In this episode of Million Dollar Grit, host Julie Chenell shares an "epiphany" about audience growth for entrepreneurs, especially those with fewer than 1,000 followers or email contacts. She frames the core challenge as a visibility problem and distinguishes inbound (attracting prospects to your house) from outbound (going to prospects' houses) marketing, arguing that outbound activities often need to be prioritized for rapid growth. Julie outlines practical tactics: using paid Facebook ads to drive lead‑magnet sign‑ups (the Audience Builder Challenge), automating both inbound lead capture and outbound outreach with AI tools, and focusing on a single platform versus a diversified multi‑platform presence depending on the audience. She emphasizes her own strengths—rapid copywriting, AI‑driven idea generation, and a lack of perfectionism—that enable her to post consistently across LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and email while running two seven‑figure businesses. Julie warns that the rise of AI‑generated avatars will make authentic human audiences a scarce advantage, making audience building a top priority for the next five years. Listeners are invited to contact her via Instagram or email for coaching.
Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.
Hey everyone, this is Julie. Welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. Today, I think I'm having a little bit of an epiphany. About audience growth, social media, and sort of the tricks of the trade. I have to admit, I have always offered coaching and consulting around social media, you know, in the context of offers, copy, funnels. That's where my strength is, and I've given people lots of support, but I've never called myself a social media strategist, and there's a lot of reasons for that. I think one, I know a lot of social media social media strategists that are absolute badasses at what they do. And I just, it's not, I'm not as expert in any one particular platform. And number 2, it's not something that I ever sold as a service, right? So back when I was in the agency life, I sold, I did sell Facebook ads, but I sold funnels primarily. Focus on, you know, Instagram growth or anything like that. And so I've never marketed myself that way, and yet I feel that one of the sort of key imperatives for this year for myself and for my clients is to focus on audience growth. And my epiphany is that I actually am a social media strategist, but maybe I just have a slightly different focus than some others. And so today what I want to do is break down what it is you need when it comes to audience building, because I think the problem is big and people come to me all the time, "I don't have an audience. Nobody knows who I am." And there's a lot to unpack and you can go down a lot of expensive rabbit trails if you don't really diagnose the problem properly. So I want to talk specifically to the people who have an audience of less, less than, let's say, 1,000, because I would say if you have anything less than 1,000, that's a pretty small audience, and how do you calculate that 1,000 people? Let's say it's your email list and your social media following, and truly the gold standard of audience is an email list because you own the data. Every other type of audience, even if it's really, really big, you are technically at the mercy of whatever platform you're on. So If you have an audience of 1,000 people or less, you have a visibility problem. And this may or may not be a big problem for you. Now, if you sell high ticket, if you sell one-to-one, if you're mainly on word of mouth referrals, you may not actually feel the problem of a small audience because you have a lot of people, um, that are paying you a lot of money. And so you don't really have to have that high volume, but eventually your lead flow dries up. And you get into that famine and then you're like, crap, I don't have an audience to draw from. Okay, so if this is you, we have to separate two types of marketing and sales. There's inbound and there's outbound, and there's all kinds of fancy definitions for this, but let's just say that inbound marketing is people are coming to you. So think that you're in a house, people are coming to your house and knocking on your door and you're opening the door and you're saying, being, "Hey, how can I help you?" Right? Now inbound marketing is our favorite because we don't have to be rejected because the person is coming to us and we like this. So if you have a website, you have funnels, you have, you know, accounts, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, things like that, people are reading your content, they're interested, and they reach out. So inbound marketing are all the activities you're doing that make it more likely that they're going knock on your door, right? So if you think about this in-house analogy, you're putting up shutters, you're painting the siding, you're planting flowers, you're paving the sidewalk, you're putting a welcome sign, right? You're putting all this stuff out there on outside your house in hopes that they come up. Outbound marketing is the marketing where you go to somebody else's house, specifically a house that's having a party, and you go hang out at that party and you work the room. And so this may look like going in Facebook groups. It may look like DMing folks on LinkedIn. It may be asking for introductions, cold pitches, uh, you know, all of that, like outbound, right? And that's the real scary stuff because there's a lot of rejection, especially if you're doing cold outreach. The rejection is way, way, way higher than the acceptance. And so you can get really bogged down. But outbound is also something that you see on social media that I think people forget to do. So for example, inbound marketing on Instagram means you're posting Reels, you're posting stories, you're posting carousel posts. Outbound means you're looking for people to follow, you're commenting on other people's content, you're engaging with users, right? This can honestly feel like the biggest waste of time. But this is how you grow, right? So specifically on like a platform like X, your ability to grow on X is directly related to how well you comment on other people's stuff, right? That's outbound marketing. And if you post great content, that's inbound. So when people do meander on over to your profile, they're like, oh, this is cool, I'm