When you’re not hitting your sales goals, you might think there’s something wrong with either your offer or your marketing. But what so many people fail to realize is that sometimes (a lot of times, actually), the problem isn’t in your messaging or even in your product. The problem is your audience.
Oversaturing your audience can create what Kristen terms “audience fatigue” and could quite possibly be what’s smothering your growth. Lead generation wants a seat at your table, and it’s time you think about how implementing an audience growth strategy can help you meet those sales goals.
Listen in as Kristen goes over:
- An explanation of the Law of Diminishing Returns and how it could be affecting your bottom line
- How to recognize when your audience might be on the brink of becoming fatigued
- Why lead generation is vital for those in a party-based business model
- How you can use organic marketing (no paid ads) to grow your audience
- What happens when audience fatigue creates scarcity
Audience fatigue can create a whole host of problems. But the biggest issue might be that you don’t recognize that it’s even a problem. Instead of panicking and thinking about switching companies or changing up your offers – think about lead generation instead and how having fresh eyes on your current offer might help your bottom line across the board. Nothing is wrong with your marketing. The problem lies in audience growth.
Looking for a way to maximize your sales this upcoming holiday season? Then now is the perfect time to download your copy of Kristen’s new Monetize and Maximize Holiday Guide. Inside you’ll find simple and effective strategies designed to turn the last quarter of the year into your best. Click here to buy now.
Thanks for listening! Do you have a question about network marketing? Kristen can help! Drop your question here, and she just might answer it live on the podcast: https://Kristenboss.com/question
Connect with Kristen:
If you’re ready to learn the simple process of running your social selling business online, you have to check out Kristen’s live group coaching program! The Social Selling Academy: www.thesocialsellingacademy.com
Do you have a business full of customers and almost no builders? You’re in need of a reboot! Learn the three skills you can learn that will completely change your recruitment game. Check it out here.
Transcript for Episode #135 Audience Fatigue:
Kristen Boss (00:05): Welcome to Purposeful Social Selling with Kristen Boss. I’m your host Kristen Boss. I’m a mindset and business coach with more than 15 years experience in both the product and service based industries. I believe that social selling is the best business model for people wanting to make an impact while they make serious income. This is the podcast for the social seller who is tired of feeling inauthentic in their business and desires to find a more purposeful and profitable way of growing their business. In today’s social media landscape, in this podcast, you will learn what it takes to grow a sustainable business through impactful and social marketing. It’s time to ditch the hustle and lead from the heart. Let me show you the new way.
Kristen Boss (00:48): Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the show. Today we’re gonna talk about something you probably haven’t heard before and I am pretty excited to share it with you because I think it’s going to be a potential game changer for you. And if I haven’t sold you on the value of expanding your audience, growing your audience, prioritizing, networking, and meeting new people, this is gonna be the episode where I sell you not just on the value of putting in the work and the effort, but on why it’s actually costing you profit and costing you revenue and costing you time and energy when you don’t prioritize networking. Let’s go, let’s do this. Okay, I’m talking about this concept that I’m gonna call audience fatigue. And that is when I have noticed this happens literally at some point in almost every business owner’s business, at some point they realize they reach a point where they hit like a threshold or audience fatigue.
Kristen Boss (01:49): And I kind of view audience fatigue like a giant sponge that sits in a bowl of water and eventually the sponge hits maximum saturation and it can no longer take in any more water so that there’s just now all the water that the sponge cannot take in is just sitting stagnant around the sponge. And this is what I believe happens when you do not expand and grow your audience regularly and you are not prioritizing networking lead generation and acquiring new customers. If you are an entrepreneur, if you are in business for yourself, this is literally top priority to increasing your bottom line. You’re either working on customer acquisition or you’re working on customer retention. And most of the time I see the problem that people have is with customer acquisition and they don’t realize is that it’s because they have an audience oversaturation or an audience fatigue problem.
