The Warm-Up: Why this needs to be your top marketing priority

What’s your number one priority when it comes to your marketing strategy right now? So, building your warm audience with your ideal customer and clients, and showing up to deliver them value: if that doesn’t feature in your top priority list, then we need to talk. And today I’m going to share the reasons why you need to be building and maintaining your warm audience.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen from the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is to challenge both you and I to look at our marketing strategies, by sharing new thoughts and ideas to move away from random acts of marketing, and start to help build you a more long-term marketing strategy.

And today’s focus is on consistently thinking and building on your warm audience. It is just so important in today’s marketing that we are always thinking about that audience of customers who we’re slightly warming up, that we’re getting closer to the point of sale. So that actually leads nicely into the start of this podcast, which is having a look at what a warm audience is, because then you might get a better understanding of why I think it’s so important, and why you need to be looking at it.

So a warm audience is obviously a group of people who have already shown some kind of level of interest in your brand, your product or your service or anything like that. They may have interacted with your website or your social media pages. They may have subscribed to your email list. They could have made a purchase from you in the past. All of those people, they’re all considered warm, because they’re familiar with your brand, and they’re more likely to actually engage with your marketing messages more than what a cold audience would. So obviously a cold audience is people who have no idea that your brand exists, and they don’t know anything about your product or service, or what you sell, and some of the problems that you solve.

So this is why today we’re focusing on that warm audience, because with a warm audience, you’ve already done all that hard work of actually attracting them to your brand. You’ve caught their curiosity in what you actually have to offer. And really, building a warm audience, and that definition, really is Marketing 101, and you should kind of know that. But the problem that we face as marketers and as entrepreneurs and as business leaders is that sometimes that can get really lost, because we’re so focused on all the other parts of marketing that are just as important, which is obviously getting our brand seen, and obviously focusing on revenue and actually building our business with revenue.

But in saying that, warm audiences, they are incredibly important to any marketing strategy, because what they actually do is they represent that high-value group of potential customers. And since they’ve already shown some level of interest in your brand, they’re also more likely to be more receptive to more of your marketing content, with the aim of actually converting them into paid customers at the end of the day.

Now, if you like numbers, like I do, love numbers, warm audiences tend to have high conversion rates as well. They’ll also tend to have lower acquisition costs compared to our cold audiences, because with cold audiences, we’re going out looking for our people, looking for our target audience. But the warm people, they’re the ones that know us more, and they tend to convert higher, because you’ve been able to warm them up over time. And this is so important. And this is why it is so important to build your warm audience, but also to focus your marketing efforts toward them as well. So it’s not just around building the audience, but how can we actually nurture that audience at the end of the day as well.

So you can take this from even some manual standpoints, and just manually check to see how your warm audiences are. Has your email list grown lately? Do you have an email list? And if not, you should start. Has the email list shrunk? Have your Instagram stories, have the views increased over the month? Have your LinkedIn videos that you’ve been posting, have they been watched for longer? Are they getting in front of more people? You’d be looking at your engagement stats. Are they rising? Your reach, is that rising? This is all examples of how you can monitor and build your warm audience, and monitoring who is actually helping you grow that warm audience as well.

Because it is really important, just so that we can not only remarket to those people with new content, but also, as marketers, it actually gives us a fantastic indication on so many other things. It actually helps us determine: is the content that we’re sharing at the moment, is it actually working? Did that campaign actually work? Was it getting in front of our right audience? Are people actually paying attention? Is more trust even being built around my brand at the moment?

It’s building that relationship. We’re going to be thinking around that building relationship, and taking them from that first cold stage, that curiosity stage, which is how they found you in the first place, and taking them through to potentially actually turning them into a sale. So what I implore you to do is think about how your strategy and your marketing goals are actually supporting this. You should be showing up with messaging and content and campaigns that are targeted towards that key audience. And this should really be the top priority in your business, with the marketing strategy and with your overall strategy as well.

But in saying all of this, I also get that it’s really overwhelming, if we really think about how much we all have going on as marketing teams, as entrepreneurs, as business owners. Because we’ve got so much going on, so much to think about: running our teams, running our businesses, thinking about sale, profit and loss, thinking around staffing, thinking around our product, executing that product, and actually delivering it to our clients. It can be really overwhelming, obviously.

