How can every Business or Personal Brand turn their Visitors into Superfans?
Whether you’re building a business or your brand. All businesses should have an Active audience so that your business doesn’t become lost in the crowd. We can take an example of Apple which has a large amount of Superfans, they are so closely bound with Apple's Ecosystem that no matter if Apple sells a wheel for $1000 they are willing to buy that wheel for $1000. Every business wishes to have such a Consumer.
Plat Flynn from The Smart Passive Income Blog gives us insightful stories from this book [Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe] about building an audience that goes from Casual follower that checks your daily posts or products to a Superfan who will pre-book your every product.
Instead of spending money on Ads, spend more time on people. Instead of worrying about the latest growth hacks and strategies, worry about identifying and addressing the biggest pains and problems in your target audience. Instead of figuring out how to optimize your conversion rates, figure out the rate at which you’re able to connect authentically with your audience and make them feel special.
We build our businesses, we should try to be like that dollar bill, which has two things working in its favor. First, it’s something we don’t normally come across, so it captures our attention. And second, it has immediate value, so we know it will be worth a person’s time to stop and pick it up. If you want to win, capture people’s attention and show them quickly how you can add value to their lives.
These first five strategies are all about turning casual audience members into active participants in your brand:
Learn the lyrics
Building a strong, successful brand is about solving people’s problems. Step one is to know what those problems are, but step two, so often underrated and overlooked is knowing exactly how those people describe their problems. The language they use should become the lyrics you use in your brand. Jay Abraham, a businessman, and author responsible for developing a lot of direct response marketing strategies in the 1970s that we still use today, once said,
“If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution”
Even if you don’t have a huge audience, you can still take advantage of asking open-ended questions like this.
For example, you could include a similar question in an email in the autoresponder serious people receive after they subscribe to your list. You’ll get a continuous stream of answers as people join, and you can then follow up with them. When you follow up, ask questions like, What kinds of solutions have you tried so far? If you had a magic wand to solve this challenge, what would things look like for you? I promise you’ll receive a ton of incredibly valuable information you’ll be able to feed directly back in your business.
Break the Ice
When it comes to your brand and business, you’re having conversations with new people you’ve never met before all of the time. They come across your videos, listen to your podcasts, read your blogs, or see your tweets and posts, and if the content answers their questions and is valuable, they might even begin to follow your work. But when you add personality into the mix and inject elements that your audience can relate to, then they’re not just going to follow your work. They’re going to follow you.
For eg: if you were teaching personal development in a blog post, instead of “10 Things you should know about personal development,” make that blog post “10 Things Harry Potter can teach you about Personal Development” and use your love for Harry Potter to make things more interesting.
Will everyone in your audience love Harry Potter? No. Some will, and they’ll immediately gravitate toward you and get excited to learn more from you. But for others, will they go away? Not usually! You don’t break up with your friends when they’re a fan of something that you’re not a fan of right? So there’s really nothing to lose here! As long as you continue to add value, you can add your personality and make a ton of connections with a lot of new people without sounding “just like the other guys”.
Create Quick Wins
Once, The author clicked on a link from another website to one of Ramit’s new articles about how to save thousands of dollars in ten minutes with one simple phone call. It seemed too good to be true, but ten minutes? He could spare ten minutes to see if it would work. Here’s what Ramit suggested in this article:
- Call your cable company.
- Read his script to negotiate a lower monthly payment.
- Enjoy the extra $
During lunch, he called his cable company followed the script, and guess what? It worked! He was able to save 20 percent per month on his bill in just ten minutes, he was hooked. Ramit became his favorite blogger. He went back into his archive and read every single post. He downloaded his ebook. And later, the author eventually paid for his products. All because he’d hooked the author in with a small, quick win. And that’s the trick.
“Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.”
Blizzard for using quick wins to make their game more addictive. Of course, they’d want to keep people playing. But you can still take advantage of the Blizzard-style small, quick win to build your own superfan army without causing them to subsist entirely on Cheetos and Mountain Dew.
Drive the DeLorean
Once you’ve made the problem super clear, and showed someone their possible future if they don’t deal with that issue, you need to tell them a story of what their problem looks like once it’s been solved. It could be the story of what their problem looks like once it’s been solved. It could be the story of how you solved it for yourself, or it could be the story of how you helped a client or customer find the solution on their own.
