SO YOU WANT TO BUILD AN AUDIENCE?
Building an audience is not just something that you should do, it’s literally something you have to do. You have to do it because without an audience there’s no one to sell to. Sales allows your business to keep the right oil to make the gears turn. It’s the blood inside of the vessel. Without either of those we are in trouble. AKA we don’t have a business.
Building an audience and replenishing the audience are two things that we focus on in our business here at Do The Damn Thing Nation. But I’m going to say this. For the sake of this post, I’m going to focus on our ability to simply build an audience. Let me give you the breakdown of the things you have to put in place or things that you have to put in place to check yourself as to how you’re building your audience.
LEANING IN
First thing you need to build your audience… is your story. Your story has the foundations for sure, but it also has the elements and what you throw out into the market. People hear in soundbites. If they stop to listen to you fully, they are becoming more interested, not just in who you are or what you’re about, but in your mission. Your story allows you to paint a picture over a period of time in which the person who has the problem that you solve can see themselves time and time again. This puts them in a position to lean into. You want them to lean in.
Leaning in is called a lead. You need leads so that you can close, and you need to close them so that you can keep being in business. It’s pretty simple. The key is that you have to tell your story not once, not twice, but daily. There are different methods to telling your story, but for the sake of this, I’m going to list out my top five favorites, and we’re going to talk about them in the form of distribution.
DISTIRBUTION
My five favorite distribution channels are LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, podcasting and medium.com. You have to have a distribution channel in order to tell your story. What’s your favorite distribution channel? After your story, next you need a place to put them in. So first you have your story, then you distribute your story, and then you put them in a container.
Different types of containers. All you have to do is choose one in order to build a successful business. The more containers you have though, the easier it is for you to talk to either the same person or different people. Let me give you the top four containers you have to have in business, or you could have in business. All I ask is that you pick one.
YOUR CONTAINER
Your email list is a container. Your phone call list is a container. Your physical mailing list is a container. A Facebook Group would be a container too, just a different type of a container. It’s like our Facebook Group called Do The Damn Thing Nation. Outside of those four containers, you could look at a few other outliers, but they would be on social media. Even though on social media you can build an audience or a following, the problem is that the social media platform doesn’t belong to you.
For example, we don’t own Facebook, we don’t own Instagram, and we don’t own Twitter. This means that even though we could build a following, it still will never be the company’s asset, which leaves us subject to being shut down at any time. Here’s the formula. If you could figure out how to tell your story once a day on one of these platforms, and then focus your energy and effort for 30 days on getting the person to jump inside one of your containers…you win.
So what container are you going to choose? How will you get your ideal person to say yes to you? Their “yes” is simply a “tell me more”.
If you can do that 30 days in a row and focus on building your list, you’ll have an audience to sell to, and before you know it, generating leads will be easy because you’ll have your own place to pull from.
