Ep 66. Is your audience too small to sell to?

How many followers do you think you need before you can start getting clients? 1,000? 5,000? 10,000? One million? Because I’m going to let you into something. Every single one of my clients has got clients with an audience of somewhere between 50 and 3,000 people.

So if you’ve been waiting until you’re, quote-unquote, big enough to start selling, this episode’s for you. If you’re new here, hello and a very warm welcome to Quiet Confidence with myself, Anita Popat. This is a podcast for introverts who want to market their thing without changing who you are.

So today we’re talking about that little voice that says, “Once I’ve grown my audience a bit more, I’m going to start selling properly,” or, “I’m going to start posting content properly,” or whatever your version of “I’m going to start doing blank properly” is. Maybe for you it’s a number, or maybe it’s just a feeling that you’re not quite there yet. Either way, I want to show you why you don’t have to wait, and how to make the most of the people who are already in your world right now.

Before anyone messages me, I’m not saying a big audience doesn’t matter, because it absolutely does, and growing your audience is something you should be working on all the time. That’s partly why this podcast exists for me, and also why I spend time every week creating content and connecting with new people. And yes, to some extent, marketing is a numbers game. Obviously, the more of the right people who see your stuff, the more chances you’ve got of someone saying yes.

The problem is when growing becomes the thing you feel like you have to finish before you’re allowed to sell, because growth doesn’t really have a finish line, and I’ve seen it so many times. Someone says they’ll do a launch at 1,000 followers, and then they get to 1,000, and it still doesn’t feel like enough, so it becomes 2,000 and then 5,000, and there’s always another number. And when you’re waiting to feel big, the people who are already following you are sitting there, possibly ready to work with you, and might even be wondering whether you’re taking on any new clients.

[00:01:43] Why we wait to feel “big enough”

So I think it’s worth exploring why we do this for a minute, because I don’t think it’s really about the numbers at all. For a lot of us, especially as introverts, selling to a small audience can feel really exposing. If you put an offer out to a few hundred people and nobody buys, it can feel personal, like it’s a judgement on you. Whereas with a bigger audience, we kind of imagine that the sales will just happen on their own because of the sheer numbers.

But the truth is that you have to put things out there and see what happens. Every time you share your offer, you learn something, whether that’s what people respond to, what they’re confused by, or what they actually want from you. And you only get that information by trying it and putting stuff out there, whatever the size of your audience is.

[00:02:21] What actually makes the difference

To be honest, the size of your audience doesn’t really make a difference as to whether you get clients or not. What makes a difference is whether the right people are there and whether they know you can help them in the way that they would like to be helped. And having a big audience will only really help if it’s full of these kind of people.

I’ve seen so many accounts with tens of thousands of followers that barely make a sale, because a lot of those followers might have come from a viral post about something completely unrelated to what they do, or they might have jumped on a trend. And I’m sure they’re lovely people, but they were never going to buy into that person’s offer because they didn’t follow them for that in the first place.

And then I’ve seen accounts with a few hundred followers that are fully booked, because those few hundred people are exactly the people that the business owner helps, and they follow because they see themselves in the content. They feel understood, and somewhere in the back of their mind they’re thinking, “I’m going to work with her at some point.” So honestly, I’d take 300 of the right people over 10,000 random ones any day of the week.

[00:03:10] Small audiences are the norm in my world

I know it’s really easy to nod along to this and still not quite believe that it applies to you, especially when you’re seeing all these massive numbers online. So when I look back, my first business was making personalised wooden gifts and hand-lettered prints, and that literally started by me posting some handmade gifts for my friends who were having babies on my personal Facebook.

I wasn’t trying to build an audience at all. It was just friends, and then friends of friends. They recommended me to their network, and then it eventually grew into people I didn’t know from social media. And over the years, that turned into a whole product range and thousands of loyal customers, all from what started as a really small circle of people who knew and trusted me.

And it’s the same with my clients now. All of them had a relatively small audience when we started working together, including myself. And we still get clients from those audiences, because not one of us has waited until we’ve got a huge following. We’re just being really clear on who we’re talking to and actually having real conversations with those people. So getting clients from a, quote-unquote, small audience isn’t an exception in my world, it’s actually the norm.

I’ve said this before, but well over 90% of my own clients have never liked or commented on a single post before they got in touch, but they were quietly there reading everything, taking it all in. So if you’re looking at your numbers and thinking, “Yeah, but I’ve got a small audience and I’m posting content, but no one’s taking any action or paying any attention,” I promise you more people are watching than you think, so keep going.

[00:04:27] Why introverts have an advantage

I really think that introverts have an advantage when it comes to a smaller audience, because it plays to everything we’re naturally good at. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a proper in-depth conversation with one person than make small talk with 50 of them. And also, we notice the little things. We’re going to remember what someone told us three weeks ago and ask them how it went later on, and that’s exactly what makes people in a smaller audience feel seen and looked after.

And it’s also what turns someone from a quiet follower into a client who trusts you completely, and that kind of connection is so much harder to keep up when you’ve got hundreds and thousands of people to look after. So I’d really encourage you to make the most of it while you’ve got it, because it’s actually one of the nicest parts of building a business this way.

[00:05:06] How to make the most of who’s already there

So how can you make the most of who’s already in your audience right now?

[00:05:09] 1. Have an honest look at who’s there

The first thing is to have an honest look at who’s actually there. Scroll through your followers or your connections and ask yourself how many of them are the kind of person you’d absolutely love to work with. You might be pleasantly surprised, or you might realise you’ve been growing in a slightly different direction to where you want to go, which is still really useful to know, because then you can do something about it.

[00:05:28] 2. Actually talk to them

The second thing to do is to actually talk to the people in your audience. And I don’t mean in a salesy, “Have you got five minutes to hop on a call?” kind of way. Just little things, like when someone new follows you, send them a little message to say, “Thanks for following. I hope you like it here.” Reply to people when they reply to your stories. Go and comment on their posts too, because they’re making an effort to comment on yours. And it’s these tiny everyday conversations and interactions where so much of the trust gets built. And as introverts, those one-to-one moments are where we really shine.

[00:05:55] 3. Invite them into your world

And the third thing is to actually invite them into your world. This is the one that people skip the most. So if you never mention what you offer, or you mention it once every three months in a slightly apologetic way and then quickly post something else, people genuinely won’t realise that they can work with you, and people can’t buy something that they don’t know exists. So talk about what it is that you do, who it’s for and how they can get started regularly, and you don’t need to make a big song and dance about it.

[00:06:20] Keep growing, with intention

Then alongside all of that, keep growing your audience, but with intention. When you’re out there connecting with new people, go looking for more of the right ones, so you’re growing towards your dream clients rather than towards a number on a screen. And if you want more on how to actually do that, then go back and have a listen to episode 29, where I talk about how introverts can proactively build their audience. I’ll pop a link to that in the show notes.

[00:06:40] The one thing to take away

So if there’s one thing that I would love for you to take away from today, it’s that you can grow an audience and sell at the same time. One doesn’t have to wait for the other. The people who are going to buy from you in the next few months are probably already following you right now. They’re just waiting for you to start talking to them and let them know that you’re open for business.

So this week, I’d love for you to pick a handful of people who are already in your audience, the ones who feel like your kind of person, and just start a real conversation with them if you haven’t already.

And obviously, if you’d like some help on getting really clear on who those right people are and building an audience that’s full of them, that’s a big, big part of what we do inside my signature programme, Silent Storm. You can find more information about that in the show notes as well.

Until then, keep showing up with your quiet confidence so you can make a loud impact, and I shall speak to you soon.