Audience Growth Strategy: How To Grow Your Audience Quickly

Your audience is your business’s most valuable asset. A larger, more engaged audience means more potential customers, more repeat purchases, and more brand advocates spreading the word about your products. It’s a foundation for sustainable growth that pays dividends across every area of your business—from lower customer acquisition costs to increased customer lifetime value.

The seven strategies below are designed to help you build an engaged audience: one that’s not just large, but genuinely interested in what you’re selling. Each tactic prioritizes attracting people who align with your brand and creating touchpoints that keep them engaged, setting your business up for long-term growth.

7 effective strategies for audience growth

1. Collaborate with other brands
2. Embrace content marketing
3. Build community
4. Start local
5. Encourage referrals
6. Prioritize audience interaction
7. Build an omnichannel marketing strategy

Building your audience base is a cost-effective, low-risk way to grow your business. Before you develop a new product type or plan to expand internationally, use these seven strategies to connect with as many potential customers as possible. 

1. Collaborate with other brands

Co-marketing and co-branding can provide immediate access to another business’s audience base. 

While they sound similar, these are distinct strategies. Co-marketing involves mutual promotion, and co-branding creates a new product that shows the influence of both brand identities and is marketed under both brand names. If an artisanal hot chocolate mix brand teams up with a gourmet marshmallow brand on a marketing campaign, that’s co-marketing. If they collaborate on a product (say, a hot-chocolate flavored marshmallow), that’s co-branding.

These types of brand collaborations require a few key considerations if your primary goal is to increase audience size:

• Audience overlap. Partnering with a business popular among your current audience can help you expand your reach—unless your audiences are made up of the exact same people. To maximize the number of new customers reached, look for a partner popular with an audience you’ve struggled to retain or one that differs in a key way, such as geographic location, gender identity, or occupation.

• Audience alignment. For durable growth, select an audience that your business can continue to serve in the long term. If you sell home improvement tools, for example, partner with a paint brand over a jeweler.

• Brand identity. Selecting a partner with a complementary brand identity and marketing ethos can help you wrap them into your existing marketing and branding efforts, rather than requiring an entirely new approach. 

2. Embrace content marketing

Content marketing allows you to reach your audience in a way that’s more engaging (and useful) than traditional advertising. Truly valuable content marketing materials share knowledge that your audience needs and can’t find elsewhere. 

An effective content strategy doesn’t recycle existing ideas; it creates something new. A yarn retailer might publish five beginner-friendly sock patterns, for example. A water filter brand might produce a docuseries on water quality around the world.

Offering valuable information to your audience lets you differentiate your brand, build relationships with customers, and ultimately prove that your expertise is worth purchasing.

3. Build community

The internet is changing. Users believe that online search results are becoming less valuable, and AI content now surpasses human content in monthly publication volume. In response to mediocre content, excessive self-promotion, data-mining, and digital scams, users are pivoting to niche online communities like Discord channels, text groups, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and invite-only message boards.

These observations have been borne out by marketing trends over the past few years. Brands are increasingly forming moderated groups and using them to connect with audiences. A well-moderated brand group can unite people with shared interests and values, providing a space for authentic community-building, conversation, and connection. 

Superfood retailer Blume’s Meta community, Blumekind, invites audiences to join “a community of energy givers, ritual lovers, and wellness seekers curated by Bloom,” for example. You can offer moderated communities to attract new audience members, collect first-party data, solicit feedback, and encourage user-generated content.

4. Start local

Tapping into an existing local community is another effective audience growth strategy. Focusing locally before expanding elsewhere can be a very effective way to build a solid base. Mattress retailer Polysleep used this strategy to launch in Quebec, Canada. 

“One of the core elements in my philosophy is really to create a local success before trying to expand upon it,” says cofounder and CEO Jeremiah Curvers on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We’re a local brand; we manufacture our product here. The fabric is knitted here and then assembled here. We have plants locally in Quebec. I think all that combined really resonated with the people in Quebec. That snowball effect when people are happy with a product really accelerates how fast you can gain market share.” 

Jeremiah also observes that starting locally can lower costs, citing decreased advertising, staffing, and infrastructure burdens. “There’s a cost associated with every step of growing a business,” he says. 

5. Encourage referrals

A warm introduction can go a long way, and word-of-mouth marketing builds your audience base by activating customers to refer more people to your business. This strategy also boosts engagement among your most loyal audiences.

Many referral programs reward referring customers when a new customer makes a purchase, often with store credit or loyalty program points redeemable for free products or other perks. To maximize the audience-building benefits of your program, you might also consider recognizing customers for referring website traffic or new subscribers.

6. Prioritize audience interaction

Interacting with your audience increases customer engagement and can help you attract and retain followers. Look for opportunities to engage with customers through interactive content forms like polls and quizzes, audience and market research activities such as focus groups and feedback requests, and customer experience initiatives like sending thank you notes and offering personalized support.

Skin care brand Province Apothecary invites audiences to tag the brand in Instagram posts about its products and reposts UGC from the brand account, which can increase reach by encouraging customers to post about the company.

7. Build an omnichannel marketing strategy

Growing your audience base without a multichannel strategy is a tall order. It asks your customers to come to you by consuming content only on the channel on which you publish.

Multichannel marketing eliminates this barrier, providing content on multiple channels and allowing you to earn fans wherever your audience responds. Omnichannel marketing goes a step further, providing a seamless, interconnected customer experience across digital and physical touchpoints.

Omnichannel marketing uses specialized ecommerce software to centralize collected data and synchronize campaigns, allowing brands to reach customers on their preferred channels and ensure that any information they provide follows them throughout their customer journey.

Menswear retailer Mizzen+Main provides one example. The brand went omnichannel using Shopify in 2023, implementing unified customer profiles to offer more personalized customer experiences and boost loyalty and engagement.