Audience, for our purposes, is an umbrella term for everyone that reads, watches or listens to the content you produce. They might be your podcast subscribers, your blog readers, your followers on youtube, or your fans on social media - but they are REGULAR consumers of your content. Clients and customers can be a part of your audience (or not!) and audience members can BECOME clients and customers - but they are two different things and should be treated differently. In most cases, you’ll want your audience to contain as many potential clients and customers as possible - this will mean that you’re investing in lead generation, brand building and education as much as content that will help you establish thought leadership or SEO. Sometimes, however, it can make sense to build an audience who is at a different stage than most of your clients and customers, to help nurture and educate them to the point when they’ll be ready, or to have a pool of people who might be interested in a different kind of product or service offering. Let’s get into a few more characteristics of an audience. As much as possible, you should know who your audience is (or who you want them to be, if you’re just starting out) - and you identify them by creating an audience profile for EACH content platform you want to work with.  Start by looking at your existing customers - who are they? What do they have in common? What of those things they have in common makes them most likely to hire, or buy from you? The last thing you want to keep in mind is that they are probably already USING the content medium you’re working on. What does that mean? Well, if you build a following on YouTube, by creating, sharing and promoting your videos, you’re attracting audience members who are in the already-existing pool of “YouTube Users.” You can have different audiences for different platforms. Your audience on YouTube can look different than your blog audience, and you can share different things on each platform - different content, different kinds of engagement and different offers.  There should be broad similarities in your audience across all platforms so that you’re able to effectively repurpose and reuse your content - BUT, if you have a YouTube channel talking about beginner level content to grow your pool of future customers, your blog can be really geared towards people who are closer to “ready to buy” and deal with more sophisticated information, and your livestreams can be for your current clients to give them support, answer questions and deepen the relationship.  What content you put on what platform and for what reason is one of the strategic decisions you make as a content creator.  Your audience should also engage with your content, by commenting, sharing and converting to different platforms. Not everyone will - in fact, most probably won’t! Audience building is a numbers game, and the bigger an audience you HAVE, the more opportunity you have for sales and promotion. As you start to build your audience, and send content their way, you’ll get a sense of what your conversion numbers are likely to be - how many people will respond to a tweet, share a video, or listen to a podcast. Once you start collecting that kind of information about them, you’ll have tons of useful information for planning campaigns, promotions, and offers. Your action step for this week is to think about the different platforms you are on, or want to be on, and determine if you’re looking at the SAME audience for each, if they are slightly different for the different platforms, and what your goals are for each of those platforms. Want some help? Get in touch!