Are you hung up on metrics?

A strange reality is that you can get thousands of podcast downloads, tons of follow­ers, and heaps of reactions on social media – and have no way of turning it into cash, because you haven’t been optimizing for the right things, things such as getting new clients and turning a profit.

Likes won’t pay your grocery bill. So the next time you put out a piece of content, consider not how many likes it will fetch you, but whether it will interest someone in you and your product, eventually leading to a sale.

Who are you trying to reach?

All good marketing starts with knowing who your audience is. If you don’t know that, you can’t possibly hope to market effectively.

If you’ve already got great clients, you’ll likely want more like them. So get to know them. Find out which of your material resonates with them, what they like about you and your product or service.

If you’re a startup, you may want to begin by testing a couple of different audiences. Or you can look at other, similar businesses and see what type of customers they’ve got or are chasing.

Knowing where they are

Given that you now know your target audience, find out where you can access them. Are they on a certain search engine or social media platform? Do they follow a partic­ular personality? Attend certain events? Do they frequent sites related to a specific niche?

The equipment you’ll be needing

Say you’ve discovered many of your ideal customers are on YouTube. Video auto­matically becomes an important  medium to you, and with it the equipment  needed to make effective videos.

If audio podcasting is more your audience’s thing, you want to gear up with the tools needed to put together and deliver a quality show.