I’m taking it back even to when I first started Done By Nine. So this is going back March 2020, so you can tell by the date that this was around COVID time. Literally, I started Done By Nine a few weeks before the COVID lockdown, which was fantastic timing, wasn’t it? So at the time, what I did was I used some existing networks and built some new networks over that time. And I was actually able to get in front of new cold audiences. At the time, that was on webinars, and going on to other people’s webinars as guests. And I was actually being able to be seen to a new cold audience, that then started to interact with my content and start to work into my warm audience.

So then I was able to build out videos. I used to do videos and interviews and emails and an email list. I even started with an email sequence so that we could get people warmed up. And that’s how we really built the foundations of our business at the time, looking for the small business owner. But in saying that, that was a lot of work. And it can be really overwhelming, because also at the same time, we’re also dealing with COVID, dealing with the whole family at home, as we all were, dealing with growing a business from home. And a lot of business owners were trying to, at that time, adjust their strategies and adjust how they were actually delivering content. So it can be really overwhelming.

However, at the time, what I was able to do was really just take a step back, and even just start by setting some small achievable goals. And then over time, just growing that warm audience, you will start to see small results over time, especially as you start to build out those warm audiences, and start to be seen more, and start to offer more value to that audience as well. I think you just need to remind yourself that this is a long game. You and I, we’re not building a business or a marketing strategy for small wins. What we’re doing is we’re building a business and building a marketing strategy for the long game, for the long term as well.

So the other question that we get asked a lot is, if you take all of this advice and you’re starting to get new content out, with the aim of growing that warm audience and the aim of actually nurturing that, what happens if you take all that advice and you actually don’t see the growth? Well, as marketers, what it means is that you clearly need to make some changes. There’s a few things that you need to start asking yourself. And this is some questions that you should be asking yourself now, if you have been trying to build your warm audience lately and it’s just not growing that momentum that you want.

You’ve got to ask yourself these questions: are you even showing up to your audience enough? The other question is, is your content not targeted enough to your target audience? As your target audience, they’re literally still sitting there. They don’t know anything about you, because you’re not actually targeting your content towards them. Or when they do see one of your videos or content or blogs or whatever that you have that you’re promoting, it’s just not talking to them, because you haven’t quite identified who that target customer is. Are you trying to be everything to everyone, essentially? So your message just simply isn’t sticking. So those are some questions that you can actually ask.

But then what I honestly think that you also need to be doing is actually committing to going hard and building that audience consistently. Try it even for three to six months, and you will start to see some effects from that long-term strategy.

Another example from my side: I work with Luke and Phil from Next Advisory. They’re based up in Auckland in New Zealand. They run a great podcast called The What’s Next Podcast. And what they spoke about on there, and have spoken to me about as well, is just thinking about what we do six months ago. What we are actually doing there is actually impacting our sales today and our revenue today.

We don’t want to be in a position where our back is against the wall, and we’re desperate for sales, and we’re willing to compromise our brand identity or our brand voice just to be able to get revenue across the line or to get cash flow moving. So what we need to do now is we need to actually act like your back’s against the wall today, and start building that audience out now. Because again, it does take time. We’re not in this for the short wins. We’re in this for the long. We’re looking for ideal clients that really are going to become a fantastic client or a fantastic customer for you in the long run.

So what you’re doing now is going to impact your business six months into the future. So that’s just one of those things that you need to think about, with the consistency of going really hard for the next three to six months, and really start to build that up, and building that consistency, and trying to do that over and over as well.

And that really does even come to me now. What I was doing six months ago is impacting my sales today. And that’s one thing that I try and constantly remind myself. What was I doing at that time? Am I going through a good stage of growth right now? What was it that was kind of bringing that? And then I also ask my customers as well, so that we get a really good understanding about what was working. What was the content that resonated? When did you first hear about us? How long have you been in our warm audience for? So we can really get an understanding of that.

And as soon as you realise that in your business, as soon as you figure out what that average amount of time it takes for someone to actually buy when they’re on that warm audience, then the better you can actually create and flesh out that marketing strategy, and redefine it, and re-scope it, re-look at it, which is what I implore you to be doing on a constant basis: having a look to make sure those goals and those KPIs are actually still relevant today, and you’re not just going for some fake number that isn’t actually going to achieve anything for your business.

