406: Making the Most of Media Exposure
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How can you make the most of unexpected media exposure? We were recently asked to be on a local TV program to talk about our business, so on this episode, we discuss how you can make the most of unexpected media exposure. We also share why you need to be intentional with your business interactions, connect others with your message, and understand that your business is highly visible in your community.
Main topics:
Embrace visibility as a business
What you post matters
Preparing for TV
Know your messaging purpose
Main takeaway: As a business, your actions, posts, and responses are seen by other people, so always be professional.
Links:
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/188
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/276
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/372
https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/382
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
pet, people, segment, post, clients, pet sitters, wanted, services, pet first aid, walks, business, pet sitting business, asked, responses, industry, little bit, provide, dog, tv, aspect
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:03
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin and we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for listening today. Thank you also to pet sitters associates and our lovely Patreon members, like Jennifer Teresa, Alicia, Sherry, Katie Savannah, Beth Claire, Adriana, Becky, Doug, and Jack, thank you very much.
Collin 00:24
Yes, and if you would like to learn more about becoming a Patreon supporter, all that means if you have found value in the show, you've learned something if it's helped your business, consider supporting the show financially. And to learn all of the ways that you can support our show, you can go to petsitter confessional.com/support.
Meghan 00:41
Recently, we were asked to be on a segment of our local TV station. And we wanted to share a little bit about that experience. It was a little nerve wracking because it was on live TV. So we couldn't do multiple takes and we couldn't mess up at all. But it got us thinking about what the you know, the pet city and industry as a whole. And where as pet sitters and dog walkers where we want our businesses to be positioned in the community. You know, we think about your own business, what do others think of it and we talk about branding is more than your logo, and it's how others perceive you and your messaging and your marketing out there. But what do they know about your business, not just your clients, but other people in the community that may know of you but don't need a pet sitter? Or even people who don't know about you? What do they think about the pet sitting industry? What did they think about your local community of pet owners? And then specifically, what do they think about your business,
Collin 01:37
we've been just personally on a really big push to try and make as many appearances as we can at business gatherings, networking and public events. It's not just having a booth or a table at something, but truly going as business owners to attend functions and things like that, right when we get when we get invited to when we hear about them, but going making a point to attend as a business owner of a pet sitting business.
Meghan 02:05
And it can feel a little daunting, because really, anybody can be a pet sitter. Yes, this job is very hard. And it takes a lot of charisma and a lot of communication skills and a lot of drive to get things done. We want people to know about this industry. And that professionalism exists. Many people know of a pet sitter, but few know of a pet sitting business that it's a legitimate thing. And so that's what we had wanted to try to communicate through this. That's something that we are highly aware of when we're in the community and interacting with others. That while this is a business that you can make it however you want, you can work as much as you want, or as little you can have a team you can be solo, it's very malleable in what this can be for you. But it is a professional it can't be can be a career but and
Collin 02:52
as the industry grows and matures as it has over the last 30 years, it will be seen as more and more professional. But part of that is each one of us taking a role of being an ambassador for the industry, taking the message of professionalism of how serious we do this, all of our training all that we have to take that not just to the general public, but to other business owners, the business world as well. And that that is a responsibility to us. If we want to see the industry continue to grow to mature to expand. It takes that effort of each one of us I keep using the word Ambassador taking viewing ourselves as an ambassador, not just for our business, that is certainly something that we do as the business owners, but also an ambassador and a representative of the industry.
Meghan 03:40
It's interesting because as we've talked in the past, some clients don't really care who walks their dog. It could be you it can be some other random person, they just want their pet cared for the litter scoop, whatever it is, but with this conversation, it's taking yourself out of your business and like like you just mentioned, you being an ambassador for the industry. It's taking a holistic approach and bettering the industry as a whole.
