Where to start when trying to personalize your audience growth strategy

Get a baseline of your current growth

Before working on growth, try and get a baseline of your current growth rates and efforts. It can be helpful for you to know where you’re starting before revamping your strategies. You’ll want this so you can track the impact that your new strategies have. A few ways to measure your current growth is to look at your students, your followers, and your engagement on the social media platforms you use. Plus, social media platforms have tools for analytics to help you track your engagement and growth.

Figure out where you can grow most easily

Once you’ve got that baseline, you can start working on deciding where you’d like to grow your business. Growing follower count might be easier for some people while growing an email list might be the place for others to start. Take a look at where you already have the most traction and will most easily be able to grow your audience. Start from there and use that as the first place to work on audience growth. 

Allocate a set amount of time to dedicate to growth efforts

With an audience you want to grow in mind, think about how much time you want to dedicate to that growth. It’s unrealistic to spend all your time working on building your audience. Again, deciding on an amount of time to spend, and tracking that time, will help you find that perfect balance for your business.

Maybe you start with a half-hour each day and increase it after a month. Whatever you choose, be sure to note what time you spend on which days and then the corresponding results. You should know if your time spent is paying off. 

Tracking your strategy

All of the steps above are important, but they will be the most helpful if you track everything as well.

Tracking your goals

When setting goals there are a few best practices to follow. You should make them actionable, and also trackable. Have a plan for how you’ll track your audience growth progress and measure whether you’ve met your goals. This is where that baseline we talked about can come in handy. How ever you choose to track, start with those baseline numbers. Google sheets can be a great way to keep track of these numbers. And you can easily make the timeline whatever you want: either weekly, monthly, or something else if it fits your schedule and goals best.

Tracking the growth, or lack of growth, you see

In addition to tracking your goals, you need to track any audience growth or any lack of growth you see as well. Come up with a system you’ll be able to consistently update. And pick one that you know you’ll be able to use to easily understand your growth. The best system is the one you’ll actually use. Keep that in mind when trying to decide between various tracking methods. As mentioned above, Google Sheets can be a fantastic place to start and might work long-term for you. If you’re more visual you might choose to make graphs or charts out of your growth numbers. 

Take it one change at a time

Before jumping in and changing multiple things about your current strategy at once, try starting with just one change at a time. This will make it easier to track the impact that change had. Plus, you’ll be able to slowly work your way up to spending more time on your growth strategy this way. Taking on too much at the start can make it more likely that you will burn out. So remember to set realistic expectations for yourself and gradually add on new approaches.

Just the beginning

You’re off to a good start! This is just the beginning. Once you get the ball rolling with your audience growth you’ll be able to level it up and spend more time more thoughtfully on it.