Mickey Spillane did not suffer from delusions of grandeur.
He didn’t write his Mike Hammer detective novels hoping they’d be studied in literature seminars. He wrote them to sell. And sell they did, more than 225 million copies.
I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.
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, Mickey Spillane
Provocative. But is it right? As you build an online presence through content marketing, you face an essential question: should you develop fans or customers?
The answer, naturally, is more interesting than the question.
Why fans matter more than you think
Your audience likely includes people who love everything you write, show up in your comments section regularly, and participate enthusiastically in every free thing you offer.
Not all of them will become paying customers. But here’s the wrinkle: some of them will become something I call Second Customers, people who may never hand you money but who faithfully share your content, spread your ideas, and bring new customers to your door.
Second customers are your volunteer marketing team. Every share from one with a sizable audience sends your traffic spiking. Every recommendation carries more weight than any ad you could buy.
These people are critical to your business, and cultivating them is some of the highest-leverage work you can do.
How to serve your Second Customers
The most valuable Second Customers have audiences of their own. To give them content they’re excited to share, you need to understand what they need from you:
- Does your content appeal to their audience?
- Does it teach something they want their own readers to learn?
- Does it expand on a topic they already cover, but with fresh depth or a new angle?
If you can, have a conversation with a few of your best Second Customers. Ask them why they share your work. Their answers will be more valuable than any analytics dashboard.
Customers start as fans, and the journey is the point
If content marketing is your primary promotion technique, most paying customers begin as fans and readers. Over time, as you consistently deliver useful information, a percentage of them cross the threshold from “person who reads” to “person who buys.”
The relationship deepens before the sale with content that:
- Helps them understand your business better
- Makes them smarter consumers of your product or service
- Shows them exactly how to get started
And it deepens after the sale with content that:
- Onboards new customers so they get immediate value
- Teaches them to maximize their purchase
- Guides them toward the next logical step, a repeat purchase or an upgrade
This is where thinking of content marketing as a verb rather than a noun changes everything. Content marketing isn’t a thing you made. It’s something you do, ongoing, over time, one piece at a time.
The mistake most people make
Can you imagine a single piece of content that’s a wildly entertaining take on your expertise and a thoughtful onboarding guide for new customers and a compelling upsell for existing ones?
No. Neither can I. Because that Franken-content doesn’t work.
You serve no one when you wedge fan content and customer content into one monster-like creation. You’ll confuse the fans and bore the customers, and you might scare away both.
Here’s the liberating truth: no single piece of content needs to do everything.
Individual pieces of content can speak to specific slices of your readers, fans, Second Customers, first-time buyers, loyal repeat customers. When you target a piece to a particular group, something magical happens: the people in that group feel like you wrote it just for them.
Because, in a meaningful sense, you did.
So, fans or customers?
Yes.
Build content that nurtures fans, because some of them will become your most effective marketers. Build content that serves customers, because they’re the ones who keep the lights on. Build content that speaks clearly to one group at a time, because trying to speak to everyone at once means speaking to no one.
Mickey Spillane was half right. Customers are your friends. But the fan who tells ten friends about you? That’s a friend too.