Kristen Boss (02:50): And this is when your audience, they know about your offer, they know about your business, they know about your product, you’ve been talking at your audience for a prolonged period of time. And there is something in economics called the law of diminishing returns. And I’m gonna read the definition for you so I don’t mess it up. But this is exactly what audience fatigue is and where I see a lot of business owners, network marketers, coaches and service providers, this is where they stall out in their revenue and they stop increase, they stop increasing their profits. Okay? The law of diminishing returns is when there comes a point when an additional factor of production, you putting in more effort, you putting in more, maybe more money and ad spend results in a lessening of the output or desired impact. I’m gonna read that one more time.
Kristen Boss (03:44): The law of diminishing returns is when there comes a point when your additional factor of production you putting in more actually creates a lesser return on your outputs, you get very little back. This is where I see people, they’ve been marketing for a long time and when they first maybe brought their offer to their audience, it was hot, hot, hot. Everybody was buying it, it was going great. Well that’s because they were selling to a very fresh market who had not heard of the offer before, not new. So typically hot market, they go first. It’s people you have the most trust and relational equity with. They’ve been following you for a while, they trust your brand, they don’t need a lot of social proof, they’re just ready to go. They’ll buy it from you. And then there is your warm market where they sit and they watch and they say like, Okay, let’s just see how serious they are.
Kristen Boss (04:32): They need to be sold. They’re not in, they’re, you know, they’re not an easy buy. They’re not like, Okay, I’m, I’m in for it no matter what. Like they need to be sold. And part of being sold is establishing trust with them over time. And they wanna be like, Okay, are you still gonna be serious about this six months from now, a year from now? And so that is when we see in the beginning we see people kind of have a massive surge in profits and then there is a slowing down where their warm market now it becomes more of a trickle. And then eventually with time their warm market starts to become non-responsive. This is when people start posting to crickets. They are putting out their offers, they’re putting out value and nobody’s buying anymore. Now the customer acquisition, the new leads, the new profit, it has slowed down so much to where it feels like there’s barely even a trickle of people coming in.
Kristen Boss (05:26): And they start to think, Okay, maybe something’s wrong with my offer. Maybe something’s wrong with my business. Maybe I need to change companies. Maybe I need to change services, maybe I need to change offers. But here’s the problem. If this is what happens when you are not constantly bringing in new eyes and new leads to your business, you have to always be making lead generation a number one priority in your business no matter what. I can’t even imagine how my email list would feel like if, if I, I remember at the very beginning when I first started out, I had 500 people on my e email list. And if we were to look at just, this is where you have to understand like the statistics and the laws of the consumer really essentially the of marketing and sales and understanding that there’s a certain percentage of your audience that’s never gonna buy from you.
Kristen Boss (06:17): And so if you’re expecting all 500 people from your email list to inevitably convert with you, convert to whatever you offer and to buy from you, this is a completely unrealistic expectation. And it’s honestly, it’s unfair of you to expect everyone on your list to buy from you. Because some people are just there to see cuz they’re curious and some people forget they’re on your email list. But that’s just, statistically it’s just not possible. But I see people doing this, I see them pitching to the, the same size list for years, whether it’s an email list, whether it’s their Facebook friends list, whether it’s their Instagram followers, whatever it is, they haven’t made growing their, their audience size a top priority. And so what ends up happening is they, they can put out a lot more, they could do more advertising, they can make it fancy, but again, this with a law of diminished returns, they start getting less and less and less return on all that they’re putting out.
Kristen Boss (07:14): Their output creates very little coming back to them. So with this concept of audience growth, and when I notice this is when their paychecks typically stall out, and this is when they start to think maybe something’s wrong with the business, nothing is wrong with the business, It’s just your job to consistently bring new eyes to your content so that you don’t have an audience fatigue problem, an offer fatigue problem or an oversaturation problem. Meaning that literally your audience, they all know you need to get fresh people in. I can’t imagine if, you know, I know when I started with like 500 fall 500 people on my email list, I made it my job very, very early in the game. And even when I had made, you know, multi six figures, I knew that my job to, if I wanted to scale the millions and build a company that it was gonna be built on growing my audience and growing leads and being very good at lead generation.
