TPS #044: The 3 Pillars of Audience Growth
Author: Andre Mullen - 3 min Read
Read Time: 3 minutes
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💡 Big Ideas:
1. The 3 pillars of audience growth are specific goals, systems, and processes.
2. Audience growth can only happen with specific goals, systems, and processes in place.
3. Audience growth is the path to sustainability.
4. The 3 pillars provide managers with a framework to consistently deliver on goals set to grow an artist’s audience.
“The bottom line.”
I never worked on building my client’s audience because I didn’t know how
And whatever I didn’t know, I wouldn’t try to do.
So, that area of my client’s business – the most important area – remained unattended.
But how could I help scale my client’s business if I didn’t know how to grow their audience?
Not addressing this would affect the bottom line and I’m part of the bottom line.
I needed to put together a system instead of putting together excuses.
The 3 pillars that make up audience growth
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to talk about the 3 pillars of audience growth and why they’re important.
This newsletter was inspired by this article as well as many of my 1-1 consults with artist managers and artists. The question consistently posed to me always involves talking about growing their, or their client’s, audience.
While there is a great deal of information regarding methods for building your audience, there isn’t information on what the necessary building blocks are.
And not knowing the building blocks – the pillars – is what drives the same question in every consult.
Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. These results are what artist managers and artists will continue to get.
Time to change the narrative.
"Audience growth can only happen with specific goals, processes, and systems in place.”
Growing your artist client’s audience is part of growing their overall business. This is part of the building blocks on the road to sustainability.
As I mentioned in my previous writings, understanding how to build your client’s audience is essential to your position and role as their manager. The time taken to do so will cultivate your desire to explore unique ways to accomplish this.
However, you cannot simply implement these ways without the basic principles to support various methods you often read and hear about from industry professionals.
These basic principles are pillars.
Pillars are regarded as reliably providing essential support for something.
There are 3 pillars to audience growth. They are comprised of:
1. Specific goals
2. Systems
3. Processes
The above pillars provide you with a framework enabling you to consistently deliver on your growth goals. After all, your client’s success and sustainability in their music career are based on their growth and engagement with their audience.
Let’s look at each of these pillars in detail.
Pillar #1: Specific goals
Goal setting is the most important work you’ll do for yourself and your artist client as you build their audience.
Setting specific goals will trigger new behaviors and insights that can prove critical to successful audience growth.
Specific goals are goals birthed from a great question. They push you, stretch you, and ultimately, point you to the processes and systems you need to put in place to achieve them.
Goals also help align your focus and promote a sense of self-mastery. In the end, you can’t manage your client’s audience growth if you’re not measuring and you can’t improve upon those very methods if you’re not properly managing them. Setting goals is necessary to accomplish this.
For example, a big and specific goal could be to organically grow your client’s audience by 20% in 30 days. Another big and specific goal could be to increase your client’s email subscribers by 30% in 20 days.
Specific goals are necessary to fuel and power audience growth. They answer the questions of “what you will do” and “how long will it take for you to do it.”
Pillar #2: Systems
One of the most undervalued and overlooked aspects of artist management is systems.
The reason why most – if not, all – artist managers and artists are frustrated with their careers is due to the lack of systems in place to accomplish goals they have to grow their audience. The lack of an audience growth system also contributes to the reason why your client’s music isn’t being exposed.
An illustration of what an audience growth system could look like is below via my hub and spoke model:
Systems are pivotal as they house the necessary steps for goals to be achievable and measurable.
To effectively grow your client’s audience, you need to have a system in place. Consistency is a necessary “muscle to exercise” in building and ultimately, cultivating a fanbase.
The greatest strength of your system will be your consistency and commitment to the processes that make up the system.
Pillar #3: Processes
Processes are important to have in place for your client’s audience system to work efficiently.
Processes – by definition – are “a series of actions or steps taken to achieve a particular end”. In this case, the “end” is the specific goal.
Each system requires that a certain number of steps be taken for it to work, and those steps come together to make up a process. Processes enable systems to deliver on the specific goals you set for building your client’s audience.
Once a specific goal is set, your process should consist of steps, each designed to bring you closer to achieving your goal.
Using the example of growing your client’s email subscribers by 30% in 30 days, your process could be like the following:
1. Create a content theme
2. Create a content calendar
3. Create a content release schedule
4. Create content with CTA (”call to action”) for newsletter sign-up
5. Schedule content
6. Automate releases to flow consistently
With the amount of music flooding the marketplace, the need for your client to cut through the clutter and connect with their audience is highly important.
Having a process or processes in place position gives you an advantage in standing out from the crowd.
As a manager, growing your client’s audience needs to be a priority.
Being able to deliver is your brand promise to your client.
Hope that helps.
✋🏾When you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:
1. Schedule a 1:1 Growth Strategy Call with me on growth, strategy, content, and monetization.
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3. Here on my website, I have resources that can help. Check out The Playbook for more information.