Most of us in the online space talk about building an audience.
I don’t think that frame is quite right. You build buildings. You build things. This isn’t just semantics.
Somewhere along the way, in the rush for speed, efficiency, and business, our terms have become less human.
Over the past month, I’ve been asking different groups of clients to complete the thought when it comes to an “audience”…
Attract… Nurture… what comes next?
They almost all say, “CONVERT!”
(If you must know, the second most popular answer is “MONETIZE.”)
We all have a good laugh about it.
It’s a strange phenomenon when you stop and think about this. We use these words about people the way we’d use it about a sale, a metric, a unit.
This past weekend, I attended my best friend’s engagement party. He and his fiancee have been together for years and I have watched their whole relationship up close.
When she said yes, I would not describe it as a conversion. I guess you could, but … yea, not really.
I’d describe it as the natural result of him paying attention for a long time. Showing up. Knowing what she likes and what she doesn’t. Doing the small things consistently. Then, when the moment came, doing one big thing she wasn’t expecting.
She wasn’t converted.
She was DELIGHTED.
That is the word we are missing.
***
You don’t build an audience. You attract them, you nurture them, and if you want them to stick around for the long haul, you delight them.
Three different skills.
- Attract is the first date. You dress up. You show up sharp. You are at your best.
- Nurture is the relationship growing over time. Different skills than the dating phase, obviously. Do you communicate well? Answer texts? Show up on time? Do the dishes? Nurture is consistency, follow-through, presence: the weekly newsletter, the timely reply, the showing up when you said you would.
- Delight is the part almost everyone forgets.
When my friend told me he was proposing (they are not the romantic type) I still told him to do something that would surprise her.
We all have different preferences but my point is that if a guy takes his wife to the same restaurant every Friday for 20 years, it might be good to mix things up once in awhile.
There’s a difference between consistency and predictability.
When it comes to cultivating a relationship with an audience, predictability can slowly kill long-term attention.
The fix isn’t more content. It is surprise inside the consistency. Most experts only do two of the three. Most marketing bros only do one (attract, and they call the other two the funnel).
The people who hold an audience for years and even decades do all three.