Kristen Boss (08:09): So I didn’t wait until the law of diminishing returns happened to me. I made audience growth of priority before the law of diminishing returns kicked in before I experience dealing with crickets before those things. And so I actually started investing in audience growth early. A lot of people I know wait until they hit a million dollars and then they work on audience growth for me. Now here’s what’s a little different. You might be being like, okay, well how do I invest in audience growth? For me, I was willing to take, like, to take the loss myself, meaning that I was willing to not pay myself so that I could invest in my future business. I was willing to pay myself less so that I could, could give my business more. And I like to remind my students of this quite often. I tell them like, listen, up until a million dollars, I was working in an office that had no baseboards, there was dog stains on the carpet, crappy lighting, crappy sound.
Kristen Boss (09:11): Like, because I kept putting money into growing my skills, growing the assets in my company, hiring, being able to hire people, getting in masterminds, being with coaches, because I knew all of those things would only compound my return on investment. I would keep generating more and making my business more valuable, making myself more valuable. So for me, I did not scale up my lifestyle very quickly. Actually, I waited a long time and I know I feel like I say this every episode, but maybe if I say it every episode people will start to believe me, <laugh>. But delayed gratification is that important to the point where like, I lived so far beneath my means and I kept putting cash back into my business, investing in Facebook ads, investing in the best team, and I was also willing to experiment. I, I remember, I think I put like $15,000 in ads and we like made nothing from it.
Kristen Boss (10:05): And I was like, Okay, well here, that’s what we learned. We learned that, but I created that type of surplus in my business and with my cash so that I could afford to do those things. I did not look to my business like I’ll never forget my first like 25 K month. I wasn’t like, woohoo, let’s go out and spend 25 k on, you know, things I don’t even need. It was like, I actually put all of that money, I literally took every dime. I want you to think about this cuz people are like, well how did you scale to millions? And I don’t know how many people would be willing to, you know, market and experiment and put things out there for a year and not make a dime. And then I also don’t know how many people who would take their first 25 K that they make and not, I think maybe I spent a thousand of it on myself and the rest, I put it right back into coaches and hiring people and I kept taking large percentages of my income and I kept waiting.
Kristen Boss (11:04): I was, and at the time I was still a hair stylist while I was making a ton of money in this business. And I was like, I’m not gonna touch that money because I’m gonna keep putting it in my business so that I can grow my audience so that I can work on, you know, lead generation so that we’re never dry on leads. And even at this point I want you to think of, you know, every huge business, it is their job to grow their audience, to grow their email list. And so for me, I know I have a process oriented goal. Like I know I have a revenue goal this year, but I also have a process goal over the next 12 months to increase my email list by a hundred thousand people. And man, that is a huge hairy goal and it’s going to cost a lot of money, but it is worth it because I know the return on investment that happens with growing my audience so that I don’t have audience and offer fatigue because this also happens with Facebook ads.
Kristen Boss (11:58): Eventually, you know, the life of one ad, one advertisement on Facebook, the life, the shelf life of it is maybe seven days before it starts to ha to hit the law of diminishing returns. And you actually, you know, you could put more money at it and then it, you just start getting lesser and lesser and lesser return. It’s kind of interesting how ads work cuz eventually you like start very slow, You don’t make much money. You figure out, okay, this one’s working, this one’s not working. It’s like a game of levers being like, okay, turn off that lever. It’s not, that’s not generating enough. You know, return on our investment, turn up that lever, that one’s finally going. And then when you find the lever that works, you crank it, you throw a lot of money on it, you, you get maximum returns. And then eventually you run that until it breaks.