Collin 04:04
So how did this TV thing come about? Interestingly, they actually reached out to us through a DM on Instagram. Seriously, without sweat it took right
Meghan 04:13
yeah. And it wasn't a scam. I looked at the guy's profile. He was the co host of the program on our local TV news station. And he asked me if we'd be interested in coming on to talk about our business. He specifically said that it was because they've been following our account for a while and loved seeing our posts, which is typical of a scammy post. But again, I looked into this and it really was the guy I saw him on TV with our city in the background. So he said that he loved what we share on social media. And that's interesting because the purpose of our posts on social media, whether or not to get on TV, that was not our end goal. We were not trying to pitch ourselves in any way. It was just information and value and education to our clients. But the reason why we were onto He was because of our posts
Collin 05:02
that they liked. They liked what they saw. And they liked the philosophy behind them, they connected with our message to truthfully, I mean it just a little bit here, it was a little bit of a validation about our philosophy of posting and how we use social media. It's basically the idea that what you're posting should be beneficial to other people, even those that don't use or can't use, your services always provide value. If you're interested in learning more about social media, how to use it, how to develop your own philosophy, check out episodes, 188 276 372 and 382. It's a it's a big topic that we like to talk about.
Meghan 05:38
Yeah, I mean, because what you post truly matters, people see you, your business, knowing that eyes are always on your company, not just in clients homes, you know, clients have cameras, not just walking in neighborhoods with neighbors peeking out their blinds, but also your digital presence as well. Whether it's your Google My Business, that you're providing updates on your Facebook, your Instagram, if you have a tick tock and you do that your posts do get surfaced by the algorithms, you know, not as much as we would like, but they do and people who have never heard of your company will see them and people who use your company will see them. So who are you talking to? Is what you are putting out a good representation of you and your services? Is it just cute dogs and cute cats? Those are great, but is it value? Is it shareable? Is it educational? Is it pet tips and tricks? Is it? I don't I don't this is how I do what I do day in and day out. This is our team. This is why we can provide you with peace of mind. Does your
Collin 06:39
posts elevate your position in your community? And that may be silly thinking about oh, this one Instagram post or this one Facebook post? But it's not just individual ones? It's a holistic approach. Have you consistently posting this kind of material information and helping others? Do your posts? Share? And are you imbuing them with your ethics and with your personal passion? It's interesting because as isolated as this job is we're highly visible when we're working as Megan, you mentioned earlier, people drive by us on the street Clancys in their homes, to their cameras, neighbors, neighbors watch us when we're parking our car. And people see our online content is absolutely critical that we don't forget that other world because it's so easy to post and forget and move away. But people will have eyes back on and it exists as a continuing representation of your company when you have long forgotten about the post. And at each of these stages. People are making a judgment about who you are, what you stand for. And they're making a judgement about what you do. So you have to make sure that all of your language your responses to everyone is a professional manner and in respectful to them as well. Your actions and responses are seen by other people like it's it's a little it's a little overwhelming to think about that sometimes.
Meghan 07:55
Well, particularly because the internet lives forever. I hear I've heard that before. Yeah. So your comment from five years ago to a negative review, or somebody just on a random post that lives forever. People can search that people can go back to it and say, oh, this person was not very professional. I don't want to do business with them. Or they handled this in a great way. So I'm willing to partner with them.
Collin 08:19
Yeah. Now this could swing hard and the other way, right? Should we concern ourselves with everyone's opinions about us and become frozen with fear of their judgment from others? Obviously, the answer is no, it we should not do that. You need to be bold. You need to be proud of who you are. Be confident in your passion that you have the morals and ethics that you bring to your work. Be proud of those things be bold in what you say. But you have to be knowledgeable and intentional about the things that you put out there so that you can be consistent in that manner.
Meghan 08:53
One of the ways to differentiate yourself is through insurance and getting that with pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. for over 20 years they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry. You can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking memberships Pet Sitter confessional and using the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at Pet said llc.com. After the TV station reached out about us coming on. They asked if we wanted to cover anything specifically, which is a really big question. We only had five minutes for the segment. So we knew that because it was a lifestyle segment this was going to need to be engaging and informal and kind of a conversation
Collin 09:51
and it was also live right so we had to make sure to be putting our best foot forward through this entire process.
Meghan 09:56
But I'm so glad that he asked us about what questions we wanted to be asked because if We were just going to do this off the cuff, it would have been a lot more nerve wracking where we were able to prepare very well.
Collin 10:05
So ask yourself, if someone gave you five minutes to talk about what you do, what would you want to be asked? What do you think people should know about you and your company, given where you are? And where you want to go?
Meghan 10:19
Yeah, I mean, because here's the thing. You could say, we're a dog walking company and do petsitting visits. But that's doesn't tell all of what you do. It's not going to cut it. Yeah, it's not it doesn't encompass exactly what you provide to the client. It says what services you do, but what do you actually do for the client?
