4 Ways to Spread Your Story and Increase Reach

Ever just happen across someone doing amazing things by chance? Maybe it was going down a hashtag rabbit hole or spotting a retweet, but you wondered how on earth you’d never discovered this person before with their beautiful products and inspiring brand story. But have you ever wondered whether people think this about you?It’s so hard to know just how to increase reach and spread your brand stories. Most creatives I speak to are scared to talk too much about their products for fear of seeming pushy, overly-salesy, or of just being annoying (read more about selling without 'selling' here). So all over the internet are these little gems of businesses with amazing stories that they’re just not telling.Of course, it’s good to be cautious about how you present yourself online – we’d have a bigger problem if you thought it was ok the blast pushy sales spiel onto your followers. But you have to find the balance between that approach, and an approach that effectively spreads your message and grows your business.Here are four ways to help you find that balance in your business, and increase reach in a soulful way.

Remember not everyone sees you as much as you do

This is the first step to increase reach is getting over your ‘I’m annoying everyone’ anxiety. You see everything you put out into the world; everyone else sees about 5%. So if you mentioned your shop update in one Instagram post, and tweeted it out three times, most people will have completely missed it.Think about your own habits as a consumer online. You don’t scroll through a fell 24 hours worth of tweets on Twitter, nor do you really go onto people’s profiles and scroll through weeks of their last tweets. When you follow someone on Instagram, you don’t read through the last three months of their captions. Even for the people you do follow, you don’t see every Story, or necessarily every post.Life gets in the way and you check in and out throughout the day. And that’s what your audience do too. Remember they followed you because they like your style and want to keep up with you and your products – you’ve got to give them the chance to see the things they followed you for. If you want to increase reach, you've first got to make yourself discoverable, make sure people see you and not hide away your stories. As long as you stick to the guidelines in ‘Be valuable’ below, you’re absolutely fine to be more vocal.

Be valuable

I feel like I talk about this all the time, but being valuable really is so key to capturing attention – and it makes you feel less bad about pushing your message out too.With so many businesses competing for your customers' attention and email addresses, it’s always the ones that provide the most value in the exchange that win. Just yesterday I browsing a site and thought ‘hmm, do I really want to give my email address out again here?’, and I ended up not signing up because their proposition wasn’t quite valuable enough to me. I bet you do the same sometimes too.If you want to increase reach, you have to provide things that are worth sharing, worth buying into, worth recommending. That includes your products, of course, but it also includes your blog content, your social media posts, your email opt ins. Everything you put out there needs to be valuable to your ideal customer, otherwise they're just not going to consume it.

How to be valuable

To be valuable, think about what your ideal customer wants, what they struggle with. And give them something that will help them. Giving 10% off their first order is fine, but it’s kinda lazy and doesn’t make you stand out. Maybe your customer wants some patterns so they can learn to sew like you, maybe they’re re-doing their living room and want to know how to incorporate more plants, maybe they want to learn about meditation and how to build a practise. Whatever they want or need that's related to your brand story, provide it for them.And don’t forget your 80/20 rule if you’re worried about talking shop too much. The 80/20 rule says that 80% of content should be valuable to the consumer, 20% should be talking about you or your products. Basically, 20% of the time you can be saying ‘buy this here’ and the other 80% is more open. Share a blog post, shoot the breeze, give out little tips.The key questions here is, do you want to be a business where peope say "I got this from X, you really need to check her out, she’s really knowledgeable and her newsletter is really really good"? Or "I got this after seeing it on Instagram – can’t remember what the name was but I got 10% off"? I know which one I'd prefer.

Activate your customers

Ok, now we’ve got the mindset in place, let’s do some actual outreach. And always, always start with your customers. There’s a stat which says “80% of value comes from 20% of customers”, and I’ve turned this into a bit of a mantra for myself. Whenever I don’t know where to start with something, I say it to myself and I start with serving the people who are already invested in me – so that might mean anything from responding to comments first to doing an exclusive offer for Monthly Mail subscribers.Focusing attention and activity on your existing customers not only provides them with value and makes them feel appreciated, but it saves you the time and money and takes to woo new customers. It’s a win win.So many of us don’t think about activating our customers for marketing purposes; it’s easy to think of that relationship as being all tied up and put away. But those people are your biggest advocates, and there are easy things you can do systematise the word of mouth and social proof they can provide in order to increase reach.

How to maximise your customer relationships

Your customers will be talking about and using your product, so you want to bring all that potential content back under your control for you to use. This can be as simple as encouraging reviews on your site, to bigger things like competitions and hashtags encouraging your customers to share images of your products that you can use over and over again. Use a follow up email or slip a personal note into your packaging encouraging them to take part, leave a review or share their images.The goal here is to get your customers sharing and talking about your product publicly, tagging you so others can find you, and basically to spread your story for you. The more creative the way you do it, the better.

Use influencers

Full disclosure here: I do influencer work here on Simple & Season and accept sponsored posts, so of course I’m not going to say that influencer marketing is a load of bull and you shouldn’t bother. But there’s a reason that it’s such a booming industry, and I’m not alone in my opinions of its effectiveness.Working with an influencer is a great way to increase reach and spread your brand story, IF you choose the right one. It’s easy to look at number of followers and see dollar signs, but really that’s one of the more irrelevant stats when it comes to influencer marketing – check my tick list below for how to select your influencers.

How to choose your influencer

• Look at how engaged their followers are – if they’ve got 20k followers but can barely muster 200 likes on a photo, then their followers aren't seeing them or don’t really care what they have to say
• Look at what their followers say – in their social media and blog comments, what are people saying? Are they genuinely engaging with the person? Look especially at how their followers react to other sponsored content
• Do they influence your ideal customer? – do your kinda people follow this person? More importantly, do they hang off their every word? This is key - you need an influencer that will increase your reach with the right people
• How relevant is their content? - would your product fit with their style, do they share your ethics when it comes to content, is their content valuable to others? Would you feel happy directing people to their content?

Working with an influencer not only amplifies your brand story, but it increases your reach with the right people. Plus, a blog post is around for as long as the blog is, so will continue to send people to you months and years after it goes live. Longevity of content is where influencer marketing really wins over traditional advertising or magazine features. A real person is living with your product, so it will continue to crop up on their social media and in their photos over time – especially if you maintain a good relationship with them.

Now, what's holding you back from increasing your reach?

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