking a road trip.

Who do you willingly go on a journey with? Someone you know, for sure. Someone you like. Someone you trust.

And how do you know that you know, like, and trust someone enough to take a trip with them?

Because you’ve had many interactions with them over time, and they’ve proven to you that they’re good traveling companions: they’re interesting, thoughtful, helpful.

If you want your future Fans For Life to show up at the destination (i.e. buy your work), you have to help them get to know you a lot earlier on so that they’ll get in the car in the first place.

You still have to ask them to take the road trip with you. If you want to sell to an audience…you have to actually sell to them. You’d be surprised how often people don’t do this and hope it’ll happen “naturally.”

That’s why it’s so crucial to not only grow your audience, but to engage, and actively sell to them.

Going deeper with your audience is just as important as growing your audience.

When they know, like, and trust you, you can ask for the sale with zero qualms, knowing that you’ve presented your authentic self and developed a relationship with your audience to the point where they know what you’re about and what they can expect from you.

How to grow your audience: The 3 stages of the audience journey

The three stages of the audience journey (aka the epic audience road trip!) are:

Awareness > Connection > Conversion

To move through these three stages, it helps to keep front of mind the three prerequisites for growing your audience and making sales mentioned above, that people “know, like, and trust” you.

Why? Because they need to know who you are, what you and your work stand for (and is it aligned with wha they’re interested in), and most importantly that they can believe—they can **trust—**that, when you come out with something new, whether it be a blog post, a new book, art, a course, it will be worth their time.

I didn’t make up that triumvirate of terms. You’ll find it in any marketing course. But what does it look like in action? How do you actually make sure you’re providing opportunities to get to know, like and trust you, regularly, to people who are likely to be interested?

Rely on the three stages of the audience journey to guide you…and make sure you’re taking action in each one!

1. Awareness

Stage 1 is awareness. People have to literally know you exist, and more than that, they need to have a basic sense of what you’re doing with your work.

You have to be “known” to move on to a deeper relationship and build more loyalty in your growing audience.

That doesn’t mean you pop up in someone’s feed once, or table at one festival. Think of the level as: people need to recognize your name or the name of your thing, and associate it with some sense of what you do/what it is. How can you reach that level of awareness?

Ask yourself: Where can you meet likely people?

Sure, social media, and other content, like blogs or YouTube, may drive traffic to the main work you’re looking to promote, but remember that you probably need to show up and attract the same person’s attention multiple times before what you do will stick.

The people who are seeing your work in that context are typically very slightly engaged. They don’t have a deep connection to you or your work, and they have little loyalty. They’ll just as easily jump to whatever pops up next in the algorithm.

As creatives, this is where we typically hang out, churning out content that produces little engagement. This is partly because making stuff is what we do.

But also, it’s because it feels safe.

I know that can sound weird, but think about it, even if posting content on social media and sending email feels incredibly vulnerable, it offers the security blanket of passive engagement and distance.

It’s not uncommon to hide behind these traffic strategies like posting on social—they make us feel like we’re being productive while simultaneously allowing us to distance ourselves from what feels like the even scarier alternative…

Actively talking to people

We’ll discuss ways out of this trap, so that you can do less, and have a bigger impact in my next post (and workshop), but I’ll let you in on the secret in advance: you don’t actually need social media when you:

1. Show up live and have conversations (like in meetups and festivals)
2. Show up virtually and have conversations (like in online interest groups)
3. Get someone else to share what you do with their audience…and have conversations

2. Connection (AKA engagement)

The second stage of the audience journey is when someone decides to connect more expansively with you and your ideas.

Once a possible fan knows who you are, they need to go deeper to learn if you’re someone they want to stick with. They know you. Do they “like” you?

Or, more to the point, do they like and identify with your work and the values, ethics, aesthetics, stories—in short, the world—your work creates?

How can they possibly know?

You have to build a relationship with the audience you’re growing and give them opportunities to connect with you, your work, and your message, so that they’ll be more receptive to what you’re trying to communicate (and if it’s your goal, to convert them into paying customers and clients).

Once they are pretty confident they like you, the next step is trust. This also needs to happen in the Connection stage, and while it’s certainly possible to build trust without any overt signs, the most common signal of trust that precedes a sale is that an audience member signs up or shows up for something: subscribing to your email list, a live event, a free resource.

This is important: Feeling confident about sharing and selling your work hinges on consent. And the Connection phase of the audience-growing process is all about consent. It’s about you inviting your fan to go deeper, and your fan saying yes.

What does this phase of growing your audience look like?

1. Building bonds via some kind of sharing. Valuable information, entertainment, conversation. Letting people in on the background of who you are and what you do. Live or asynchronous, but strengthening bonds using your authentic voice.
2. For low cost products, like a comic book, it might be enough to read your about page on your website, or click through to your sales page to see samples of your work.
3. Joining your email list. Give them the opportunity to get to know you with a regular newsletter or an automated series of emails that showcases your passion and your story, lets them know what they can expect from you (what’s in it for them), and gives them the chance to reply and start a conversation with you. That way, you can build the relationship and be in touch with them again when you have a new thing available!
4. For all offers, from $3 minis on up to multi-thousand dollar service offers, live interactions are gold. Talks, summits, trainings, meeting people at live events, workshops, and live interviews are great opportunities to get to know your audience (and more importantly, for them to get to know you and your ideas).

They key here is to open up avenues for direct communication with your audience. Communicating your ideas with your audience and learning what they dream of and struggle with (as opposed to running a faceless account) will lead to engagement. Bonus, you’ll be able to use to what you learn about them to deliver more engaging and relevant content in the long run.

Truly listening and connecting—in addition to publishing and sharing your own thoughts and work—is what turns your growing audience into Fans for Life.

3. Conversion: make the ask

The third stage of the audience journey is to ask for a sale.

Pitch a service, run a campaign, or send a note to members of your audience that have expressed interest in your offers previously.

If you’ve done your job right, and built a strong relationship predicated on the work you’re offering, this should be straightforward.

I know, selling is scary. It opens you up to criticism and makes you feel vulnerable.

But by this point you’ve been clear about who you are and what you do. Your audience knows what you’re about, and they’ve stuck with you because they know what they get out of this relationship with you.

You do have to ask if you expect to get the results you’re hoping for. Followers simply don’t magically turn into buyers.

But it can feel truly easeful if you know who you’re asking is your Fan For Life.

If you haven’t built the know-like-trust factor, you’re likely to be disappointed.

What are you doing to build your audience, and where does it fall in the journey? Can you spot where you have gaps?

One of the biggest problems creatives share is that they feel stuck inside the friends and family bubble, where only their mom and bestie ever seem to see their marketing.

We’re going to talk more concretely about how to break out of your bubble next time!

Video Transcript