So your work’s getting featured: how to make the most of the opportunity & grow your audience

Okay, so you’ve got an opportunity. You’re going to be a guest on a podcast, a speaker at an event, or your work is going to be featured in a magazine, for example. How do you make sure you’re making the most of that opportunity?

1. Streamline your URLs & social media handles

When your social media handles and URLs are all the same, it makes it so much easier for you, the person sharing your details, and the people who will want to follow and engage with your work.

As much as possible, make your handles and URLs the same, easy to remember names, even if that means adding something like an underscore or a full stop to make it happen. This is a super simple change that could take 5 minutes and make a big difference.

2. Update your website & social media profiles

A great result that will come from these opportunities, is that more people will be browsing your website and social media profiles. That means it’s important to make sure these are all up to date with the latest, most relevant information.

It’s no use someone landing on your website, seeing that you do commissions, and reaching out to book one in, if you don’t do those anymore and you only sell your products. So go through your bios and website and make any necessary changes before your episode, interview or feature goes live.

3. Check that your channels are consistently on-brand

Hopefully, those people who check out your Instagram will also click through to your website, maybe join your email list, download a freebie, and purchase something you sell. To make this experience amazing for these audience-members, you need to make sure each step is on-brand.

That doesn’t just mean visually, either. Each time someone interacts with your brand in a different place, it needs to look and feel like your brand. So if you haven’t updated your Instagram highlights with your new brand colours, or your email template is out of date, for example, take some time to update them so that everything is on-brand and amazes your potential customers!

4. Create a custom freebie for the opportunity

It would be a waste to get your work in front of a whole new audience of people and stop there. You need to get them to stick around and stay in the loop with you and your work. The best way to do that is to offer a custom opt-in.

This should be a free download or offer that’s relevant to the topic you talked about and the people who will hear or read it. You’ll share a link for them to sign up to your email list and get the download sent to them. For example, if you’re an illustrator who spoke at a conference about pricing illustration work, you could offer a free email course on pricing, a pricing quiz, a downloadable PDF guide to pricing, or a pricing calculator.

These highly relevant, custom freebies give people a way to connect with you beyond that one opportunity, get a tonne of value from you, and want to stick around and come back for more!

So think about what custom freebie you could create, and set it up in your email marketing provider for your upcoming opportunity.

5. Add an opt-in to your website

Not everyone will download the custom freebie you offer straight away, but they might look you up on Google, browse your website, or follow you on socials and head to your site a couple of months down the line. You don’t want to miss out on or forget about those potential customers.

So as well as creating a custom freebie to be shared at the time of the opportunity, add one to your website. This could be the same, specific one you shared for the talk, interview or feature you did, or a more general one for anyone who lands on your site.

This is something that you should have on your website at all times anyway, so if you don’t already have a way for people to opt-in to your email list and an incentive to do so on your site, now’s a great time to do that before your URL is shared with the world and hopefully a flood of new people end up there!

6. Set aside time in your marketing calendar for promotion

The person hosting the podcast, event, magazine or other feature you get will likely share the content, but you can and should too! You’re putting the time, effort, and energy into doing the thing, so you might as well put in the same amount of time, effort, and energy into getting it seen as much as possible to make it worth it!

Set aside some slots in your marketing calendar to promote the opportunity. This could include:

• Including it in your email newsletter
• Writing a blog post about it
• Sharing it in your social media feeds
• Talking about it on your stories
• Going live when it does
• Hosting a watch/listen/read party
• Sharing it personally with people you think would enjoy it
• Posting it in relevant communities

There are a tonne of ways to share, so make the most of them so you can make the most of the opportunity and get it in front of as many people as possible.

And there you have it. 6 super practical ways that you can make the most of your brand and work being featured. Which will you try first?

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