Kristen Boss (12:43): And then once it breaks, then you hit the log diminishing returns, you turn it off and then you have to create something else. This is like constant innovation and it’s your job. So if you’re like, but Kristen, I, you know, I’m not anywhere near, you know, doing paid ads and you know, a large portion of my audience is social sellers and network marketing who they don’t do paid advertisement, they just do organic marketing. So let me break it down to you like how the law of diminishing returns works for organic marketing. Meaning you’re just using your social media platforms without using paid advertising dollars to grow your platform. How the law of diminishing returns works is when you haven’t grown your audience, you haven’t added friends, you haven’t added to your network, and eventually the audience that you’ve been posting to and talking to your business about for the last, you know, year, suddenly you’re noticing it’s going stale, You’re not getting enough very many people expressing interest telling you that they wanna do it. And
Kristen Boss (13:44): Hey, bosses, we are just weeks away from the holidays, before you know it, it’s gonna be Thanksgiving and then it’s gonna be Christmas. And with that, this is the time of year where you have the most potential to truly increase your profits with your social selling business and reach your audience in a new way. That’s why I’ve created a $7 holiday guide for social sellers. You guys, I’m giving my best stuff away because I want you to have massive profits this holiday season. So if you wanna go ahead and grab that, we got that at the link in the show notes, go ahead and download it. I promise you it’s gonna be worth your while. Follow the steps and you will see a noticeable increase in your engagement, your connections, and your sales back to the show.
Kristen Boss (14:29): Listen, if you are in a party based business, it’s even more important that you expand your network because eventually you are going to hit saturation with your audience and you might have a pool of very loyal customers. I know for me, I have a good friend of mine and she she sells books in a direct sales party model. And every year I look forward to one of her parties. I don’t host. I might one year, but, and I think I actually did host one year actually now that I think about it. But I, I know that she can count and she knows that she can count on me every year to be there at her, you know, at her party that she throws. Like that is a pool of customers that she can always count on. But to look at me and now think, okay, now I need, you know, Kristen and this pool of customers to help me reach my income goal this year, it really puts an unfair pressure on your audience.
Kristen Boss (15:24): And they can feel that, they can feel when you are getting annoyed that they’re not, that they’re not buying from you anymore. They can feel annoyed. And this is why I think people can get a bad taste in their mouth about buying from a direct sales model. It’s not the product. Most people love the product. It’s a good quality product. Most people have hesitation with a customer experience. And the hesitation is most people don’t want to be messaged at the end of every month by, you know, by their distributor or by their rep saying, Hey, can you put in an order for X amount of dollars so that I can hit my revenue goal this month? Or Hey can you, you know, I see that you’re empty on your product, do you wanna order more or can I introduce you to a new product?
Kristen Boss (16:15): Now there is a way to do that really well, but most people have an experience like that they are expected to buy from their rep in order to contribute to their rep’s revenue goals. And nobody likes feeling that way in a buyer’s experience. Like if I was to walk into a commission based clothing shop, actually I have done that like with, with a purse you know, I would hate feeling like if I was dealing with a sales rep, if they were breeding down my neck, expecting me to buy a purse in that moment because they needed to hit their commission goal for that month. It again, I’m gonna say it over and over again, people ask me all the time, Okay, well Kristen, why do people have hesitation? You know, join, you know, joining or becoming a rep in the direct sales industry or in network marketing?
Kristen Boss (17:06): I’m like, it’s not the product. It’s because they, in their mind, they have a negative experience on the customer side of things and they don’t want to associate with that. Now, this is part of my work and what I wanna help people with is I wanna change this narrative in network marketing. And here is the only way you can have really phenomenal customer service and that your customers feel loved and cared for and that it’s about them is you being somebody who’s always acquiring new customers and then getting in front of new people. Because when you are getting in front of new people, when you are growing your audience, do you know what that does? It creates more abundance in your mind with your customers. Suddenly you aren’t approaching them with need, you’re approaching them with service. It becomes about the customer instead of about you.
