Stop Building an Audience Without an Offer in Mind

Want to make sure the people in your audience actually turn into buyers?

Then you need to make sure you build your audience with an offer in mind.

Otherwise, you may end up with a collection of people who are just there to look but will never buy from you.

And that’s just the beginning. There are other reasons why you need to have an offer in mind before you start building your audience!

Learn more in the most recent podcast episode

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Full Show Notes (Transcript)…

Hey, risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. 

Today we want to cover the biggest mistake that people make, and that is building an audience before you have an offer in mind.

This is a really common practice that people teach big names in the online space teach this. Just build an audience, just get in front of people and talk to those people and they will tell you what they want you to make for them, and in theory, it makes a lot of sense, but I actually think it's a huge mistake.

I think it's a big mistake to go ahead and just be accumulating and collecting people when we just look at the audience as numbers and we just are in the practice of accumulating them, collecting them so we can pick their brains later. We stop seeing them as human. We dehumanize our audience and we go after a vanity metric, which is a number of people.

The other thing that happens when you just build an audience is you are ending up with a group of unqualified leads. You practice this accumulation, and maybe it's working, maybe your audience has gone from a hundred to 300 to 500. Maybe you have a thousand people following you on Instagram or a thousand people on your email list, and that's all great and good, but if they're all there under different, I don't wanna say pretenses, but un for different reasons.

If they were attracted to one Instagram post of yours over another or something like that, you've just got a bunch of people following along and no way to know. If they are lookers or if they are actual buyers. And we're not here to be influencers and some of you might be, some of you might be growing an online audience and building an online presence because you wanna be an influencer, you wanna be a representative of other brands, and you wanna sell other brands stuff to those people.

There's nothing wrong with that. Then just go out and accumulate those people. That's totally fine. However, if you wanna run a business, if you wanna have proprietary courses, proprietary membership sites, proprietary group programs, coaching, whatever, that is something that you have created in order to make an impact and in order to make people or help people have transformations, and you wanna sell your own stuff.

We need that audience to be qualified for what it is you wanna buy. It's not the same as, oh, here's my shirt from Nordstrom. They have all the sizes, except they're running low on size small. So make sure you swipe up and grab it. Now again, I'm being a little facetious, and there's nothing wrong with influencer marketing if that's what you're into, and that's what you're looking for.

We can totally talk about that. However, most of you listening here, that's not what you're going for. You're going for your own program. That you want people to go through and experience a transformation and work on changing their lives, selling a program. Qualifies your audience, right? If you sell the program to the group of people, those that don't want it or don't have any interest in it, they would or they should and will leave your audience. They're like, oh, this isn't for me. This isn't what I wanted. This isn't what I need. I'm gonna bow out right now. I'm gonna remove myself from this group of people. That is what we want. We want unsubscribes. We want people to leave our audience who are never gonna turn into buyers from us. When you sell to your audience, those that do want what you're selling, those who are in the right place at the right time, they're either gonna buy when the, the next time you make it available, they're gonna buy it then. Or they're going to bookmark your program for later. Maybe the timing isn't right. They've got, they, they can't make Wednesday evenings or something like that. Maybe the timing isn't right, or maybe their cash flow isn't there, but they know they want it eventually, and they're gonna put it in. In the bookmark, they're gonna put it in their back pocket and when it is time for them to buy, when the timing is right, when the pricing is right, whatever they will then purchase from you and they will stay in your audience and they will continue to learn from you and grow from you as you provide them free value.

That's the point of the audience. It's not to just accumulate people. It's not just to be growing that vanity metric. It's to keep people warm until you offer. Your program again, and for them to buy it the next time it becomes available. Now, sometimes your program is always available. This is called Evergreen, or some of you are thinking about passive income.

Sometimes a program is always available and peak pool can register right away, and that's great too if you are attracting an audience who's not interested in your offer. Then they're certainly not gonna buy it right away. They're certainly not gonna buy it on passive in. So for evergreen programs or for passive income, it's even more important to have the offer locked in first.