Collin 10:39
And that's a key point here in understanding our role as a pet services company, what do you do? Many of us our first reaction is I do dog walking, I do pet sitting, I would argue that your first response should be something like, I provide peace of mind. I provide pet parent guilt absolution, I provide high quality pet care services for people to live their best life possible. It's connecting to something just a little bit bigger. Now, how do you provide that peace of mind, you do that through excellently executing your pet care services on a consistent and repeatable basis. That's how you do that. But what you do is something just a little bit bigger. So there has to be a story and some connection thread to all of this.
Meghan 11:31
So we've had three main areas that we wanted to cover, who we are, what we do, and what we need. But didn't just answer those in a straightforward way. Because again, it had to be a little bit conversational. So who we are, well, we can tie that into the fact that we've been doing this for 11 years, we've been pet sitting and dog walking for 11 years, we have grown immensely over the last five, it just started off with Colin and I now we have a team of 11 employees across two service areas.
Collin 11:57
And this was important to show us as a vibrant as a growing as an expanding business as available for people to hopefully to catch a little bit of excitement as part of our story of growing and new of growth and people looking to that wanting to be a part of something new and exciting in their community.
Meghan 12:17
The second part was what we do, obviously, we need to play up the fact that we provide peace of mind to pet parents in their home, we come to them, we wanted to differentiate ourselves we do we no longer offer boarding a daycare. So we didn't we wanted to specifically mention what we do provide because we do get a lot of calls for boarding which we no longer offer. It also helped us play up the convenience factor of you no longer have to transport your dog. It really focuses on how it helps the client rather the than the intricate details of each service.
Collin 12:47
Again, that story based right there's a time in place for detailing out exactly how long each service is exactly how they're conducted about the updates about the this about that. But the story here was what do we do, we provide peace of mind in your home by allowing you to live a more rich life and the clients problem, right the client's problem of of needing peace of mind of needing this convenience of needing absolution from their pet parent guilt later, we can get into exactly how we get when we're having a one on one conversation with a potential client.
Meghan 13:19
The third component was what we need. While hiring is a big deal. I'm sure for a lot of you as well, it's been a little bit of a struggle over the past year or so. So instead of ending on a call to action to book our services, we ended with a call to apply for a job. We said you can go to our website and you can apply there we are looking for employees, we have a strict hiring process where we conduct a background check and go over a bunch of training and pet first aid and CPR certification and all of these things.
Collin 13:46
And that was actually an interesting aspect. Because hitting this back to the peace of mind we give pet parents, they some parents want to know who's coming into their home. So now while we are pitching our services and our on our hiring process, I'm also talking to pet parents so that they know how vetted people are how they get the background checks and the training that they receive. It's it's it's using that one situation to get out to get the same amount of information. But you're talking to two different people at the same time. We also
Meghan 14:19
wanted to talk about hiring because ultimately we can't serve as clients without staff. Colin and I had had a conversation beforehand of Oh man. So this is on live TV. It's going to be seen across all these hair salons and dentists office and and everywhere across our local region. What if we get 100 phone calls? How are we going to be able to service all those people? So we really had an intention of saying we are actively hiring
Collin 14:42
and it makes for a much more appealing and informational segment for the viewer when they know they're not being sales pitch
Meghan 14:47
to we also prepared for several common questions we get so we had some canned responses. We often get the question what's the craziest pet you've ever cared for? Or what's a horror story from pet sitting and dog walking again that
Collin 14:59
prepper ration allowing us to have these canned responses. So we didn't have to think up of things on the fly, which was really critical for us.
Meghan 15:06
We also knew that it was only five minutes. So five minutes can seem like an eternity. But it also goes pretty fast, we knew that there were going to be two co hosts, and then Colin and I. So there were four people on the couch, that's a lot of talking, which eats up a lot of time.
Collin 15:19
Another aspect of this was whether one or both of us would be on the segment. Truthfully, at this stage, getting both of us in one spot is pretty difficult. But we know that the optics of having us both there was super important and would help with the flow of the conversation a lot. Both of us being there was also part of the kind of getting to know us aspect of this, instead of us having to say that there's two of us and that we're married, and that we own the company together. And we've been doing this together for 11 years, people can visually see all of that and get to know us just a little bit more and be more comfortable with us be more familiar with us. Then we had to consider, I think the most important aspect of this entire process. What do we wear?
