Five Principles for Building a High-Value Audience of Any Size

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

Building a high-value audience starts with creating high-value content.

This is not a lesson in going viral or hacking social media algorithms. Those tactics change constantly and are not entirely in your control anyway. Instead, I’m going to share five principles for building an engaged, passionate following of any size. These principles haven’t changed in millennia, and they aren’t likely to change anytime soon.

Let’s dive in:

1. Set the Right Goals

The first step to building an engaged audience is knowing why you’re building one in the first place.

Jay Acunzo knows exactly why he’s building an online audience: to support his high-ticket consulting and speaking business. This is one reason why he chose to start a podcast—a terrible channel if your goal is to build a large audience, but excellent for building deep relationships with your listeners.

Amanda Natividad also has clear goals. As the VP of Marketing at SparkToro, an audience research startup, her Twitter following has recently ballooned to over 100K followers. But building a large audience was never the point. “I don’t want to be famous or go viral,” she told me. “I just want my ideas to resonate in my industry.”

Natividad thinks about audience-building as a tool. She calls it networking at scale. Her audience gives her the type of leverage that Naval alluded to: a marketplace for her ideas, businesses, and side-projects.

But goal-setting is a tradeoff. Any goal will take time and energy away from your other priorities. Whether you want to build a Toyota audience or Tesla audience, your efforts need to fit in with the rest of your work and personal life.

To set the right goals for your audience-building aspirations, I use a technique called ecological goal-setting. See the section Practice, Practice, Practice for the full exercise.

2. Make Your Customer the Hero

Everyone lives as the main character of their own story. Remember this as you set out to build an audience. You are not the hero—your customer is.

Your role is to guide them on their journey.

The Hero’s Journey is a story as old as time. It’s the ultimate saga of human trial and triumph. Any time we find ourselves wanting, striving, succeeding, or failing, we’re following in the footsteps of our favorite heroes: Hercules, Joan of Arc, Luke Skywalker, Usain Bolt, and Queen Elsa.

Many companies use the Hero’s Journey to connect with potential customers. One of the best modern examples is Nike, the brand that promises to “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world (*If you have a body, you are an athlete.)” Nike supports athletes with equipment, clothing, and inspiration to do what they do best. They make their customers the hero—those of us who strive to be like Serena Williams or Michael Jordan.

But not everyone sees themselves as a hero. Some people want to be rebels. Others want to be adventurers. Again, brands play the role of the guide: Harley Davidson and Vans help their customers feel like outlaws. Patagonia and Red Bull fuel our epic journeys.

Traditional marketing logic says to put your brand at the center of the story:

“Recommended by nine out of ten dentists.”

“Choosy moms choose Jif.”

“The World’s Cheapest Car.”

But today’s best brands teach us a different lesson: Make your customer the hero, rebel, or adventurer of their own story. Your job is to guide them along the way.

Map Out Your Customer Journey

So how do you make your customer the main character of your story?

First you need to know what their unique journey looks like. Then you need to create content that serves as a guidebook for them along the way.

During my days at WeContent, we developed a tool to help companies tell more customer-centric stories: The Heroic Customer Story (HCS) framework. The HCS not only helps you build empathy for your customer, but identify content ideas for every part of their journey.

Spend time answering each question of the HCS in detail. By the end, you’ll have dozens of high-value content ideas that have a direct impact on your customer’s life:

1. The Hero

   • What’s your customer’s name?

   • Do they see themselves as the hero, rebel, outlaw, adventurer, caregiver, or something else?

   • What is their current status quo like?

2. Aspirations

   • What do they want out of life?

   • What do they need?

3. Challenges

   • What stands in their way from living the life they want?

4. Call to action

   • Who, or what, finally motivates them to change the status quo and seek out their aspirations?

5. They meet a guide (you or your brand)

   • Why do you want to help? (Consider your mission and business goals)

   • Why should they trust you?

6. Who paints a vision

   • What could life really look like for your hero?

7. Gives them tools and a plan

   • How can you help your hero live their best life?

8. Hero faces obstacles

   • What challenges will the hero face along the way?

   • What external challenges stand in their way?

   • What internal beliefs must they battle?

9. But achieves victory

   • What does “success” look like for your customer?

   • How will you know when they’ve achieved it?

   • What will success hear, sound, and feel like?

10. And transforms along the way

    • Who will your customer become on their journey

The Heroic Customer Story aims to plant you in the life of your customers for the long haul. Paint the vision, help them along their journey, and watch them transform into the people they were meant to be.

One last thing to keep in mind: Who you’re not writing for is just as important as who you are writing for. For many of us (including myself), we naturally aim to please everybody. This is a bad habit that can make our writing boring and average.

Take a moment to describe exactly who you’re not trying to serve in your writing. This will give your work a distinct edge—a line that differentiates your tribe from everyone else.

Don’t be offensive, but don’t be afraid to be an acquired taste, either.

3. Position Yourself — Part 1: Own a Niche

With your Heroic Customer Story mapped out, now it’s time to talk about you. How will you stand out from the crowd?

It’s not just about what you write about, but how you do it.

When it comes to positioning, there are two schools of thought: Owning a niche and finding your key differentiators.

