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Become great at audience building

Grow lasting brand affinity by building an audience beyond your existing customer base.

By Phil Nottingham,

Founder @ Nott Media

Course length: 1h 55min

Sign up now Buy just this program for $299

English subtitles Certificate included

Some of the companies that train their teams at CXL:

Competitive advantage in brand marketing is all about building an audience with high levels of brand affinity. If you have a community of superfans, launching products, running ads, outreach and customer acquisition all become much easier.

This course will teach you how to identify the right audience, and then give you all the information you need to go out there and craft a technical and creative strategy that cements your brand as their home on the internet.

What you will learn in this course

  • Learn to identify a valuable target audience using research methodologies.
  • Develop create a content strategy that will connect your brand to the target audience.
  • Craft a process for publishing and measuring content that builds your audience.
  • Implement techniques for turning returning visitors into regular visitors.

After taking this course you’ll…

  • Understand the value of audience building, and its conceptual distinction from customer acquisition.
  • Evaluate and Identify options for a valuable target audience that you can associate with your brand.
  • Develop an effective multimedia content strategy with which to attract and engage your target audience.
  • Plan a realistic approach to creating and publishing content based on budgets, available talent, and time.
  • Employ systems and methodologies for testing and measuring your Audience Building efforts.

Skills you will master

Audience buildingContent MarketingCommunity buildingCustomer base studiesSocial media marketingPositioning

Phil Nottingham

Founder @ Nott Media

Phil Nottingham is the CEO and Founder of Nott Media, the video marketing agency for B2B businesses. A strategist who specializes in media transformation, Phil regularly speaks around the world about video strategy, brand marketing and search engine optimisation.

He has consulted on brand and video strategy for both large and small brands including Red Bull, Wistia, Yoast, SparkToro, The Financial Times and Lidl.

Your course curriculum

Audience building

1 Why should you care about building an Audience?

A summary of the contextual importance of building an audience for brand marketing, and the difference between audience building and customer acquisition.

Topics covered:

  • The flaws with conventional approaches to brand marketing and why audience building can offer competitive advantage as a brand marketing strategy.
  • The difference between audience building and customer acquisition, and how they need to be considered as complementary but distinct marketing disciplines.
  • how audience building needs to be measured differently to performance marketing, and how bad measurement can create bad strategy.

2 How to find a community or interest group to target

A breakdown of the effective approaches to finding a brand audience, with B2B and B2C examples.

Topics covered:

  • What makes a good brand audience distinct from a product audience, and why these two concepts need to be differentiated in your marketing.
  • The options for where to build an audience, and the pros and cons of using your own website vs social media channels, including why your own website is the best choice for most businesses.
  • How to use SparkToro and Reddit to find insights about a potential audience and why these insights can indicate a promising opportunity

3 How to Define an Audience Value Proposition

A summary of the principles behind creating a focus for your audience building, including the importance of championing a particular cause or idea. How to construct an audience positioning statement which guides your audience building work

Topics covered:

  • What a brand needs to stand for in audience building, and how this is distinct from a product value proposition.
  • The pitfalls with being too abstract or vague with audience positioning and why failing to be specific at the early stage can lead to poor creative execution.
  • How to construct and refine an audience positioning statement, which ties together your chosen audience and your brand with a mission.

4 How to Develop a Content Strategy for Audience Building

A breakdown of audience building principles applied to different media types, and how this execution can be applied across different marketing channels.

Topics covered:

  • Understand the concept of "hub and spoke" approaches to marketing channels, and how to apply this idea to consolidate a disperse audience onto a single platform.
  • Understand what sort of length and depth of content works best to build an audience, and why this necessitates rethinking traditional approaches to blogging, email and video creation.
  • How to develop a tone of voice for audience building and why speaking with the language of your audience helps build trust and rapport.

5 How to Create and Publish Content for Audience Building

Tips and structures for creating and distributing the content required for audience building, looking at publishing, quality, curation and finding creative partners.

Topics covered:

  • The options for publishing content for audience building and why certain cadences are appropriate for certain types of creative execution.
  • The importance of a high quality threshold with audience building content compared to other content marketing, and why fewer high-quality pieces will always outperform more numerous lower quality ones.
  • How to find talent to collaborate with in creating and distributing content, and why finding out who influences your audience is incredibly valuable to make better decisions around promotion.

6 How to Nurture Your Brand Audience using CRM techniques

Applying growth marketing principles to brand marketing, using email, gated content, and advertising to drive audience engagement.

Topics covered:

  • How to implement lead scoring based on audience engagement triggers, and why tracking "fan" levels, parallel to "lead" scoring allows for a more personal approach to brand marketing.
  • How to use social media advertising to build an audience, and why adopting the marketing strategy of a media company works well for audience building.
  • Why growth marketing strategies, applied to brand marketing, represent the most effective and measurable ways to build an audience.

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Learn Audience Building: FAQ

What will you learn in this course?

After taking this course, you will:

  • Understand the value of audience building, and its conceptual distinction from customer acquisition.
  • Evaluate and Identify options for a valuable target audience that you can associate with your brand.
  • Develop an effective multimedia content strategy with which to attract and engage your target audience.
  • Plan a realistic approach to creating and publishing content based on budgets, available talent, and time.
  • Employ systems and methodologies for testing and measuring your Audience Building efforts.

What does the course include?

Our Audience Building training includes 6 lessons, 10 downloadable resources, 1h 55min of video material, several assignments, and a final exam.

Are subtitles available for the lessons?

Lessons have English subtitles and transcriptions available.

Will I receive a certificate of completion?

After taking this course, you will receive the Audience Building Certification from CXL, with credentials that you can add to your LinkedIn profile.

What is the refund policy?

All plans come with a 7-day refund period .

How long will it take for me to finish it?

This is entirely up to you – it’s how many study hours per week you can put in. This course is 1h 55min long.