By: Andrea Mac | August 6, 2023

If you can only take me in small doses, here's what's new:

Random: I’m obsessed with the idea of creating a series featuring how people maintain their to-do lists. It’s such an interesting, insightful view into someone’s mind. I wonder if I can start a hashtag or TikTok trend.

Speaking of TikTok: My kids found my TikTok channel (if you can call it that, it’s like five videos) and now walk around the house mimicking me - “Ah, being ghosted.” Even my 4-year old. Which was funny the first 700 times, but now, not so much. PSA: Imagine your teenagers and preschoolers as an audience when you create content. It’ll keep you humble, for sure.

Building Prequal (#7): If at first, you don’t succeed...

This year is a test. It's a self-administered one, but a test, nonetheless.

I shared in a previous edition of this newsletter how we have three main functions – a consulting arm (which is humming), a passive arm (which is growing), and a media arm (which is in the 5-year plan).

To scale and make passive revenue around things outside of consulting, there has to be an audience size that's big enough to support those functions. For those of you who don't check our social media followers and CRM contacts every week as we do, (spoiler) we currently need a sizeable audience.

I am aware that it's going to be a slow build and take time to reach the follower and contact count I have in mind to sustain those arms of the business (and my team reminds me when I have moments of impatience with this process – it's painful for me. Like wearing my shoes on the wrong feet that are two sizes too small.)

We are fortunate, though, because we've had some time to try and test things this year.

Prequal had a good year last year. We secured and contracted enough work to put us on solid footing heading into 2023. That padding gave us wiggle room and time to experiment with growth channels before the pressure was on.

To maximize this gift of time, we sat down as a team in December and reviewed the list of growth channels I teach about.

You see, not all growth is created equally. There are many ways to grow, and all are correct, but some channels allow for quicker growth. The key is figuring out the proper growth channels for what you're trying to accomplish. Growth looks different to different people, and for us, growth means explicitly audience size.

During our growth strategy session, we each ranked which channels we thought would yield the greatest (and quickest) growth, and as a team, we discussed and determined which ones we should focus on. We decided to take our top growth channel contenders, tackle them individually, and run tests. Our tests were for short periods with a set budget and measurable KPIs.

Given that we're more than halfway through the year, we've tested a few. And because this newsletter is all about Building Prequal, I thought it fitting to summarize the ways we've tested building our audience this year.

Here are some of the different growth channels, what we tried, what we haven't, what worked, and what didn't:

Social and display ads: We unsuccessfully tried Facebook, Google, and Pinterest ads. It doesn't mean we won't try them again, but our first go-round was nothing to write home about.

Speaking engagements: I have presented at a few conferences and engagements this year and am applying to do more. All my speaking engagements have added email subscribers to our list and brought in work. I'm currently pursuing multiple speaking opportunities, because this growth channel has proved useful so far.

Memberships: I am a member of Chief, Entreprenista, and Her Brand and Co. All these groups have an educational or networking component and have been helpful in their way.

Events: We've held two virtual webinars, one on finding new clients and one on pricing. Both were well attended and brought new people into our fold, but they require a lot of time and effort from the team, so we have yet to do them consistently.

SEO/Blogging: SEO is a long game, and we're playing it. We're checking all the right SEO boxes on our site and creating web content and blog posts with SEO in mind, but it will be a little while before we can count on SEO for real growth.

Unconventional PR/Stunt: We have yet to try this, but I wouldn't put it past us.

Sponsorships: None yet.

Social Media: This has been the biggest disappointment so far. We're consistently putting out good social media content, but it's such a shouting match on most platforms, so reaching new audiences (without paying out the wazoo to boost posts) is challenging.

Email marketing: We've gotten much more consistent with email marketing, and we are putting several automations in place to help welcome new people and guide them through what we have to offer. Email's working, and we have yet to unlock its full potential.

CX investments: In progress.

Collaborations: None yet. We really missed getting a Barbie collab. Seems they were all the rage two weeks ago.

Affiliates: We haven't tried this approach yet—nothing to report.

Building a community: We have a FB community but have yet to put much effort into nurturing it. We're still determining if Facebook will be the best place to build a community for us.

Engaging in other communities: We've done this and seen some success. By posting thoughtful comments and valuable links to our free resources in established online communities, we've seen traffic to our site and new people joining our email list.

Influencers: We've engaged with some micro-influencers with moderate success and were weighing spending thousands with prominent influencers. However, after examining the opportunity and what potential we thought it would yield, it felt like there needed to be a better capital investment at that time.

So that's our rundown. You might be wondering what's next for us. And I'll be happy to tell you. We're doubling down on the areas that are working for us (speaking engagements, events, and email marketing) and giving ourselves the permission to let go of or scale back our expectations for other channels (ahem, social media and ads).

Our testing phase isn't done, but the answers to this test are becoming more evident the more we try.

Cheering you on,

A.

PS I'm being shameless (+ strategic) here. Since it's no secret that we're trying to grow an audience, please help Prequal by doing one of these things (or all if you're an extra credit kind of person):