Kristen Boss (17:58): And I think this is where a lot of people bring so much pressure to every conversation they have because they aren’t growing their audience, they aren’t working on generating new leads. So when you’re not generating new leads and you’re having your first sales conversation that you, that you haven’t had in 90 days, how do you think you’re approaching that conversation? Let me tell you, most of the time people are like, they come to a very high pressure. They’re, they’re verbally vomiting all over their, their potential and they’re scaring them off because they’re coming at them with so much need because they are so scarce around the one lead because they aren’t prioritized prioritizing, gaining leads. Let me break this down even more so for you. If you are a coach or a service provider or a or network marketer, it doesn’t matter. Let me break it to you In the coach and service provider, if you aren’t consistently growing your list and working on new client acquisition, it can create an incredibly talk toxic relationship between the client and the coach because then the cl then the coach starts to have a sense of ownership over the client and guilts the client into renewing just so that the coach can have more secure income because they’re not out there generating leads.
Kristen Boss (19:17): But a coach that is always generating leads, always creating demand and growing their audience, they’re able to serve and love their clients in the best way. And then their clients are only renewing because it’s best in the best interest of the client and the client alone, not in the best interest of the coach’s bottom line. It’s the same thing with contractors. Like I had one of my, one of my mastermind members, we, you know, we, I had her do an inventory of her VA’s hours and what her VA was doing. And when we broke it all down with what the VA was doing, how many hours the VA was working and what she was paying the va, she was being grossly overcharged for what the VA was doing, like triple the going rate. And when she knew that, I’m like, Okay girl, we gotta negotiate this package.
Kristen Boss (20:05): You gotta make the va you know, you have to make the VA aware of this and you can negotiate the package or you can fire them because they’re an independent contractor, it’s month to month. So she, what she did was she’s like, Okay, I’m gonna negotiate with this con, I’m gonna negotiate with my contractor. I’m gonna say, Hey, here’s what I can afford. Here’s the package, here’s what I’d like to do. And the contractor ended up guilting my client saying, My family relies on this income. There’s no way, I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t afford to lessen it. I’ve really come to rely on you like this, this exact picture between my client and her virtual assistant is the exact experience that some people have in the direct sales model where maybe they don’t want to reorder a product, maybe they have a surplus in product and they get the vibe from their rep because you’re not ordering product from me this month, my family will suffer.
Kristen Boss (21:04): And this is why people have distrust. This is why, you know, nine times out of 10 when people say, when they’re in Facebook groups and they say, Hey, can someone gimme a makeup re recommendation? And there’s parentheses that says, no mlm, please. This is why, because someone wants to buy makeup without getting a text message from that person saying, I really need you to buy this so I can hit my goal so I can feed my family. Because that’s not a customer centered relationship. So going back to my client with the va, the VA was pulling kind of the same crap with her and it, I knew when my client brought this back to me, I said, The reason why she’s saying this is because she has not created a reliable system to generate new leads and new customers and she’s feeling scarce. Whereas if she knew that she was great at customer acquisition, she had leads going, she had demand and she had a wait list, she would, there would probably have been a completely different conversation.
Kristen Boss (21:59): You probably would’ve, you know, both, you know, said, Okay, well send you on your way, see you later. And the VA would’ve gone just to the next person in line that was waiting to pay her at that rate. And I think, you know, for me as a coach, I remember like I had built a wait list and it got to the point where it was a nine month long wait list. And that’s when I realized, okay, what’s a better way I can serve? Especially if the conversation with every single client looks exactly the same. And that’s when I created the mastermind cuz I’m like, well, if I’m in 25 conversations a week and they all sound exactly the same, I should put them all in the same room and teach them these concepts and teach them these lessons so that they’re all learning together and leverage my time better.
Kristen Boss (22:40): And so this is where audience growth and this, this audience fatigue, it creates scarcity for you and it harms your marketing because now your marketing is falling on tired eyes. The audience is fatigued, they’ve heard it. You grow resentful, you start to think something’s wrong with your marketing. It might be nothing is wrong with your marketing. The problem is lead generation. The problem is audience growth. This is where audience fatigue and audience oversaturation happens. And this is why you have to make audience growth a number one priority in your business so that you can stay abundant, so that you can actually keep the customer centered in all of your service instead of making it centered on yourself. This is so that you can lead your teams. So for example, leaders, I’m looking at you in network marketing. This is if leaders have stopped looking for qualified new business builders on an ongoing regular basis, they end up looking to their current business builders with a lot of scarcity.