Now I'm going to have a caveat here, and I'm gonna say, this does not mean your offer needs to be built. Then we build an audience around that concept. Okay? So we're not building it around an actual course or an actual program that's been built out.

We're building an audience around the concept. You will get feedback from your audience. They will tell you what they're looking for, and then you can adjust that concept. We wanna look for trends here. We don't wanna get feedback from one single person and then change our whole concept. That's not gonna work either.

But if you have a concept and you're building an audience for that concept, and then in that process you start to see a trend from your audience, it may help you refine that concept. Okay, but we do not want to go ahead and build an audience first without a concept in mind because when you have an offer in mind, you can en line your entire audience-building process to what you plan to sell.

People are brought into your orbit for a very specific reason. It saves them time. If they're brought into your orbit for a very specific reason, they can then decide if they wanna purchase from you. If you bring them into your orbit for something that's wishy-washy or something that's nebulous and they don't really know what it is you do.

All you do is wasting their time and you're really wasting your time cuz it's not gonna turn into a sale. Any building your audience with your offer in mind helps them find the right solution and help them find it fast. If we're talking about impact here, if we're talking about service here, we need to have our offer in mind when we're building our audience because that in itself is a form of service.

I am helping you make sure you're in the right place. So you know that you're gonna get the solution you're looking for, and so you're not wasting your time wondering if I'm gonna help you or not. You get to decide very early on if I'm the person for you and if my program is the program for you. On the flip side for you, it helps you build an audience of buyers, not people who are just like, what's over here?

And like looking around like the looky-loos. We don't want looky-loos. We want people who can make an informed decision of whether or not. It's there, it's right for them to buy. If it's not right for them to buy and they leave the audience, that's awesome. We're not upset about that. What is more upsetting is having an audience of lookie-loos than you think.

You've got a thousand people who are qualified buyers, and maybe you really only have 200 people who are qualified buyers. That kind of sucks. So building your offer or building your audience with an offer in mind is what helps you build a long-term and sustainable business, something that you can rely on, something that you can shrink your caseload because this revenue is dependable. This audience is dependable. It's an audience of buyers who are either gonna buy from you the next time or are gonna bookmark your program for when it is the right fit for them. That's the lifeblood of your business. A qualified audience full of buyers, not a just accumulation amalgamation, so to speak, of random people.

So having the offer be the center point of your audience, building streamlines your business, make sure your audience is more qualified, makes your business more sustainable, and makes your business more long-lasting. All right, so let's break down exactly why it's a mistake to build your audience before you have an offer in mind.

Hey, risers. We are all here listening today because we're craving that lighter lifestyle that's possible when we repurpose and repackage our clinical skills into an online income stream. But none of us is alone when we've realized we have 25-plus ideas floating around in our head and zero clue how to take the first step.

The truth is there are a lot of different types of programs we can offer online. And each one will help us scale beyond one-on-one clients so we can start claiming a bit more time and financial freedom. And every online income stream has subtle nuances that makes it different than other revenue sources.

Each income stream requires something a little bit different from you and it's wise to take a look at things like your work style, your values, and your business goals before you decide which type of program you want to offer. So whether you're thinking about adding, coaching, a digital course, or even a retreat, gaining some insight into which type of program is best for you will make it so much easier to get started.

And that's why I made a really fun quiz. In 10 pinpoint questions, you'll take a look at things like the work that lights you up outside of the therapy room and how comfortable you are with marketing and visibility. And at the end, you'll see which type of online income stream is right for you, so you can move forward with the clarity and confidence to make it happen.

Just head on over to marissa lawten.com/quiz to take the first step in building the business and the lifestyle that you crave.

