Email and social media have become an inevitable marketing channel for any business that wants to grow its audience and make more sales. Many email users have made purchases as a result of emails they received from businesses. Also, many social media users have relied on their content to engage brands and even buy the products and services they sell.
This tells you how powerful content can be when it comes to growing your email and social media audience to have them purchase what you sell.
As a beginner, using content to grow your audience on email and social media can be challenging.
I can vividly recall how tasking it was for me a few years ago when I wanted to use content to grow my audience on Facebook and email to have them visit my site, so I could make money through display ads and affiliate marketing.
I faced the common challenges that many beginners face today.
For example, I was worried about the amount of content out there and how I could stand out, considering that there are established marketers who have huge audiences and are already killing it.
Consistency is another issue. To grow your audience on social media and email fast, you have to be consistent with creating high-quality content that your audience will find valuable.
After that, you gotta worry about how to get your audience engaged and how best to engage them back to boost your reach as soon as possible.
You want people to share your email and social media content with their friends and family and also want to respond to questions and comments they make about your content.
There is also an algorithm change to worry about. On email, you won’t have to worry much about this, provided your email marketing platform has a good delivery rate.
With that, most of the emails you send will land in the inbox of your subscribers and not the spam box.
But on social media, where you have algorithm changes frequently, you have to pay attention to understand what is working on any social media platform and plan how to pivot to take advantage of it.
And the most important is building trust and credibility with your audience. People will only subscribe to your email list if they trust you and the content on your landing page or blog post. Same on social media. They will follow you, engage, and share your content if they see you as an authority who has a solution to their problem.
But you don’t have to worry because I have you covered in this guide.
I will show you how to use content to grow your email and social media audience as a beginner with no experience.
This will help you create awareness for your business, and generate high-quality leads that will convert to sales.
Understand Your Audience
One question I ask myself when I want to create content for email campaigns and social media is: who is my audience?
This helps me put myself in their shoes, understand their pain point at a particular point in time, and come up with content that they will find helpful.
Understanding your audience is important as you aim to grow your audience and have them buy what you sell. An audience who finds your content helpful and sees it as a solution to their problem will share it with others. The same audience will consider the products and services you sell to them via email and social media because they trust that you understand their problems.
There are many ways to understand your audience. The commonest way is to use surveys. Create questions that uncover demographic information, challenges, and preferences. Share them via emails or social media to a broader audience. Analyze their responses to that survey to identify common issues that they are interested in so you can tailor your content as a solution.
Here is how Justin Welsh, a content creator, uses X and email to grow and monetize his audience.
Not long ago, he created a survey to understand the type of content his audience wants from him. He shared it with his email subscribers and followers on X.
You can do the same, as this method has proved to be effective when it comes to understanding what your audience wants.
Create High-Quality Content
On email and social media, high-quality content is everything. So you don’t have to sacrifice it for anything. Remember, the competition is fierce and lots of businesses are competing for the same audience who want to be loyal to your business.
On email, your audience will click off within seconds of opening your email once they take a glance and see it as something that isn’t helpful.
Many of them won’t even bother to open it the next time and might end up unsubscribing.
On social media, they will scroll past it on their feed if they see it as something that doesn’t capture their attention. People’s attention span is shorter, and your content must create the best impression within a few seconds of them engaging it.
From my experience, video content, photos, and short texts that convey valuable messages work on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X.
On emails, infographics, screenshots, testimonials, and user-generated content do the magic. You can use specific ChatGPT email prompts to ensure your email content is high-quality and engaging. Additionally, consider employing advanced GPT models like GPT-4o for generating superior email content.
On both platforms, people love educational, entertaining, and inspirational content. They tend to share it easily with friends, which boosts the chances of your content going viral.
Have A Strategy
Growing your audience using email campaigns and social media requires you to have a strategy. You can just throw content around and expect magic to happen overnight.
The content strategy to grow your email list is different from that of social media.
To grow your email list, you need an opt-in form on your blog or landing page with a valuable lead magnet like a free book, templates, or checklist. Then you have to run an email campaign with an email welcome series, a content-driven newsletter with an engaging subject line, and content that converts.
