10 ways to simplify growing your brand by getting help from your audience

Mastery Den, Saturday Edition, 5-min read.

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The world is shifting in such a way that everything points to the value of building your own brand presence online.

AI is on the verge of providing services and creating intellectual property, like books, that will compete with ours in terms of quality.

But what’s a great product without a loyal audience to support and buy from you?

Your product or ideas alone are not necessarily enough to compete. The appeal of your overall brand, message, and personal humanity will make the biggest difference in whether you progress or fall to the side.

The people who follow you will not only buy your products, but they can help you build the brand itself.

Here are some ways your audience can help you develop a powerful brand presence.

Ask them about their pains.

Those who follow you will likely have challenges they face that you could help with.

This is the primary reason they listen to you. Your brand is a service, so make sure you ask them enough to know their problems intimately.

Then you can find the solutions and give it to them, deepening their loyalty.

Speak directly to a single member of your audience.

One of the best pieces of advice you can get about writing more impactfully is to have a real person in mind when writing.

Consider a client you’ve been working with or someone in your audience specifically. What have they expressed as a difficulty?

Write with them in mind like you’re chatting with them at the pub.

It will help you write more fluidly and will be felt by more readers because many will relate.

Use them to help with product development.

When developing new products or services to sell as part of your brand, you want your audience to be part of this process.

This way, you’ll be far more likely to deliver something people respond well to, because they’re the ones who will ultimately use what you create.

For example, I’ve asked people for their thoughts on what they need help with for previous products. 

But I’ve also created early iteration products for a smaller group of beta testers — those who get early access to the product. They know the product is incomplete, and you are working with them to make it the best product possible.

You can even charge for this because they still get value in being able to work with you closely and more intimately.

Start a community.

Communities are a great opportunity for brand development because those who join are collaborators themselves.

You don’t need to be an expert at the top of a mountain directing everyone to do it your way.

A community brings in the contributions and support of all involved. 

You can view your community as a product in itself — driven in part by you, but also in a large part by your community members.

Use your audience to get reviews and feedback for products like ebooks.

Your audience is an ideal source for adding additional value to your products.

They can give you feedback on your products so you can improve them.

They can also provide social proof through case study examples or reviews that will help promote and sell your products further.

Have your followers be brand ambassadors.

Those who follow you and are loyal to your work can become brand ambassadors by referring your work to those they know.

Some systems help refine this process, such as the Substack referral system, which awards points to readers who help promote your newsletter.

Create user-generated content.

Stuck for ideas on what to share? 

Enlist the help of your readers to help generate content. You can simply ask a specific question and use the answers as content. 

You can invite others to write guest posts or contribute content segments like paragraphs or videos that feature in your content.

You can also get creative and run a contest that rewards winners with a feature, such as a ‘show me your workspace’ competition or a contest for redesigning a well-known book title.

Ask for ideas on how to improve.

This might seem obvious, but it is little used. 

Your audience experiences your work from a fresh perspective.

Regularly ask them about this experience and what you can do to improve. Bring your followers into your process and acknowledge them when they do.

You don’t need to operate from behind closed doors and opaque walls.

Use interactive content.

I’ve been experimenting with interactive content more recently.

Quizzes, surveys, and polls unite people and allow your audience to interact and contribute.

Substack, for example, provides a polling option for readers to show their stance on issues, which is presented within a post for others to see.

Crowdsource product-creation.

You can run a Kickstarter campaign, whereby the crowd generates financial support for the product in advance of completing the product.

Say you had an idea for a coffee-table book, but you weren’t sure if it would sell. 

You could gauge the demand through crowdsourcing while collecting funds for its development in parallel to creating the book.

You can also crowdsource by having others contribute pieces of the content, like having people contribute content to an anthology.

You could pay a flat fee to those whose work you accept.

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Can’t wait to see you grow over the next few years.

If you have other ideas to add, share them below!

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