The first thing is, if you are audience building without an offer in mind, you have a higher chance of getting in front of the wrong people. Let's take, I always use new moms as an example, or moms because it's a really big industry, the mom industry, but let's say. Your program is to help sleep, train a baby without using cry-out and like gentle using your therapeutic background, gentle emotion, connection, relationship-based sleep training versus the cry-out method. If you are just gonna start marketing to moms who happen, who are either pregnant or just had a baby, you are 100% certainly going to get, be getting in front of the wrong people. There may be some people in, in the mom audience, there are some people in the mom audience who want a gentler approach. But there are also the moms who don't care. They don't care. They're maybe not informed enough about an emotion-based approach or a connection-based approach. They might think that's gonna take too long. And they have, they're, they have to get back to work and they're not sleeping, and they need an instantaneous result, so to speak, and they believe from other people, marketing to them or other messages they received, that a cryo out method is gonna do it faster. So if you don't have your offer in mind, You're just like, I'm gonna just talk to moms and, but what I, but I know that I'm not gonna be able to meet those moms' needs. Okay. So what's funny is I actually just used that example, starting with the offer in mind because I was like, say you wanna do this, right?

So say you have no idea what you wanna do. And you just know that you wanna be a sleep consultant for mom, you ha You have to know what it is you wanna do. You might not have the exact offer in mind, but you still are starting somewhere from a place of what you wanna do. But let's just say you're just called to help moms in your practice.

Maybe you've helped moms with sleep, maybe you've helped moms with postpartum or perinatal mood stuff. You've helped moms with X, Y, Z, and you're like, okay, I'm just gonna build an audience of moms. Just build an audience of moms and then I'm gonna send them out surveys. Then I'm gonna send them out polls what to what they want.

You're gonna get those surveys back and you're gonna get those polls back, and they are going to be all over the place. They're gonna be all over the place. Most people know a bit about what they want. Or who they want their niche to be. But remember that the person is only one element of an offer, okay?

The person mom is only one element. You also need to know the type of program you're offering. Some moms might not want a membership site, or some moms might not want a group program. Some moms might not want or can't afford or don't wanna spend money on one-on-one coats. So you need to know not only the person but the type of program you're offering, the problem you're solving.

Are you gonna help them with sleep? Are you gonna help them with mood? Are you gonna help them with self-care? Whatever that might be. And you need to know the promise you're making. Are you helping them get back to work faster? Are you helping them to reclaim their identity as a mom or as a person, even though they are a mom or a woman, even though they are a mom?

Are you helping them? Whatever. What's the promise that you're making with that? And then what is the price you're charging? Are these stay-at-home moms whose partner happens to be an elementary teacher? That person's purchasing power is going to be very different than even a stay-at-home mom. Whose partner is a hedge fund manager?

Are these working moms with different purchasing power? Are these dual-income moms? And then do they have even still different purchasing power? So we need to understand all the elements of the offer so that we can build the right audience because even if you're managing to get in front of the right people, that's not enough to grow a business.

So getting in front of the right people is much easier when you have. An offer in mind. Otherwise, you are for sure going to be building an audience that has a percentage of the right people, but the bigger percentage is gonna be the wrong people. So we need to have the offer in mind in order to set parameters of the people that we're talking about in order to draw in the right people.

The other reason it is a mistake to build your audience without an offer in mind is because that audience becomes too broad. This is what I was just talking about a second ago, this, and this is what happens more often than getting in front of the wrong people per to say, because you're always gonna have a percentage that's the right people.

But when you're building an audience first, There's gonna be a few common factors among your audience. Moms, they're probably most likely female-identifying women identifying they're probably most likely, most likely in a partnered relationship, whether that's married or a committed relationship. There will be some single moms by choice or getting starting families and raising children on their own.

So there's gonna be some common factors among your audience, but. More so than the commonalities are gonna be the differences. Lifestyle differences, circumstance differences, privilege differences, purchasing power differences like we've already talked about. Many people think, and many gurus teach that if you build an audience, you can then crowdsource your offer.

