How to build an audience for your B2B brand?

Building an audience for your B2B brand can often feel confusing.

Here’s what we now know -

YOUR AUDIENCE ≠ YOUR FOLLOWING

You could have 10,000 followers on your LinkedIn & still not have an audience.

But you could have just 1000 followers & still have an engaged audience.

Your audience includes -

• People who engage with your content often
• And lurkers who read your posts but hardly ever engage

True Fact: You may never really know exactly how big your ‘audience’ is

Your audience will grow & shrink based on the consistency & quality of what you share.

Here are 3 important pillars for building an audience.

Especially if your ideal audience is B2B.

1. Educate

Give, give, give, and give a little more. That’s what you will do here.

• Share your knowledge, strategic do’s and don’ts, know-how & tactics

• Share guides, whitepapers, and e-books with actionable insights
• Create content on relevant topics on Linkedin
• Case studies of clients & how they did what they did
• Collaborative podcasts with industry experts for new perspectives

Here’s how we implement it ourselves

1. We run The ABM Voice Podcast (18 episodes young) and our goal is to help B2B marketers learn from the very best ABM practitioners in the world.

2. We condensed our knowledge of ABM into these e-books that we share freely.

3. We share our original thinking on Linkedin. We arrive at this by learning from our customers every day.

The closer you are to the ground, the more you’ll understand.

2. Entertain

B2B has got this bad reputation as Boring to Boring

Look, the person you’re selling to may be a VP, Director or a C-Suite but they’d still laugh at a good joke and likely watch the same series as you do on Netflix

A little entertainment or humor won’t hurt your brand

It may just be the unique angle your brand needs

Here’s how we do it -

We run a weekly cartoon series taking a dig at how B2B marketers do things. We call it “The Marketing Tales”.

Some of these episodes are here for you.

3. Engage

Nobody likes a conversation where you speak and everyone else has to listen

Engage with folks on social. It’s as simple as that

Do this:

• Ask thought-provoking questions related to industry challenges
• Engage with the content posted by industry influencers
• Respond to questions, opinions, and feedback.

Here’s how we do this:

My colleagues and I engage with thought leaders and share our point of views.

Bonus Tip

One huge mistake that most thought leaders make is this -

Not checking their DMs ??

It’s very basic. I can't stress this enough.

When you don’t reply to DMs or comments, your identity takes a hit.

The genuine human element is lost right where it’s most important.

Immediately for your audience, you become this person on the top who doesn’t have time for them.

Your goal is to make your audience feel valued at every step.

And that my friends is how you build an engaged audience in 2023.

BTW the holiday season is just around the corner and so is marketing planning for 2024. If ABM is on your mind, you should talk to us.

Please like this post if you find it useful ??

I will take it as a sign to write more about Building Thought Leadership and unlocking inbound leads from LinkedIn.