Here’s how to grow a brand’s online audience on a budget

Building engagement with your audience can be really hard in today’s tech landscape – while many more channels are available to share your brand story, it’s harder to cut through the noise. So how can marketers establish themselves?

Nadya Khoja, Chief Growth Officer at Venngage, has worked hard to figure it out. She’s built a strong online audience for Venngage, but also for herself. Ahead of her TNW Conference discussion, I asked her about her experiences, lessons learned, and how she sees the future of tech influencing tomorrow’s marketing techniques.

What was the driving force behind starting your own web-series, Drunk Entrepreneurs?

Within your four years at Venngage, you’ve grown from Digital Marketer, to Head of Marketing, to Chief Growth Officer. What have you learned in each of these roles?

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced growing Venngage’s user base? How did you overcome it?

What advice would you give to other marketers or bloggers trying to build an audience with a startup budget?

You don’t need money to make money. You just need to be creative in how you approach problems. And just because the CEO or some other higher-up at the company doesn’t believe one method is possible, it doesn’t mean they’re right.
I think what marketers should focus on is identifying the main KPIs or data that are indicators of growth, and keep breaking those inputs down into smaller, more testable inputs. You don’t need to go all out right away and build this massive strategy first. You can test small things out little by little and once you find something that works well, then double down on it and scale it up.

What piece of tech do you rely on the most in your daily role? How do you see tech playing a role in marketing in the future?

Venngage is obviously the tool I use most frequently. I rely on it to visualize ideas to help me see the bigger picture.

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The obvious technologies I rely on are, of course, my phone and computer, because it’s the only way I can communicate with people on a global scale at any moment. That’s what the future of marketing is — spreading out ideas faster. And we can only do that by connecting with other people and building relationships with the individuals who will help us get those thoughts out faster and to the right people. Communicating our ideas in a visual way helps our audience truly understand what we are saying and makes engagement easier.