Kristen Boss (23:49): Like you all need to keep performing for me. And they stop recruiting because there’s no one in the pipeline, there’s no one else they’re developing. So suddenly they become very scarce for their leaders to perform. And so it, and this happens with coaches, it happens with clients. So this is why audience acquisition, your audience growth is so important. You have to make it a number one priority. And honestly, if you’re gonna invest, like I knew for me, like I’m always gonna spend money, rightfully so on audience growth and lead generation. I’m willing to break even, I’m willing to lose money, like I’m willing to not be profitable in the short term so I can be profitable in the long term. I’m willing to lose money generating leads so that I can fill my bucket with the best possible people who actually want to work with me so that I’m not creating offer fatigue where my audience is like, we’ve heard it, we’ve been there, man, what’s going on like this?
Kristen Boss (24:47): What happens? Right? And understanding that eventually people are gonna unsubscribe. Like I know people that have probably been on my list for three years and they’ve just decided they’re never gonna buy from me. And I don’t, I, I have no thoughts about that. I’m like, okay, they’re not gonna buy for me. Am I offended when they unsubscribe? No. The reason why I’m not offended is because I’m constantly getting new subscribers because I make that an ongoing business practice that I have that keeps me abundant, keeps my marketing fresh, keeps me relevant. And honestly, I will always be wanna be on the leading edge of what’s happening in marketing and sales. I always wanna be on the leading edge of what’s new, what’s relevant and what matters. And the only way I can do that is by constantly thinking about, okay, what does today’s buyer need? Because that’s the question I’m asking myself in order to acquire new leads and what today’s buyer needs is different than what last year’s buyer needed.
Kristen Boss (25:43): So in order to generate new audience and new people in your funnel is you have to be relevant, you have to know what’s going on. You have to understand, well, what’s the pain point right now? I’m constantly thinking about, okay, what’s the, what’s the pain point right now? Is it seasonal? Is it annual? Is it economic? Is it internal? Is it with industry? I’m always thinking about what are the current pressure points that are relevant to my consumer and my buyer right now? And the moment I am marketing from that and serving from that place, I am constantly acquiring new leads because I put myself in the front of the line and always thinking, okay, and what’s the next problem I can see them having, I’m not just thinking about the problems they’re dealing with right now. I’m thinking about potential problems six months from now.
Kristen Boss (26:30): Like for example, in 20 19, 20, actually it was 2018, that was when I saw trends happening in network marketing. I was like, Oh, we’re about to hit like massive burnout e eventually at some point where there’s gonna be churn and burn culture. And a lot of people are gonna leave this industry unless we change, unless we bring sustainability unless we start really bringing everything through the lens of playing the long game and helping people enjoy the process. So I hope this was an incredibly valuable episode for you because oftentimes, I see people stall out in their business because they have stalled out in growing their audience and acquiring new leads. So if you make this a number one priority, you’ll never be outta leads. You’ll always have new customers coming in and growing your revenue won’t be as big of a problem. We’ll catch you in the next episode
Kristen Boss (27:28): That wraps up today’s episode. Hey, if you love today’s show, I would love for you to take a minute and give a rating with a review. If you desire to elevate the social selling industry, that means we need more people listening to this message so that they can know it can be done a different way. And if you are ready to join me, it’s time for you to step into the Social Selling Academy where I give you all the tools, training and supports to help you realize your goals. In the Academy, you get weekly live coaching so that you are never lost or stuck in confusion. Whether you are new in the business or been in the industry for a while, this is the premier coaching program for the modern network marketer. Go to www.thesocialsellingacademy.com to learn more.