Now, the other thing with a warm audience that can be so beneficial, especially, I’m just going to pivot a little bit to talk about e-commerce as this example. In the e-commerce space, essentially what you’re doing with a warm audience is you are building that list of super fans. And those super fans are really important, because they’re the ones that know you, they love you, and they buy your product. So if you are needing a boost in cash flow, or let’s say you’re in food and beverage.

Now, I was actually having this conversation with a client last week. Based in Australia, they’re in the food and beverage industry. And what she was talking about was making sure that we had goals in mind to keep building up that warm audience. I was trying to get across to her that we need to build up that warm audience, because obviously in the food and beverage industry, they have best before dates to work with. So let’s say they had a whole lot of product that they need to ship out sooner rather than later. If they have a really solid warm audience of their super fans, the people that are ready to buy, especially if a deal like that is coming in front of them, then it’s going to ensure that they can get rid of that product much easier and much faster. And again, this is where your warm audience is going to become so gold.

Another example of this is thinking around sale periods, whether you run big sales in your business. Let’s say Black Friday. That’s typically a big sale period day, or Boxing Day. Consistently, if we have a look at our e-commerce clients that we work with, their warm audiences are the ones that are buying on those big sale periods: the people that know the brand, trust the brand, and they’re just ready to go and buy, because they’ve done all the research, ready to go. They just want that product at that really good price. And we find that during those sale periods, the warm audiences are the cash cows. Those are the ones that are actually making the big sales.

So it gives you that incentive now to be thinking about all those sale periods, even Black Friday at the end of the year, and start thinking how can we build up that warm audience over the course of the year, so that when those sale periods hit, we have got the audience ready to go, and they are ready to buy.

So the next question we need to think about is how you’re actually going to build out these audiences in the first place. And that’s where going right back to your marketing strategy comes in, because you need to have this detailed along with all your different goals, or you’re simply going to come off track. And again, I know this becomes quite overwhelming, but this is why the importance of having a strategy is so important in businesses and with digital marketing. Otherwise, you get stuck by shiny object syndrome. I always get caught by it. I always see the newest, latest product and get sucked into it. And essentially, that’s one of my things that I try and work through. And having a marketing strategy for our business makes sure that I don’t get sucked into shiny object syndrome, and I don’t get off track.

But what you need to be thinking about is your marketing strategy, and building out these different audiences, building out your warm audience. It needs to be built around things like your content marketing: building a warm audience based on creating valuable content, such as blog posts, videos, that provide your target audience with the information that they’re actually going to be interested in. Using your social media and the platforms to engage with your target audience: this is where you share that valuable content, where you build those relationships.

Thinking around your email marketing. Think around how you’re actually building an email list by offering something of value in exchange for someone’s email address, like a lead magnet. But then going further, and then using email marketing to nurture your subscribers by providing them with those regular updates as well.

Thinking around referral marketing is a great way of building out this warm audience: encouraging your existing customers to actually refer their friends and family to your brand. I’ve got an e-commerce brand right now that we’re working through. We made a few tweaks to her referral programme that she’s using at the moment, and her marketing plan. And it’s not only helping her grow her reach, but also revenue at the end of the day as well. She’s getting some really good quick wins in there.

Then if we think about webinars and events, this is how I kicked off, using events and being a guest on other people’s webinars. Hosting webinars yourself as well, providing value again to that target audience, building relationships with them. Over time, it’s going to establish your brand really as that authority in the industry, and encourage people to actually engage with your brand on that deeper level as well.

Then over time, what you’ll start to see is that you’ll start to find what platforms, what type of content is actually resonating with your people, with your audience. You’ll then learn, you’ll then adapt, and then you can react to that as well. Because your strategy should be reacting. As soon as you find some key content is working better than others, then I honestly think you need to be starting to think about how you can do that more consistently. Let’s say even once a week, with value-based content across that medium. Let’s say it’s videos on LinkedIn, or videos on Facebook, or Instagram stories, and you’re finding some great reach on there. Go all in, and try and be consistent on that platform with that type of content that’s actually working to that audience as well.