On social media, your focus should be on the type of content that works for a specific platform.
For example, entertaining videos and photos move the needle on Instagram and TikTok, while short educational and inspirational l texts work well on X and LinkedIn.
Even Pinterest which many women and ecommerce brands in the home and beauty niches leverage to grow their audience has video and images as its favorite content.
Consistency is another strategy that works well on social media. Your audience wants to see you show up with fresh and valuable content every day. Social media algorithms favor creators who post content consistently. That’s how many businesses go viral and generate massive engagement, which skyrockets their audience base and generates quality leads that can convert to sales.
Below is the analytics dashboard of an X creator who uses content to grow their audience, generated within 30 days.
This is a result of posting valuable content multiple times a day on X.
I know this can be a heavy task, especially if you are a beginner. But you can always start slowly and increase the frequency at which you post daily. Another option could be to hire a content creator to help you out.
I have also seen businesses use hashtags and trending topics as a strategy to grow their audience and expand their reach. This works well on Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest. When a topic is trending in your niche, you can jump on it and create content around it. Then add hashtags associated with such trending topics. This will boost the chances of your content going viral.
Think Of Cross-promotion and Integration
Social media and email marketing are two marketing channels that integrate. So cross-promotion and integration are easy.
Promote your best-performing social media content via email. Add clickable social media buttons at the end of your emails, so your email subscribers can click and follow you on social media.
Ensure these buttons are visually appealing and match your brand color scheme.
Many email marketing platforms support you in adding social media icons and even branding them to suit your marketing goals. Highlight user-generated content in your email. Those who recommend your products and services work best since your main goal of growing your audience is to have them buy what you sell.
Add a link to your email sign-up form on your social media bio. All social media platforms support this. You can even use link management tools like Linktree to add links to multiple email sign-up forms you want your social media audience to join.
You can also make posts that offer incentives to your social media audience to have them join your email list.
Let’s assume you are in the cooking niche, you can offer your Instagram audience a free cookbook if they join your email list through the signup form in your IG bio.
You can also turn your Stories into an email sign-up machine. For example, many Facebook users watch stories of brands they love and Facebook allows you to add links to your stories.
So an audience who watches your FB story on the value your email audience enjoys can click the link to the email sign up and join.
Repurpose Content
You don’t have to create new content from scratch all the time. Repurpose content that performed well into different formats and share them where they work best. Let’s assume an email you wrote to your subscribers had a high open rate, click-through rate, high engagement time, and high conversion rate. You can repurpose it into short posts for X and LinkedIn. If your email audience found it helpful, the chances of your X and LinkedIn audience engaging it is high because text content works on these platforms.
The positive feedback you get from your email audience can be repurposed into a Facebook story with a link for your FB audience to sign up for your email list after watching the story. An Instagram video that went viral can be transcribed into texts and used as a blog post on LinkedIn and X.
Also, an email campaign that performed well can be converted into a video for LinkedIn and X. All these are common ways marketers repurpose content to grow their email and social media audience.
Track Performance and Optimize
You won’t know if your efforts to grow your audience on email and social media are working or not unless you track performance. Many email marketing platforms have robust analytics dashboards that show how your audience engaged with each email campaign you launched. You will see key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, conversion rate, etc.
These are what tell you if your effort to grow your audience via email and monetize them is yielding results. It also gives you the data you need to make an informed decision on how to optimize your campaigns and boost your performance.
Social media platforms also have analytics dashboards that show you how your audience engages, comments, and shares your content.
But having used them, especially on Facebook, I can tell they aren’t robust and can’t provide all the details you need to make an informed marketing decision.
This is why I prefer social media analytics tools like Bulky, which offer advanced features that give enough insight into what is working and what isn’t.
Final Thoughts on How to Grow Your Email and Social Media Audience
High-quality content is everything when it comes to growing your audience on social media and email. Your audience will learn about you and the products you sell through your content.
That’s why I showed you how to do it on two popular marketing channels where people consume content with the aim of making purchases – email and social media.
From understanding your audience, and creating high-quality content to analyzing performance to optimize growth, you have all you need to nurture your audience, get them to love your brand, and buy products and services you sell.