Michelle takes a deep dive into audience borrowing - what it is, why it works, and how getting it wrong can quietly tank your marketing.
Think you just need a better marketing strategy? In this episode, Michelle takes a deep dive into audience borrowing - what it is, why it works, and how getting it wrong can quietly tank your marketing. She breaks down why showing up in front of “good enough” audiences wastes your time, how to build genuine relationships with the people who own the audiences you want, and why precision matters more than ever in a crowded market. If your collaborations, guest spots, or visibility efforts aren’t turning into real results, this episode will show you exactly what’s missing in your sequence.
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Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner and I'm a business designer and strategist. In the 15 plus years I've done this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business, and the order in which you take them, is way more important than how you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
Defining Audience Borrowing
And this season, as you know, we've been focusing on the It Matters More theme. Because so many of you tell me how you're experiencing a more crowded market, there's more competition, there's more people doing what you're doing. When you have more competition, getting those details right, they matter.
And that matters because people are looking in other places, they're going to have more questions, they have more options. Maybe they're a little bit more careful about where they spend their money. And in those moments, you can't get away with as much as you used to.
So in that spirit, we're going to revisit a topic I've touched on here before, and that topic is audience borrowing. And how getting it right can be a game changer for your business, especially if you're a relationship marketer, but even if you're a traffic marketer. And how getting it wrong, or just doing okay with it, aka not worrying about the details, not worrying about the fact that some things matter more, it can hold you back or it can send confusing signals about why your business is or is not working, or more specifically, why your marketing is not working.
So let's get into it. We're going to start with definitions. You've heard me talk about audience borrowing before if you've spent any amount of time with me, but let's remember what it's called, or what other terms may be used out there when people are talking about the same thing.
Why Audience Borrowing Often Goes Wrong
So when I say audience borrowing, you may hear other people say terms like joint ventures, collaborations, co-marketing, even introductions. There are a million different names, but I use audience borrowing because I find it to be the most inclusive one. Because when I talk about audience borrowing, what I am talking about is that you are going and inserting yourself into a space where ideally your people already are.
But we'll talk about that in a second. That's where maybe things can get a little sloppy. Audience borrowing at its core is you going out, not relying on your own platforms, not relying on your email list, your LinkedIn profile, your Instagram profile for people to find you, but instead you are looking at where people are already gathered and you are going and inserting yourself into that place, aka borrowing that audience from whoever originally gathered that audience.
So you might be borrowing it from a professional organization. You might be borrowing it from a colleague. But you are saying, hey, there's a place over here where my people are gathered, whether that's virtually, whether that's in real time or not, whether that's a good old-fashioned conference.
You're saying people are gathered in this spot, so I'm going to figure out a way to go insert myself into it and speak to them in some way. That's what audience borrowing is. And that's where we start to see the other things that it's called, right?
When it's called a joint venture, sometimes we know that and see that with people who are putting on webinars together. Or we see collaborations amongst consumer brands, right? We might see Adidas go collaborate with a famous clothing brand.
And so Adidas is saying, hey, there are these people gathered who are customers of this clothing brand. We want to get in front of them, so let's collaborate. And let's do something to put our product, you know, co-branded, collaborated with in front of this audience.
And that's what we're talking about when we're talking about audience borrowing. And again, audience borrowing, some people have said, wow, that seems like a really transactional term. And I get it.
I get where you're saying that. But I, again, am using that term because the other terms, the collaboration, the co-marketing, the joint ventures, we tend to have a very specific definition in our mind of what that means, right? They tend to be associated with specific strategies or tactics.
And you know how I feel about that. Like if you are starting your conversation with a specific strategy or tactic in mind, it probably means you're missing a sequenced question that would get you back to a better outcome. And so we're going to keep using audience borrowing because that's what we're doing.
That's the first question we want to ask when we're talking about audience borrowing is, what audience should I borrow and in what format? So as soon as I don't call it audience borrowing and I call it joint venture, you're already going to skip that first question because in your brain, you probably have a very specific definition of what a joint venture looks like. So excuse that little rant, but I just want to be really clear about what we're doing.
Because again, then you can see the sequence over strategy in it, right? And you can understand why sometimes I use the terms that we do. So before we talk about how audience borrowing done right is important and how to really make sure you're caring for all the details, let's talk about the mattering more piece and more specifically how I see audience borrowing going wrong, or at least not going as well as it could when that sequence part is missing.
Precision of Inputs and the Slippery Slope of “Good Enough”
Because audience borrowing is one of our very classic simple but not easy strategies. In that on the surface, it's relatively simple. Oh, okay, I'm going to go borrow an audience.