You see, your audience won’t be buying your product or service — they’ll be buying the change that product or service offers them. They’ll be buying the change that product or service offers them. They’ll be buying the change that product or service offers them. They’ll be buying the way it will help them transform their lives. They’ll be buying the solution, and you need to tell them a compelling story about how that solution works.
Return Every Handshake
Instead of offering a physical handshake, a person comes to your Facebook page and asks a question on one of your posts. Their question sits quietly for a few days, getting no attention from you. Now you’re the person on the other side of the (so far one-sided) interaction. Eventually, that person shrugs and gives up on you. It’s just one missed connection, but it’s also one lost potential superfan.
Don’t leave anyone hanging. Follow up with everybody, especially when it’s their first interaction with your brand. That first extended handshake from a person who’s coming across you for the first time can be nothing short of a do-or-die moment for you in terms of whether you’re going to walk away with a bitter taste in their mouth and the urge to say unflattering things about you whenever they get the opportunity.
Active Audience to Connected Community
Suppose you’ve invited one of your friends to your regular match on the basketball court. No doubt the friend is excited to play, but as soon as the match starts the friend doesn’t get to touch the ball, the whole game finishes like that. Now, Your friend is annoyed feeling betrayed, will he ever come back to play with you if you again invited him? No
When it comes to building community, make sure you’re just not inviting people onto your basketball court, but that you’re also passing them the ball from time to time.
Let them take a shot
Engaging with your customers is important. Instead of revealing, how the Science worked, they added a question to the end of the video description that invited people to explain how the experiment worked. Here’s how Steve describes this shift: “The question at the end is what made the huge change for YouTube, and that is: ‘In the comments below, tell us how you think this works”
Just for fun, ask your audience on Social media (it doesn’t matter what your target audience is) this question:
Which one is healthier: kale or spinach?
Let them Decide
Speaking of LEGO, the company’s rank of superfans has been instrumental in its success — especially because not too long ago, it was massively in debt (to the tune of $800 million in 2003) and on the brink of bankruptcy. With a shift of focusing on what its fans really want, LEGO has since rebounded and as of 2018 was the largest toy company in the world with a valuation of $7.6 billion, higher than massive brands like Mattel or Hasbro.
Letting your audience help influence your business isn’t something new, but its’ something everyone can easily do.
Just like “Epic Rap Battles of History” which features actors portraying two famous people having a rap battle together, shows screenshots from commenters who have helped to influence each new video they create. At the end of each video, they ask “Who’s next? You decide”
Andy Weir involved his small audience on his blog by publicly writing chapter by chapter, a story about a man stuck on Mars. The story began to get noticed, and his audience began to give feedback and suggestions about the content in his story. Eventually, this series of blog posts turned into a bestselling book “The Martian” which later became a film starring Matt Demon.
Open up your brand and your business to your audience. Ask them questions and give them a forum to share their answers. Allow them to have a hand in the decisions you make in your business. Challenge them to reach their own goals, and to support each other along the way. Let them backstage so they can see how the magic happens and learn from your processes. Then bring them together in bigger ways. Create your own gigs and meetups, events where you can talk to your audience and they can connect with each other in intimate and powerful ways. Finally let your community members take their place on stage with you to share their stories, whether it’s featuring them in your podcast, thanking them publicly on your Facebook page, or yes literally bringing them up on stage at one of your events.
Connected Community to SuperFans
Making things irregular and unexpected is the key thing here your audience will get used to the pattern. Break that pattern and help them remember why they love you, and why you should always be in their life. And most importantly, give without asking for anything in return.
Everyone loves a good hero story, and when you can create ways for your audience to become the hero, they’re going to stick with you for life.
Be human. Be curious about people. Show that you’re excited to see them and that you care about their needs and interests and the details of their lives. They’ll notice, and they’ll love it. Up next, the days of “You’ve got mail!” and the excitement we used to feel when we got a new email in our inbox may be long over, but there’s another type of messaging you can use in combination with the Remember the Lemons strategy to surprise, and delight your dedicated fans and groom them into superfans.
Thanks for reading, I hope this was helpful for you. If you want to read more about it, please considering buying Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe as it covers more stories that can give you “Aaha! Moment”.
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