15 Reasons You Can’t Find Your Audience With Your Videos for Female Entrepreneurs
Creating that all-important connection with your audience of ideal clients is your number one priority, but how can you do that if nobody is watching your videos? There can be nothing worse than feeling like you’re posting to crickets, but in this post, I’ll go through some of the mistakes you might be making and the simple things you can do to turn things around.
NOTE: ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL
Before I dive in, you must know that it might take a bit of trial and error to find your ideal clients and create that connection.
Also, one approach won’t fit everyone and every audience.
It’s not a case of A+B=C all the time.
There are conflicting strategies within this article and therefore options that will be totally opposite to each other.
It’s up to you to choose and experiment with what is right for you and your audience.
Mindset
I know you’re sick of reading about mindset in entrepreneurial circles, but it really does make such a difference.
Remember, like the law of attraction, what you focus on you get more of, so if you only see what is going wrong, that is all you will see and it will affect the delivery of your content.
People will shy away from the negativity that will underline what you create. And that is definitely the opposite of what you want.
You need to celebrate every small win (because they will get bigger as you go along).
2. The Patrick Stewart Approach
I know, what could Patrick Stewart have to do with content? Well bear with me here, because this is a really inspiring story.
Have you been thinking things like ‘Wow, I did a Facebook Live and only 5 people showed up’. Well, this is the most dangerous of things to think and let me tell you a story to demonstrate.
This was told to me by one of my old bosses.
You may or may not know Patrick Stewart, a fairly well known actor for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men (plus loads of other stuff).
My former boss attended one of his stage plays, I want to say Richard III but I can’t quite remember. The show in question was a Matinee and only 5 people showed up.
Now Patrick could have thrown a tantrum and said ‘Well there’s only 5 people here’ so I’m not going to perform.
He could have given everyone their money back and walked off stage, headed for the nearest bar to drown his sorrows.
Here’s the awesome thing he did instead.
He invited the 5 people on stage, got them five chairs and everyone sat around in a circle. Then he gave a reading of the play and chatted and answered questions etc.
In short, he gave those people an even better experience than if they’d just been part of a huge audience watching a play.
And what do you think those five people did? You can bet they told everyone they knew about the experience, in glowing tones no doubt, too.
This is such a huge metaphor for business. Those five people, if you serve them well, could be your greatest advocates. You never know who they know. One of those people could have Bill Gates as a best friend who might hear about you and want to do business.
Better yet, those five people might tell five people and those people tell some people and more people hear about you.
Heck one of those people might hire you on the spot, as happened to me with my first Facebook live.
If you catch yourself thinking, ‘Only X people showed up’ then turn it around straight away. Cherish those five people, celebrate them and look after them better than you could if they were part of a larger audience.
3. Consistency is Key… or Is It?
Depending on what you’ve read you might find people touting this trite line: ‘Consistency is Key’ and then proceed to sermonise on picking a schedule and sticking to it.
Well I’m about to say something about what I’ve learned that will be far more realistic.
It depends on where you are in your business, your experience in your industry and who you are.
There are two or even three different options open to you here.
One is the creating a content schedule, sticking to it and having the content creation be a permanent arm of you business, continually working away. But you are also partly a slave to it, and it takes time away from your business.
Another approach is to create a few really high quality, key pieces of content which you can continually re-promote to draw in new business. This is the kind of content that answers your ideal clients’ biggest questions or pain points.
This second option means maybe only 6 really high-quality videos or articles that you advertise.
The third option ties into when you have a specific product or service to launch. You create a few key pieces of content that relate to your product and also solve a pain point. These pieces of content, attract and prime your audience before you announce the big product they can sign up for and / or purchase.
The difference between the three options
If you’re at the beginning of your business and you’re not entirely sure of what you are doing and who you are talking to, the first option is great. It builds an audience, you learn a lot but you aren’t necessarily offering anything for sale, or you are doing it much later in the process. It is also a great way to build authority and make you feel more confident in what you are doing.
The second option means you aren’t a slave to your content creation. It works well if you really know your audience and have money to plug into re-advertising content and working out an entire sales funnel process etc.
The third option is great but again relies on you knowing your audience, having a product that they want and at a price point they will gladly pay.
If you have a base audience built up you can survey them and talk to them to find out about the product and pricing.
It all depends on you, your time, and your audience as to which one might work. Or you can do them in combination.
I’ll say this right now. You don’t have to create a weekly content schedule and stick to it in order to build a business.
4 – 7. Words, People, Place, Time | Have you got it Right?
So if you’re struggling to find a connection between your content and your ideal clients. One or more of the following things could be wrong.
Are you talking in the language of your ideal client? Do you use words they understand. Are you using too much industry jargon, or not enough?
More than that, are you talking about what they are searching for? One of the biggest problems as business owners is that we are quite knowledgeable in our field. It can be really hard to remember what it is like to not know what we know. So if we google answers we know exactly what to put in the search bar, but our customers might not know. They might call things the wrong names. They might search for symptoms of a problem where we know the real cause and are wondering why people aren’t searching for it.