I'm going to go speak to a group of people. Got it. I can do that.
Well, yeah, you can, but it does require some things to be in place. Number one, and the most important thing is that it requires precise inputs. And I use this term a lot, precise inputs.
It can be a little bit annoying, but I use it for, again, a really specific reason. Because it is very, very easy with audience borrowing to get a little sloppy. Because when we look at the types of opportunities there are out there to borrow audiences, a couple of things go on.
Number one, it can be a little intimidating for you to go out and ask to borrow an audience, right? And you also are probably offered audiences. If you're doing some networking and you're talking to people, people are going to naturally offer up some opportunities for you.
And it can be really easy to say yes to a lot of things. And it can be really easy to stay at that surface level and just say, oh, good, I'm borrowing an audience. Someone asked me to be on their podcast.
Fantastic. That counts as a borrowed audience. Well, we have to consider what audience you're borrowing and be really, really careful about it, right?
Because the secret about audience borrowing is that there's a little bit of an inverse relationship that you have to match between the ease of booking it and the quality of the match of the audience that you're looking for. So in order to have an absolutely perfect match of an audience, those are going to be really hard to book. It's going to be really easy, relatively, to book audiences that are just OK.
They fit some sort of pattern, some sort of profile of the person that you're looking for, but it's pretty broad, right? It's not super, super zeroed in. And to get your absolutely perfect people, wow, your precision of inputs needs to be absolutely perfect and you need to find the absolutely perfect opportunities.
So usually we get stuck somewhere in the middle because if you're only holding out for those absolute perfect opportunities, you're probably not going to find enough people or enough leads, especially if you're just getting started. But if you allow yourself to be sloppy, you're going to waste a ton of time getting in front of way too broad of audiences where you are looking for a needle in a haystack and you're essentially doing traffic marketing. It is really easy if you're trying to relationship market and you're trying to borrow audiences.
It is really easy to kind of slide into audience borrowing looking like traffic marketing and making choices that make it traffic marketing. Let me give you an example that happens all the time to my B2B folks. So when I have B2B folks who are trying to sell into C-suites of organizations and we talk about audience borrowing, this is where when you're a B2B person, audience borrowing has to be really precise.
And a lot of times you're literally borrowing an audience of one, meaning we're looking for introductions for you. So when we're having those conversations, my clients would usually come back with ideas like speaking at a conference or running a workshop, running a lunch and learn. But here's the catch.
Senior managers, senior folks, C-suite folks, they're not attending a lot of conferences. They're definitely not attending a lot of lunch and learns. And so it's very easy for you to go borrow audiences and come back and have a bunch of leads who are middle managers who don't actually have any buying power, but they're desperate for your services because they see their organization needs you.
And for you to get really excited about that and think that you've found some quality leads. Well, guess what? You haven't found quality leads.
You have found people who are very eager for your services, yes, but they have no buying power. And all of a sudden they have to try to sell you three rungs up the ladder at their organization. And that's never going to happen.
And so when we're borrowing audiences, we have to be really, really careful about, hey, what audience are you borrowing and making sure that it is true to a relationship marketing map and not kind of veering over into a traffic marketing map. So translation to all that, it's very easy to take a broad traffic mindset to audience borrowing, right? And when you do that, the problem with that is the rest of your efforts will not go as far as they could, right?
It is possible, like, sure, you can do that and you can go build a big audience, right? Again, it's a traffic marketing thing. But now the rest of the marketing that we have in place, your inputs, this is why precision of inputs matters, your inputs are not going to be as quality.
And so you're going to sit there and you're going to wonder, why am I not selling things? What's happening? What's wrong with the rest of my marketing?
When there may be nothing wrong with your marketing, it may just be that the inputs were wrong. And this is a real slippery slope, again, you know, with audience borrowing, because like I said, you're always trying to balance that. Like, how can I find enough opportunities in front of the right people, but not slide down to wrong opportunities that really just look like needle and haystack stuff?
And I have this conversation with people all the time. They'll be like, oh, yeah, I tried audience borrowing, I hear you. But, you know, I just ended up with a bunch of junior people.
I just ended up with a bunch of people who didn't actually need it. And I'm like, yeah, that's because you didn't do it right. It's because you didn't find the correct audience.
And that's where simple but not easy comes in. Because it's a simple concept of finding the right audience, but that's the piece of audience borrowing that takes a lot of work. And that's where we need to, again, it matters more.
When markets are really wide open and easy, and everybody's buying things, and there's not a ton of competition, okay, fine, maybe you met a higher-end manager at an organization, and they could pretty easily work three rungs up and get a purchase through. You know, that probably happened back in like 2015. And that was fine and great then.