You can just send a poll out or send a survey out. And then they will tell you what to make them. Overall, you might see some trends, right, but without a really solid group of, with a lot of similarities. Your poll responses and your survey responses are going to be all over the 15. You might send out a hundred surveys because, and your audience is just moms, right? 50% of them might say they need help with sleep, but then let's look at that 50%. Outta that 50%, you're gonna have a handful that want a membership site, a handful that want more intimate group coaching, a handful who can afford this, a handful of who can afford that. And then it's just gonna be too diverse of information and it's not going to be something that you can move forward on.

A captive group of people, we would think will provide answers to what our offers should be, but it rarely works that way because the audience becomes, Too diverse. We get 25 different ideas for what they want. There may be some themes, but when you break it down, the information is gonna be so varied that you're not going to understand how to move forward, and then you're gonna end up stuck.

It's gonna be like if I make this for this part of the audience, then this part of the audience isn't going to be served. Or if I make this for the other part of the audience, then this part of the audience is gonna, isn't gonna be served. So what then you do? You make both. And do you now have two offers that you're trying to manage?

Believe me, it's not easy to run a, an online income stream with multiple offers. The few, the least amount of successful offers that you can maintain the better. Right? So you're either gonna end up alienating part of your audience or you're gonna end up overserving and burning out basically. With too much or too broad or too diverse of an audience, you're going to get stuck.

The other thing that tends to happen is that people wait too long to ask. Eventually, I'll sell something, but right now I'm just building an audience. Right now, I'm just building the audience and, and that's all I need to do right now. But if you're not, Building your audience around one central idea. And if that idea and that concept is not the program you plan to sell, it's going to be much harder to meet those people's wants and needs, and therefore much harder to make sales.

So not only from the diversity's perspective that we're gonna have too many people to answer to, too many people, to satisfy how many groups of people to satisfy. The other thing that happens when you build an audience first and introduce an offer later is your audience feels a bit betrayed. They feel like, oh, I thought this was a free support group, or, oh, I thought this was just the place to come and get information.

I didn't realize I was gonna have to buy something. I didn't realize they were gonna turn around, but six months later and ask me for money. If you come across as a professional business from the get-go, if you come across with an offer in mind from the get-go. People will not feel backstabbed or stabbed in the back or will not feel blindsided by you introducing an offer six months, a year and a half down the road.

A, that's way too long. You should be monetizing way sooner than that. But B, imagine if you thought this place was like your place, it was your community, and then a year down the road someone tried to sell you something in it. It would feel kind of, you'd feel taken aback, right? Knowing and setting the tone from the beginning that this is a place of business and not just a free support group makes a total difference with your audience.

It's not that they're, they don't necessarily wanna support you down the road. But it's the fact that it's like a bait-and-switch kind of feeling. If you set the tone from the beginning, they may not buy from you from the beginning, but remember, they might bookmark your offer or bookmark your program for later, for when they do want to participate or when they can purchase.

So it's much better to build an audience of buyers from the get-go. Set the tone of you being a business from the get-go than down the road 12 months later, surprising your audience with an offer. We don't ever wanna string people along without offering them something to buy. We don't wanna string them along and make them feel betrayed.

But we also, it's not good for our bottom line to wait to introduce the offer. We need to get to a certain point. For the sustainable amount of audience that's there for what we intend them to be there for, which is to purchase from us, and then we need to make that offer. We need to make the sale sooner in the process than we probably think.

This is what keeps even qualified buyers from going cold and moving on to a different coach or a different course or a different account to follow on Instagram. If they, if we're waiting too long to sell to them, they're gonna feel like, oh, this person isn't ready to meet our needs or can't meet our needs, and so they're gonna go find someone else.

So waiting too long to introduce the offer can feel like bait and switch, but it also, the people who would've purchased from you may decide that they want results sooner. They want transformation sooner, and so they go and seek it out somewhere else. We don't wanna delay the offer for the sake of building the audience.

We don't wanna build the audience first and introduce the offer later. We want to build the audience. Around the offer. All right, so if you've been making this all too common mistake of just willy-nilly building an audience, collecting people, accumulating numbers, or if you were planning on jumping in this way, oh, I'll just build the audience first and then see what happens. Keep on rising. 

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