On one of our camping trips this year, our dog Zoe ran out of the camper and took off around the campground. She’s only a thirteen-pound dog. How hard can it be to catch one of these?
Turns out, it’s pretty hard if she doesn’t want to be caught, and if you follow your natural instincts. My first instinct was to chase her and grab her. However, since she’s not our first dog, I know the futility of that. You frustrate yourself, wear yourself out, and the dog has fun.
My best hope was to entice her with something she wants. In this case, we had some dog treats handy. It took a bit for her to lose interest in exploring and become interested in the treat, but after encouragement from us, she decided that the treat looked good, so she approached my wife to get it.
What does chasing a dog around a campground have to do with growing your audience?
I’m using audience here as the group of people you are marketing to and would like to attract to your business.
Lesson 1: Don’t chase your audience. The more you chase them, the faster they will run from you.
Lesson 2: Have items to give people to entice them to talk to you. When Zoe came to my wife, she wasn’t sad or regretting it. She was happy and excited to approach her.
Lesson 3: Realize that even though you’re giving people great value, they won’t come to you right away. It took Zoe many tentative tests before she decided she wanted to approach my wife or me, even though the treat looked good.
Lesson 4: Know that you will have to work hard to make this happen. It was hard watching Zoe run and not come back to us. We tried many strategies and offers before we found one that worked.
As business people, we often expect others to take us at our word or to trust referrals who say we are good to work with. That’s not the way the world works, as much as we’d like it to.
We have to be good at what we do and tell others exactly that in ways they find credible and valuable; then we must work hard to ensure that people realize this.
A properly set-up system to attract people to you and your business is a valuable asset. The challenge is that you have to set it up and do the work before you see the results, and creating the necessary elements to draw people to you isn’t something people do instinctively.
If you want innovative ideas or help in developing a system that will attract people to your business so they can move into a closer relationship with you, I offer one-time coaching sessions. We will talk for forty-five minutes, and you will leave with several ideas of what you can do to create this type of asset for your business and the tools to make it happen. If you’re interested, click here to schedule a time.
Have a great day!