How to Turn Passive Followers Into Active Paying Customers

Truth bomb: Having a massive follower count is pointless.

That is, if your followers aren’t converting into customers. Instead, all you’re doing is shouting into the void. You aren’t growing or scaling a business.

Creator CEOs are really, really good at customer acquisition. They know that it’s better for their bottom line to have a loyal customer base than it is to have hoards of passive followers on social media or elsewhere in the digital space who don’t purchase and – quite frankly – don’t care.

“We Will Focus on Customers, Not Followers” is the second law of our book “18 Laws of a Creator CEO”. For existing Creator CEOs who want to reinforce million-dollar brand practices or for aspiring creators looking to scale their business from first sales to first millions, we recommend grabbing your own free copy of “18 Laws of a Creator CEO” to elevate from the everyday hobbyist to a Creator CEO with a seven-figure business.

Let’s expand on the second law, “We Will Focus on Customers, Not Followers”:

How to get really, really good at customer acquisition

Fear not: Customer acquisition isn’t a skill someone is born with. More than anything, acquiring customers regularly boils down to being persistent. You should constantly be giving your audience and your followers the opportunity to become a customer of whatever product, service, or good you’re selling.

This doesn’t mean you send the occasional email, a monthly webinar, or a flippant social media post when you have room in your posting schedule. The best Creator CEOs we see selling on SamCart everyday blast their followers with opportunities to buy. One of the biggest hurdles every Creator CEO has had to overcome is the notion that they’re being too “salesy” or “pushy”. When you’re selling something that people genuinely want or need, they’ll bite.

→ We recommend checking out our article on the first law of a Creator CEO, "We Will Drill Deep to Find Oil” to learn how to make what you’re selling more relevant and enticing.

So how do you become a master of customer acquisition without annoying the living you-know-what out of your followers? Find opportunities to seed your messaging where it organically makes sense, like:

• A quick pitch at the end of a great YouTube video you’ve created
• A call-to-action in your regular newsletter send that has amassed a following
• A call-out in a useful social media carousel post that highlights your followers’ pain points, problems, or concerns

You don’t need to flood your followers’ feeds with sales content, but you do need to take opportunities where you can take them to put your message in front of the people who could potentially become paying customers.

Some of the best Creator CEOs in the game don’t even necessarily have massive followings, but they make the most of the visibility they do have by creating great content, interacting regularly with their audience, building trust and rapport, then hitting them with the sales messaging if and when it makes sense to do so. 

How to focus on customers first

When you’re a creator, it’s par for the course to focus on follower count above all else. But a follower does not make a customer, so it’s important for the sake of your business to adopt a customer-first mindset. Here are a few ways to put that into practice:

• Remember that customer acquisition isn’t a means of generating immediate revenue. You’re bringing them onboard and (hopefully) keeping them on for the long haul. Repeat customers are your revenue drivers.
• Find your customer ratio by taking how many email subscribers you have and dividing by the total number of customers you’ve ever gotten. If you’re under 5%, you need to focus on customer acquisition.
• Brainstorm 5 different products you could sell for $20 or less. You likely already have these assets, like videos, downloadables, case studies, or other digital assets just sitting on your hard drive. As always, you can prompt ChatGPT to help in the idea generation process.

We’ve covered two of the 18 laws it takes to become or maintain Creator CEO status. Download the full Monty “18 Laws of a Creator CEO” by clicking here, then tweet us @samcartapp and tell us your favorite law.