How to find your audience and make them love you

Welcome to this week’s issue of Write Like You Mean It.✊ 

Here are three things you’ll learn:

1. Where to find people online who share your values

2. A technique that will make your readers love you

3. What to do once you have people’s attention

Building trust with your words is the best way to attract and keep a loyal audience.

Most people spend way too much time on bells-and-whistles websites, expensive CRMs and Facebook ads.

While these things can surely help, you don’t need all that. (That’s right, you don’t even need Facebook ads.)

You need to:

1. Find out where people who share your values hang out

2. Choose the right words and a compelling story

3. Create a seamless journey to bring people to you

1. Find out where your supporters are online

Instead of waiting for loyal supporters and advocates of your cause to spontaneously start sharing your content and taking action every time you ask them to, go seek them out.

Where do you supporters hang out online? To answer this, you need to know who your ideal supporter is.

Creating super specific personas has always felt like a bad use of my time (contrary to popular advice). But of course you must know something (if not everything) about who you’re trying to reach.

Who are your supporters now? Who do you want them to be? How old are they? What are their interests? What keeps them up at night? How can you keep them awake? All of that.

Then narrow down your channels based on these factors. Older audience? Facebook groups. Business geeks? LinkedIn. Young and hip? TikTok. Simplified, but you get the idea.

Once you know where your people are, go to them. Consistently.

2. Choose the right words and a compelling story

This is key. Place the right words in front of the right people and half your battle is won. You might be thinking: What’s my story? What’s my cause’s tagline, mission, values? That’s all good stuff.

But again, what’s your story?

If you don’t have a story already consider:

• What’s your origin story?

• Why does your cause exist?

• Who / what does it benefit?

Once you’ve got the basis of your story, write from your heart. Write with emotion and your readers will react with emotion.

Weave those supporter-focused, channel-specific heartfelt words into your content plan.

Don’t force it down people’s necks. You know, be cool.

But when you have specific stories about how your cause has helped the world be a better place, share the hell out of them.

Heck, go out and find those stories. The world needs to hear them. Especially now.

Fill those stories with humanness, with highs and lows, pain and fear — and joy, love and triumph too.

(As you might have gathered, I love, love, love stories, and you’ll be hearing a lot more about using this technique to build your audience and make an impact in future issues of this newsletter.)

3. Create a seamless journey to bring people to you

Now you’ve built trust and rapport, it’s time to bring your newfound friends home. Thanks Zuckerberg, cheers Musk, all the best. . . uh, whoever owns LinkedIn.

Gently lead your new shiny friends away from these platforms. You need to invite them over — and, well, sort of ask them to move in.

This is the part where you invite people to join your email newsletter, and — when you’ve built enough trust — eventually ask people to donate / volunteer / sign a petition / do something.

Once you have people’s trust, don’t blow it. Keep engaging, keep telling them the stories they want to hear.