But it's not happening now. And so, again, where it matters more, we need to really dial in for some of these things. And when we dial in, we're returning to our fundamentals, right?
We're returning to our sequence over strategy. We're talking about understanding why you're doing it, right? And why your audience borrowing is because you have identified it as to be a more effective way to meet people.
You've identified that your particular business is in alignment with doing some audience borrowing. Fantastic. Not every business necessarily is.
But you've identified that your business is, and so it's going to be a more effective way than trying to meet people through other means, like through content marketing or something. And so then what do we want to do? We want to talk to only the right people.
And, again, this is obvious, you know, but is it? Based on some of the examples I've just shared, and I'm going to run through my own example of how this can go sideways on me. Because, again, talking to only the right people, that is the way that it makes it a more effective way to meet people and to meet leads.
How Relationships Make or Break Audience Borrowing
If you allow yourself to branch out too far in your audience borrowing, then you're going to miss number one of our fundamentals of understanding why you're doing it and that answer being, I'm doing it because it's the most effective way for me to market. If you spread out too far, it's no longer the most effective way for you to market. And so you're losing that advantage.
And so how do you know who the right people are? This goes into stuff I talk about in networking that pays inside the course, right? You need to know who those people are.
You need to know what I call your ideal connection avatars. Who are the people? Who are the organizations who are hosting and who quote-unquote own the audience that you want?
Who are you going to go borrow this audience from? You need to know who that is. And then you need to spend time building those relationships with people.
With me, it's always going to come back to building relationships, right? Because we need to have relationships in place with the people who own the audiences that we want to borrow so that we can make this a win-win for everyone. And over time, it can multiply.
Doing It Right: Relationships, Discipline, and Long-Term Wins
So let's get into an example of how this works or frankly how it doesn't in my business. Let me be really frank with you. Because again, this slippery slope of what does it really look like to borrow an audience in a world where you don't have a lot of room for air or slippage or whatever we want to call it.
You'll often hear me talking about guest teaching as one of my central business strategies. I absolutely love it. I'm going to go into different programs, different organizations, and I'm going to teach people.
A lot of times I'll be teaching them about networking. Sometimes I'm going to be teaching them about relationship or traffic marketing. There's a lot of different things that I can go in and teach as a complimentary kind of bonus episode or extracurriculum inside of a program.
And it's always been one of my most effective strategies. Now where this goes right, this goes back into our list of knowing the people, right? And precision of inputs.
Where this goes right is when I build relationships with those people who own the audiences and I invest in them year round, right? We're actively communicating. We're talking about our audiences.
We're talking about how we can help. We're talking about what they're going through, how we might be able to do things a little bit differently. Like how can I truly add value?
This doesn't mean we're spending hours on the phone, by the way. If you know anything about my networking that pays system, this means we are doing brief check-ins, but I'm staying connected to them. I'm building real relationships with them.
We're probably also talking about our family lives or our gardening or what I'm doing at the beach that day. Like we're actually building a relationship. And then when I go and borrow their audience, it's not at all a transactional thing.
It doesn't leak over onto the traffic side at all because we have that relationship in place and we are very clear about what we're doing and why we're doing it. And it can be a huge win-win. And by the way, I have this relationship with people who bring me in to talk to 10 people and who bring me in to talk to 500 people.
The size of the audience doesn't necessarily matter in terms of how you're building the relationship with the person who owns that audience, right? You're building the same relationship. They just might be putting you in front of different sized audiences for different reasons.
Now here's where it doesn't work as well because this often happens to me. I will be connected to someone. Maybe I teach in their community.
Maybe they know my work. Maybe we're colleagues and peers and we just haven't done a lot of direct work together because there aren't opportunities for that. But somebody knows me, right?
And they will reach out and they'll say, hey, I think my friend could really use your information. Their audience would absolutely love this. It would be such a great fit.
Can I introduce you? And maybe they're building a resource library. That's a really common thing that happens.
And so they'll reach out and they'll ask, can I introduce you? Or maybe they'll know me and they'll reach out directly and they're the ones who are building it. And that's awesome.
And it's lovely and it's wonderful. And they say, I love your material. Can we do something?
Can I get you in front of my audience in some way? And usually it's in a passive way, right? It's not, can you come in and teach live?
They'll say like, I'm building a resource library. I would love to have a training from you in there. And at this point, I have a lot of those stock trainings.
So it's a pretty easy ask for me. It's not going to take a ton of my time to produce that material. So usually I will say yes.