Meghan 16:06
That was very important. Actually, we didn't even know if we would be standing or sitting. Yes, fine. So that was also a discussion. What do we do with our hands? Yeah. But we couldn't show up in our normal dog walker attire of black T shirt with covered in Husky fur and shorts and, you know, close toed tennis shoes, but we want it to be at least a little more professional than normal. So I know Colin wore khakis, I wore jeans, and we wore a petsitter shirts.
Collin 16:31
These mid afternoon TV programs are usually played on things like salons that are played in bars, office waiting rooms with the sound off, right. It's just supposed to be backgrounds supposed to be inoffensive to anybody watching just generic TV in the background, plus people watching it in their homes. So if someone saw the images, but didn't hear any of this out, at least they'd have some kind of idea of what was going on because there'd be some more moniker at the bottom. There'd be us sitting there with our petsitter shirts on and there'd be some intrigue. Going into this. Another aspect of this visual aspect of trying to put all these pieces together was that they asked us for photos that they could display during our conversation.
Meghan 17:13
So think about the photos that you would include if somebody asked you to do this. What photos would you give them? What feelings would you want to leave people with? For us, we are working on growing our daily dog walks. So we picked a bunch of photos of dogs on leashes out on walks. We also used staff selfies with pets. We wanted those photos to be big and adventurous. So we picked ones with different and unique angles or cool lighting or you know services we wanted to highlight like dog walks and our adventure hikes. We walked into the segment with really two main goals here. One was to share about our dog walks. And the other was to ask for people to apply for a job. Those dictated really our decisions and guided the conversation.
Collin 17:54
If we're asked back on, we'll have a different goals, which means there'll be a completely different segment, we won't repeat the same thing twice. Right, as we left, we thank them and we told them about other content ideas for segments that would be maybe beneficial to them their daytime show. So they're always looking for content ideas, trying to get information to their viewers trying to be informational and helpful to other people on how fun segments. So we'll see if we're invited back on to cover more topics. But it's, it's just another opportunity that we can pursue.
Meghan 18:26
Yeah, we sent an email a couple days after thanking them for inviting us on and then we recapped the types of segments that we think would be beneficial to their audience.
Collin 18:34
Yeah. And just like the philosophy for posting on social media, we wanted our appearance to be beneficial and educational to more than just our immediate clients. We wanted to be there to help other people think about their options that they have available in their community. We had to think through all the aspects and the imagery that we wanted to convey this message.
Meghan 18:55
Yeah, because I had mentioned that were pet first aid and CPR certified. And one of the hosts said, Oh, wow, I didn't know that was a thing. And so it's a little bit of education there of yes, your pet care provider should be pet first aid and CPR certified. And also you pet owner should be as well. So you know how to react in an emergency situation. I think for our first time on TV with very little preparation, I think we only had about four days to prepare for this. I think we did a really good job. And I'm pretty happy with how we did. Yeah,
19:24
this was a little bit of a whirlwind for us. And we were definitely out of our element and out of our comfort zone. But I'm really happy with how it turned out. And the reception from our clients people have reached out to us was was great. So it was well worth it. Yeah, they're
Meghan 19:35
calling us famous, which we're not. But preparation was really the key for our success in this we only had one shot and it was live. So being prepared helped in that if they asked a weird question that we weren't ready for. We had some responses that we could throw in and spit it back to our goals. We know the mission and vision and values of our business. And so we could align that with Whatever question they threw at us.
Collin 20:01
Yeah, one cohost stated, Oh, I love where your business name came from, I get it now. It's actually a play on our last name and in which we responded, We wanted it to be personal, which is an aspect of our service, right? We want our service to be personal, personal and relatable to others. So we were thinking through our mission, vision and values of our company, and we were reading these responses that tied back and pointed back
Meghan 20:24
to those. Think about how you are positioning your business in your community. What do people think of you? What do you want them to think about when they know about your business? How would you prepare for something like this? Thank you to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and thank you for listening, taking your most valuable asset your time and listening to this today. We really appreciate it and we will talk with you next time. Bye