going to follow. Okay. You need both to grow an audience. You need both. And. Usually the outbound marketing has to be stronger, uh, or more priority than the inbound marketing, just because it's more likely that you're going to get traction faster. Right? So I tell people, if you have a good brand, if you have a clear brand, you know what problems you're solving, you set up your platforms, whatever channels you happen to be on, you make them look good and you post consistently, then the rest of your time should really be outbound so that when people do come and hang out on your profiles, You're there. Now, when someone is just starting out and they have a small audience, it can be really stressful to do both because you're like, wait a second, I got to do inbound marketing. I got to do outbound marketing and I have to do client customer fulfillment, right? That's a lot of things. And so that's how people end up overwhelmed, burned out. And the thing that they always drop is the outbound because nobody wants to do outbound. And so then they end up doing inbound. And client fulfillment, and then they're frustrated that it takes so much time and energy and money, and they're not seeing the fruit of their labor. So I think that the best strategy to grow an audience is to get your inbound marketing as efficient as possible so that you have time to do outbound. So what does that look like? Maybe that means running Facebook ads to a lead magnet. It's pretty efficient. It costs money, but you don't really have to be doing a lot of work. You have to check on your ads, you have to create, create some ads, you have to create a lead magnet. So that's something like the Audience Builder Challenge, right? We have that. It's a free challenge. If you sign up for FG Funnels, it takes you through building a lead magnet and then you can run ads to it. And then that can be kind of some inbound marketing. You can also, you know, add some reels, some comment automations, things like that. And try to make that not too labor-intensive. And then your outbound marketing is your introductions, your follow-ups, your, you know, being awesome in Facebook groups and things like that. Because if you have a very manual inbound process and a very manual outbound process, you're going to get underwater really fast. And some people say, well, I can, I can automate my outbound. And you can, there are ways, you know, there are companies that do outbound research, there's AI agents that are doing outbound research for you. So there, So there are opportunities to automate on both sides of the coin. But, um, for some people, it's very obvious that their audience is on one specific channel. And so their best interest is to really focus on that channel. And I have given that advice many, many times, like, hey, focus on one channel, grow that channel, get to know that channel. And in that case, it does really benefit you to buy a course from an expert, right? A very tactical, like, here's how you grow your grow your audience on Instagram, or here's how you grow your audience on TikTok. But I think my opinion is kind of changing, not for everyone, but it's kind of changing because I'm starting to realize that people need to be on a lot of platforms because you never know where people are going to come from. And so you need good search platforms because You want AI that's searching the internet and using SEO. You want, whether they're on Google or ChatGPT, you want to be recommended, right? And so you need search content. This is content that's either on the blog or on YouTube, somewhere where they can find you, uh, and they being a prospect, right? You also need to be social, uh, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X. And I would argue that a lot of that content can be easily adapted and natively put on that platform. Threads would also be there. And then you need all that outbound. And so where I think I can provide the most value to people is that I am not a perfectionist. So I am really good at coming up with copy that converts, copy that gets attention, and adapting it quickly. So for the last month, I have been doing sort of an experiment where I'm posting on more platforms than normal. The only one that I'm not posting on right now, which I think I need to get into, is YouTube because YouTube is like the king, and I resist it mainly because of video, but I think I'm adjusting to that because I found some new tools that are getting me kind of excited. So, and I have been— people don't realize this, but I am a CEO of 2 companies, 7-figure consultancy and a multi-7-figure, uh, software automation, right? I have 80 clients that have one-on-one access to me, and I have been consistently posting on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for the last 3 weeks, 4 weeks, and email. And how am I doing that, right? And that is a combination of idea generation, strong copywriting abilities, efficiency with AI and automation, and a lack of perfectionism driving that. And so I think that's really where I shine, and that's, I think, how I can help you. So even though I have not pitched myself as a social media strategist, I absolutely do not have the biggest platform ever. So there's lots of people that do way better than I do. I have an extremely engaged audience. And I have multi-seven-figure businesses. And I think at the end of the day, that's what we all want, right? We want, we want wealth, we want financial success, and we want an audience. We don't need millions and millions of people. So I think I might reassess. I know I'm a business coach, a digital marketer, but I do think social media strategy and audience building is a strength, even though I've always written it off. So if this is something that you need support with, you know, DM me on Instagram, hit me up at email julie@juliechenell.com, because I think This is the year where there is a short amount of time where we can be building audiences, and largely we're relating to humans. But in the next 5 years, there's going to be an explosion of AI avatars. It's already happening, and it's going to be really hard to tell who's human and who's not. And so if you have put off your audience building, you really can't afford to do that anymore. It needs to be a high, high priority, one of the highest in your business. All right, talk to you soon.
And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.