Owning a niche means finding an untapped segment of your market and then winning over that entire audience. This path is getting more and more difficult due to the explosion of competition in virtually every industry, but it can be very lucrative. To find an unoccupied niche, you have two options:

Split an existing niche into an even more specific sub-segment

For example, if you’re building a CRM for small real estate investors, you’re already facing fierce competition. But what if you niched down to female investors just getting into real estate? In a male-dominated industry, this could be a lucrative niche. Ellevest has carved out a similar position in ETF investing.

Create a new category

Category creation is the process of creating a brand-new class of product or way of doing business. For individuals, category creation could also mean coining a term for the type of work you do. Nicolas Cole, for example, coined the term “digital writer” for someone who writes online to grow their audience. Being a category creator can be highly lucrative but challenging. First, you need to create a truly different product or experience. Second, you need to educate your audience on what this new category is and why they should care.

The biggest benefit to owning a niche is the opportunity for rapid growth. If you find a truly untapped market—especially one that’s highly motivated and interconnected—you can become the go-to resource for that audience. Owning a niche makes you immediately recognizable and more memorable in a crowded market.

But there are downsides to owning a niche. The biggest drawback is being boxed into a highly specific category. Owning a niche requires you to stay obsessively on-topic. This is constraining for anyone who wants to explore multiple interests. It also caps your potential growth to the size of your niche unless you choose to branch out. Many individuals and brands have successfully grown out of their niche, but you risk losing your most fervent audience members by doing so.

4. Position Yourself — Part 2: Key Differentiators

So what’s the alternative to owning a niche? Find your key differentiators.

“I don’t think you have to double down on a niche in order to grow,” Amanda Natividad told me. “If you focus on your key differentiators instead, you’ll be able to grow your audience in a healthier way.”

Finding your key differentiators is a little less cut-and-try than owning a niche. Simply put, your key differentiators are what make you different and better to your target audience. This could include a single factor like price, or a combination of hard and soft traits like your business model, values, tone of voice, or customer service.

It can be slower to build an audience based on your key differentiators than by owning a niche. But the benefit is building an audience who follows you for you, not your category.

“Focusing on your key differentiators will lead you to developing true fans—people who follow you and care about what you have to say based on the way you think,” said Natividad.

To find your key differentiators, ask yourself these four questions:

What am I really good at?

Don’t just think about your marketable skills, but your personality and soft skills as well.

For example, Natividad is an expert in content marketing—she’s done it for eight years for some of the biggest brands in the world. But she’s also a professionally trained chef and has a knack for making people feel seen and appreciated. This is a unique and powerful triad of skills.

Think about the compliments you get, what people pay you to do, and the traits that make you, you.

What am I interested in?

If you’re a human being, your interests probably extend beyond your work (sorry, robots).

Your mix of interests can be one of your key differentiators. I write and publish books for entrepreneurs, but I also love travel, urban planning, architecture, and playing ultimate frisbee. These aren’t passive interests, either. I learn important lessons about life and work from these extracurriculars.

Natividad is obviously interested in content marketing, but she also loves to share original recipes for food and cocktails. And as a mother, she also shares occasional misadventures of family life.

What does my audience want or need?

By this point you should have a clear idea what your audience is looking for. Refer to your Heroic Customer Story:

• What do your customers want out of life?

• What do they need?

• What stands in their way from living the life they want?

• Who do they want to become?

How can I deliver differently?

Owning a niche is about what you do. Your key differentiators focus on how you do it. That makes a huge difference for your audience.

Steph Smith, an author and former marketer with The Hustle, said in an interview with Growth Machine:

Rather than focus on your end product or service—your ‘what’—focus on your how: how you, and only you, can deliver this product differently.

Will you bring a sense of humor to an otherwise stale industry? Could you provide short, easy-to-digest snippets of information? Can you design infographics that help break down complex topics?

How you deliver your products, services, and ideas is just as important as what you deliver. Don’t underestimate the power of being different.

Your key differentiators live at the intersection of these four questions. Take stock of all the things that separate you from your competitors, then combine them in a unique way. Don’t look for validation from your industry—if you do it right, your approach will be unlike anything else. And that’s exactly what you want.

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path,” said Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

Be bold. Be different. Be relentlessly you.

5. Show up Consistently

The number one reason why founders fail to build an audience is that they give up before they ever really get started.

Building an audience takes time. Starting and stopping after three months will look like a failure, but you haven’t even left the starting gate. Prepare to commit to twelve to eighteen months of consistent writing.

But the exact definition of consistency is different for everyone. Social media rewards people who show up daily, but it’s more important to pick a cadence that works for you. Don’t push out C-grade content just to say you did it.

Consistency is the most reliable way to improve your skills as a writer and build momentum with your audience. Start by blocking time on your calendar for content creation. This could be twenty minutes, an hour, or even a few hours every week. Protect this time as an investment in your future. Every piece of writing is another degree of leverage for your business.

Refine your content strategy over time by seeing what performs and what doesn’t. If one newsletter outperforms the others by two or three times, take that as a sign of a topic your audience is interested in. Explore that topic deeper to see if you can double down on your success. At the same time, watch for topics that fall flat. Keep tweaking your messaging until you get the response you want or move on to topics with higher engagement.

Consistency is the only thing you can’t fake. If your goal is to build an audience, be nothing if not consistent.