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 a 1000 followers & 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

Looks like you open this email often - thanks for being an engaged audience

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 as 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 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. Sharing on Linkedin

We share our original thinking on Linkedin. We arrive at this by learning from our customers everyday.

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

Follow our founder - Arun, the ABM geek here

4. This newsletter. Thanks for being an amazing patron. We highly appreciate it

A lot of share feedback regularly & we are picking topics based on your feedback.

Thanks for being such an engaged audience

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 “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:

Our founder, Arun (follow him here) regularly engages with thought leaders & share his point of view

Bonus Tip

One huge mistake which most thought leaders make is this

Not checking 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