How to sell beyond your audience

(2 min read) Reach new customer bases without sacrificing your current income streams. A guide to leveraging marketplaces to scale your Creator business.

August 06, 2024

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Tl;dr

  • Creator direct-to-fan sales are limited by their audience size

  • The solution is to sell in marketplaces with ways for non-audience buyers to discover Creators’ offerings

    • The tradeoff is that these marketplaces have worse economics than direct-to-fan platforms

  • Creators should put their offerings on relevant marketplaces but only send their own audiences to direct-to-fan platforms

Capped sales are a problem

You, me, and every other Creator has the same problem:

Our reach (audience) is finite.

Everyone monetizes by selling something, from brand deals to digital products to consulting services. If you’re selling only to the people you reach with your content then your revenue is capped.

Why? 

Remember: Revenue = Quantity sold x Price

You can only sell something to people who:

  1. Know your offering exists, 

  2. Can access it, and

  3. Are willing to pay for it

So, to increase Quantity sold, you need to increase one (or more) of these three variables.

If you’re only selling directly to your audience, then you’d want to focus on:

  1. Promoting to your audience to maximize awareness

  2. Making your offering super easy to access

  3. Making your pitch and value proposition undeniable

But - again - all of these are limited by the size of your audience. Your sales will be some percentage of your audience up to 100% of your audience.

Here’s the thing - there are probably a lot of people outside of your audience who are willing to pay for your offering, but don’t know it exists. 

So what’s the solution?

Marketplaces.

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Marketplaces enable discovery

Marketplaces allow those people to become aware of your product, access it, and purchase it all without ever seeing your content. 

Marketplaces connect buyers and sellers of goods and services. Pretty broad, I know, but you’ve used tons of marketplaces in your online travels - Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, Amazon, and Upwork are all marketplaces where independent sellers transact with consumers looking for their services.

There are marketplaces for nearly every kind of offering, for example:

Unlike direct-to-fan monetization tools that require you to promote to your audience to make money, marketplaces make your offering discoverable to prospective buyers.

And that’s the real value.

There are a variety of difference mechanisms for this, including:

  • Features - The marketplace staff (or algorithm) curates featured offerings on their home or discovery pages

  • Search - Consumers discover offerings based on what they’re searching for

  • Algorithmic recommendations - Consumers discover offerings based on previous purchases

  • Promoted offers (ads) - Consumers discover offerings that sellers are paying to promote to them

Of course, nothing’s free. 

The cost for bringing you customers is a lower margin than you’d get for selling directly…So how do you take advantage of marketplaces without unnecessarily reducing how much money you actually take home?

Simple: 

Put your offering on every marketplace, but continue selling to your audience through a direct-to-fan platform. 

You want to take home as much as possible from the purchases made by your fans, but if you get a customer you never would have otherwise, then it’s fine if you make a bit less.

There’s a reason every Direct-to-Consumer ecommerce brand eventually wants to get into retail marketplaces like Amazon.

No matter how effective their sales and marketing efforts are, they can’t reach everyone. Being on marketplaces with massive scale and great discovery mechanisms means they are available to and discovered by huge cohorts of net new customers.

There’s no reason Creators can’t take the same approach to make more money than they otherwise would.

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Written by Avi Gandhi, edited by Melody Song,
powered by TheFutureParty

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