Is your content getting in front of the people who need it? Are you posting on the right social media platforms? If you are boosting posts is your targeting correct?
Are you posting at the right time of day. If you are targeting Mum’s perhaps posting while they are out picking up the kids from school might not be the best time of day (unless they are checking their phones while in their car, clearly I don’t target mum’s but you get the idea).
To work out which of these aren’t working, you need to start talking to people to find out. It can be hard if you don’t have an established audience, but it is well worth it.
Also, make a note of the language they use, so you can use it when creating content, and create a bigger connection.
8. Is your content search-friendly?
The other way to make sure your videos and other content gets in front of your ideal clients is to make sure it is search friendly.
Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world, following only google. In fact, it is owned by Google. When you search in google, youtube results do come up.
Both options require the use of keywords in your content in order for people to find your content. This means you need to know what your ideal clients are searching for and create content to help them.
To learn more about how to do this, register your interest in my upcoming free training course ‘Making Your Content Search Friendly For Video‘, which will walk you through the basics of researching your clients with a Google search and tube buddy.
Just because you are creating videos, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also have an accompanying blog post to make the most use of both search engines.
9. - 11. Guest Posting, Interviews and Content Partnerships
The other way to find your audience is to guest post on related blogs or create a content partnership with someone who has a similar audience.
For example, if you’re a business coach you might want to get featured in a business blog. You could create content that helps readers with a particular pain point and pitch it to the blog.
You might also do a content collaboration with someone who has a similar audience. Again, using the business coach example, you might find a lifestyle vlogger who crosses over with your audience but isn’t business-specific. You could each create content and cross-promote each other’s content.
Another way to do this is to interview people, which can also help grow your audience, as your guests share the show with their followers.
Being a guest on other people’s podcasts is another great way to grow your audience, just make sure you have something to offer the audience so they come and sign up to you.
12. Are you talking to everyone?
Very often, business owners can be too scared to be specific in who they want as an ideal client. This affects their content in a big way.
If you’re talking to everyone, then you are talking to noone.
What I mean by this, is if you are being too general, then your readers won’t connect. They won’t realise the help you are giving is for them. They’ll move on and won’t look for your content.
For example, when I first wrote this post, it was a very general article on how to find an audience. It didn’t have any specific language or advice for business owners. It wasn’t specifically targeted at content creators either. Nobody would have read it.
I had to really consider ‘who is my audience?’, what do they need and then I re-wrote the post entirely from scratch.
You might have noticed I have mentioned business owners specifically. I have even used examples for business coaches since they are the people I really want to work with.
13. Production Issues
Now, you will notice that nowhere here have I said you need better equipment or production quality in order to find an audience with your videos.
Content is the make or break of this endeavour.
With one notable exception: your audio quality.
People can put up with bad visuals, bad audio quality will make people click away immediately. Is it too loud, too soft, or not clear enough?
Get some people to check.
14. Is your content entertaining / informative?
Now this is something that shouldn’t distract you. What I mean by that is, don’t let this point cause you to fall into analysis paralysis or worse, the perfectionism trap.
Creating engaging content comes with time and practice. If you are putting up your videos on YouTube and you have their statistics to help you, you can learn where people stop watching.
Sometimes, it could be worth having someone view your video who can tell you when they get bored or lose track of what you are saying.
It is the curse of the novice in video to be wordy and repetitive. Make sure when you are editing that you are deleting repetition and making things as easy to follow as possible.
This is something that will come with time and practice. Make sure you keep putting content out there, even if it isn’t perfect, but make notes to improve for the future.
Take some time to watch other people’s content. Note when you get bored, or things that you like.
Consider the use of B-roll or additional footage to make things more interesting. A good rule of thumb can be to have a cut every three seconds to keep things interesting. Although, there are still plenty of videos with one person talking to camera for a whole ten minutes.
15. Can People See Your Personality?
Making sure that your personality shines through is the biggest thing you can do to connect with your ideal clients.
Your audience needs to see that you are a real person with vulnerabilities just like them. This will allow them to connect with you and starts the ‘Know, like, trust, buy’ cycle.
Again, be prepared for your first few videos not to have this shining through. Depending on who you are this will take time. If you’re struggling, take a look at my tips on how to gain confidence in front of the camera, the biggest one being talk to the camera like it’s a person.
Remember, it’s okay if some people don’t like you. The people who do, will love you, for being real and approachable.
As I said before
Now I’ve touched on a wealth of options that might be preventing you from connecting with your ideal client.
It will take some trial and error. The best place to start is to talk to your ideal clients and get their feedback about your content and their struggles.
If you want some help and support on how to do all of the above then check out my 1 on 1 coaching packages.
Yes, there were a lot of options in this post. Don’t get yourself down though. This takes time for everyone. Don’t give up. Keep trying things. Keep moving forward. Keep taking action.
Send me a DM over on Instagram and let’s see if I can help!