However, here's what's interesting, is even though everyone's excited about that and we see the synergy, if I don't take the time to build a relationship with them, I very rarely if ever see someone coming over from their audience into my audience. So when I build a relationship with people and when I'm teaching live and when there's a lot of synergy there, it's a fantastic lead generation situation for me. When my material is in someone else's program relatively passively and we met maybe at a time where I didn't have a lot of time to nurture a new relationship for whatever reason, that definitely happens.
I talk a lot about keeping a network steady. Sometimes I don't have a lot of room in my network. So I'll just say, sure, you can have this training.
And then lo and behold, nothing happens because there wasn't a relationship strong enough with the person who owned the audience. I didn't spend the time building that relationship. I mean, this is a me problem, right?
I could have spent that time building that relationship, but I didn't. And then the training just goes into a passive library so that even if people watch it, there's not a lot of context. And that I would put is where I would call kind of traffic-based audience borrowing, right?
Where I'm just kind of passively saying, sure, have this thing, wonderful. I'm so glad your audience will benefit from it. And that's great.
Like I'm happy for them to have it. And again, I have these stock trainings, so it's fine. But unless I have time to put into that relationship and get creative with that person and really build it, I know that it's not gonna be the game changer for me than it would be if I sat and built the relationship.
I also know, frankly, in those cases that that is usually my version of talking to a good enough audience, right? So I was kind of calling out my B2B people who can very quickly have a good enough audience. They're gonna go talk to managers or department heads instead of the C-suite because it's a lot easier to book.
In this case, these are a lot easier to book for me. Somebody comes to me and says, hey, I would love to include you. I'm like, yeah, sure, here you go, right?
That was easy for me. But what's the trade-off for easy? Trade-off for easy is that I don't get nearly as many leads, if any, from those opportunities.
Exact same way I see my B2B folks not getting nearly as many opportunities. When they kind of get a little undisciplined with the audience that they're gonna borrow, when they don't worry as much about the precision of inputs. And then this just becomes the equivalent of a connection call, right?
That ends with, okay, great, I can't wait to support each other, right? Here you go, I'll do this, I'll do this. But it's just not gonna work out in the way you need it to work out, in the efficiency way you need it to work out.
We hear audience borrowing. We're putting that time and effort into things because we expect it to be a higher conversion event. So when you let some of these borderlines, right, some of these boundaries cross a little bit, then that conversion is gonna come down and it's gonna really quickly not make sense for your time.
And so that's where we're talking about, again, that it matters more. We can't just say, oh, I'm gonna audience borrow so every opportunity that comes my way I'm gonna say yes to. That, again, is the equivalent of being stuck in kind of connection calls where anybody who wants to spend 30 minutes with you chatting, you'll be like, yeah, sure, great, that sounds good.
Well, does it? Does it really sound good? So we need to have a little bit of discipline and, again, some of this precision of inputs because if we're gonna summarize this, borrowing audiences, it's one of my go-to strategies for both my business and my clients.
And my clients, both traffic and relationship side, we talk about borrowing audiences and how to make that work. But it's also, again, simple but not easy. I've talked about that a couple of times today, meaning it requires more discipline.
It requires more precision of inputs because if you get a little lazy with the audiences that you're borrowing, results are gonna go down. And in a world where markets are noisy and saturated, you're gonna notice that going down a lot faster than you would when the markets are wide open for the taking, right? Because when markets get saturated, that's when we see a greater impact on not doing the right thing or missing a little detail.
It's gonna hurt us a lot more. You can't get away with as much. And so it's important that you really buckle down when markets get saturated and you think through things a couple levels, 10%, 20% more detail than maybe you had to when markets were wide open.
So if you are someone who's borrowing audiences right now, I mean, get on board with me. I still am. It's still the best strategy that I have.
So I very much hope that you are. Also, this is an invitation and a reminder to you that kind of having an it matters more mindset, really thinking through not only the audiences that you're borrowing, but the quality of relationship you're building with that person or that organization that you're borrowing it from, that's when you're gonna find the right ones. And that's when you're gonna find those really turbocharged results from your efforts at audience borrowing.
And of course, that's what I want for you. That's why we audience borrow in the first place. Because a lot of times it is what I found to be the absolute best way to get qualified leads to convert at a high rate.
So let's do it right. And with that, as always, thank you for being here today. If this episode helped you, I'd be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that it might help, or if you left a review because that just helps more people find it.
And as always an invitation to head to themichellewarner.com, jump on my email list, or even drop me an email and message, letting me know what you'd like to hear from me on a future podcast. I love to hear from all of you. Hit me up on LinkedIn, wherever.
I always like to hear your voices and hear what is going on in your business and what is on your mind. Thank you all. And we will see you back here in a couple of weeks.