The Risk Behind Building the Wrong Audience

Brian Curee

Social media marketing is a lot more complex today than it was ten years ago. It’s not about throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks. To grow your radio station’s P1 audience on digital, you need a strong community. This means engaged followers who get your mission, seek out your content, and will advocate for you in their own networks.

If you’re reading this with a sinking sensation in your gut, then you might be building the wrong audience. We’re going to review why the wrong audience can be so detrimental, and we’ll offer a few actionable tips to help you find the right social media followers. 

Your radio station deserves a passionate, engaged audience—and it’s within reach. Here’s what you need to know.

Lots of Followers ≠ Engaged Followers

Though we might not like to admit it, many in the past have made the mistake of hiring someone to grow their social media following without any strategy. Their focus is purely on increasing the number of followers. To do this, they follow a bunch of random accounts and hope some follow back. Worse, they might work with a skeezy follower farm to quickly generate a huge boost in followers that are mostly bots or fake accounts.

Moral of the story? Don’t go for a quick fix or social media growth hack to boost your follower count. Sure, the number of followers can get you in the door for advertising deals and influencer marketing. But it’s mostly a vanity metric.

It can be hard to come to terms with this one. After all, you’re probably pretty proud of your 5k Instagram followers. It shows the world that at least 5,000 people care about your radio station. Right? Wrong. The statistic that actually matters most is engagement

Who cares if thousands of fake accounts or random people follow you? These people are not your target audience. They’re not paying attention to your posts, listening to your shows, or engaging emotionally with your content. Your radio station needs actively engaged followers, even if it’s only a thousand of them. That’s something worth bragging about.

Get More Followers Hack

Type of Engagement Matters

To take it a step further, the type of engagement really matters. At a strategic level, your radio station’s marketing efforts are all about getting people to tune into the show. As a Christian radio station, your mission and message are life-changing. You want listeners to be confident in your station and to talk about it with their friends. 

If you only run contests, or get Likes only when you post funny memes, then how deeply are your followers actually engaged with your station and mission? You’ll build up the wrong audience if you only post surface-level content. People will follow you just to win stuff, or even worse- when you create a post that supports your station’s mission and message you get negative feedback. People hide your post, mark it as spam, etc. Instead, create content that will generate the type of engagement that actually grows your station. Strategic content can help your most passionate listeners become brand advocates (P1 advocates) by giving them great social media content to share.

Your Audience’s Engagement = Value of Your Brand

When it comes down to it, you can’t sell to people who won’t buy. You can’t drive advertising spend if you have a low engagement metric. The value of your station’s brand is directly correlated to your audience’s engagement levels. When you’ve got the attention of the wrong audience, it throws off your entire marketing and growth strategy. You could even be putting out excellent content, but with the wrong people seeing it, it’s just a waste of energy and genuinely awesome content that could be funneled elsewhere.

Your Audience Engagement

So Who IS the Right Audience?

Luckily, there’s a lot you can do to find the right audience so that all your time and money is flowing towards people who actually want to help your radio station reach more people for Jesus. Use SEO to find the right people. Cull through your followers to weed out the bots. Be consistent about your content and your schedule. Make sure you’re sticking to a clear strategy and that your messaging is on-mission and brand. 

You’ve got to know your audience inside and out, and then create content that serves your listeners, not just your radio station. That’s the entire equation. Know your audience, create content for them, and stick to the plan. We solve problems for businesses that need digital strategy assistance. If your marketing plan needs a power-up, reach out to Killer Bee Marketing and we can help.

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