And it all comes back to our goals. Having that strategy laid out, so that you’ve got that really clear. The goal of visibility, brand awareness, maybe lead generation, which then creates that curiosity and gets them into that warm audience. And not only you as the business owner or the marketing team, but the other people around you need to understand those goals as well, and understand how a warm audience is going to help build the business over the long run as well.

And I think that you just need to have a think about asking yourself some of those hard questions. Even today, when was the last time you came up with a new video or a new blog post for your service-based business? When was the last time that you personally posted on LinkedIn, or your brand posted on LinkedIn? Maybe it’s time that you need to come up with new ideas that you can leverage and then use to attract more people to your business.

And then think about what you’re actually doing to nurture that warm audience as well. Once you grow that email list, go that step further. Are you then emailing them maybe once a week with something of value? Are you sending your videos out to your warm audience? Are they aware that you’ve got new videos out? Are you connecting with those people? How are you actually going to connect with those people as well?

Consider treating that warm audience like they are real people. They are real people. But sometimes, obviously, when we see them on a CRM, we forget that they are a real person. So instead of thinking of them as a number on a CRM platform, or a number on a spreadsheet, or a number on a piece of data that only hears about you when you have a sale or offer, try and consider thinking of them as a person as well. You wouldn’t treat an in-person relationship or a friendship the same way that you potentially look at a number on a spreadsheet.

So I want you to be honest. Have a look at your marketing strategy, your marketing goals, and determine whether building that warm audience is near the top of the list. And if not, it needs to be. It needs to be near the top, if not the top, of the list of building up that audience. Because a warm audience, it may not bring immediate sales back right now, but after you work this out and get consistency, you’ll start to actually make that investment back, if your content is focused on your target audience at that real moment as well.

So I do implore you to have a real big think about that. Look, I’ve spoken about this on other podcasts as well, with not only just purely focusing on your immediate return on ad spend, but actually looking at the entire omni-channel, thinking about more the macro instead of the micro, not just looking at small pieces of data, but having a look at how your marketing is performing across different platforms. Also, we had a podcast recently around how we build our warm audiences and nurture our warm audiences using content on a value-based customer CRM, and a customer CRM structure. So if you do want to dive deep into these topics, please go back a few episodes into our podcast, and you’ll be able to see how you can actually start to build and nurture these warm audiences.

If you can keep this consistent over the next three to six months, you will start to see that investment come back, and you will start to see some fantastic growth within your business as well.

And look, I just want to finish today’s podcast just on a real quick personal note. I said that with this podcast, I wanted to make sure that we got in with the actionable content that you could take away from it. But just a quick personal note at the end: I’ve been getting a lot of messages regarding this little podcast that we’ve set up, which was a bit of a passion project for me on the side of my business, saying just how much value that people have been able to get out of it. So a big thank you. And also, I’ve even noticed people sharing it on their social medias and stuff, which is fantastic. So I really do appreciate it. So if you have listened, if you followed, if you’ve rated this podcast, thank you so much.

This was a bit of a passion project. I’ve been working in radio broadcasting, very long time ago, started radio broadcasting about 20 years ago. And this is a completely different style of broadcasting to what this podcast is about. This was on morning breakfast radio, where we used to have to do all the funny stunts and things like that to entertain people as driving to work in the day. But it’s been great to be able to take some of what I’ve learned back in the broadcasting days, and be able to put it into this podcast, to be able to share some new marketing tips, and hopefully some value to you as well, to help you grow your business as well.

But I do hope that today’s episode has given you a little bit of value. And I hope that it is going to help you start to move away from those random acts of marketing that we talk about, and get you thinking more about your long-term marketing strategy as well. Now, if you need any help with your strategy, obviously, donebynine.com. That is the business that I run, and we focus our marketing on strategy first. So if you do want to talk strategy, please head across to our website. You can contact us on the website. You can chat with me or the rest of the team. Also on our website, you can see all our other episodes of our podcast, and also our blog content, all the other articles, and details about what we do and how we help our clients as well. You’re more than welcome to go check it out. It’s donebynine.com. Thanks so much again for listening to another episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast. We look forward to seeing you on the next one.