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You’ve got people on your list. They’re opening your emails. They’re watching your Stories. They maybe even comment sometimes. So why aren’t they buying?
According to Sophie Griffiths, ads strategist and creator of the Superfans approach, it’s because most of us are accidentally building an audience of engaged lurkers rather than actual buyers. And the fix isn’t more content or a better lead magnet. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about who you’re building an audience of, and why they’re there.
Here’s what Sophie shared when she came on the podcast, and it’s the kind of conversation I’ve been thinking about ever since.
What a superfan actually is (and isn’t)
A superfan is not someone who attends every free workshop you run, signs up for every freebie, and comments on every post, but has never bought from you. Sophie is pretty clear on this. Someone who’s endlessly consuming your free content without any intention of ever buying from you is not a superfan. They’re a freeloader. (Her word is nicer, but you get the idea.)
A superfan, as Sophie defines it, is someone who’s consuming your content with an intention of eventually working with you. They might not be ready yet. The timing might be off. The right offer might not exist yet.
But they’re moving towards you, not just watching from a distance. Sophie says people regularly tell her they’re on her vision board, that they plan to work with her in 2026 or 2027. That’s the energy you’re aiming for.
The three layers of building superfans
Sophie breaks her approach into three layers, and they build on each other.
Layer one: Get really specific with your messaging.
The temptation with ads especially is to speak broadly. The broader you go, the more people you attract, and the more your follower count grows and your ego feels good. But Sophie’s seen this backfire repeatedly. The clients whose ads worked incredibly well were the ones attracting people who felt genuinely connected to them, who shared the same values, who felt like they belonged in that person’s world. The ones whose ads grew their list but not their revenue? They were speaking to everyone. Which means they were speaking to no one.
This specificity goes beyond just naming who you help. It includes sharing the parts of yourself that feel almost random. Sophie talks about salted butter. She talks about her strong opinions on fridge chocolate (she’s against it, firmly). She talks about having ADHD, about watching Virgin River, about spending weekends in the woods with her kids. None of this is strategic in the traditional sense. But it’s magnetic to the exact kind of person she wants in her world.
Layer two: Make everything sound like you.
Your sales pages, your lead magnets, your landing pages… they all need to sound like an actual human wrote them, specifically you. Not a template. Not a content brief. Not ChatGPT. Sophie is direct about this. People are increasingly sophisticated, and they can feel the difference between copy that came from a real person and copy that feels like it was assembled from parts. Your messaging needs to match the version of you they’d encounter on a live or a podcast. Otherwise, there’s a gap, and gaps destroy trust.
Layer three: Activate people consistently.
This is where Sophie sees the most hesitation, and the most missed opportunity. People find you, get on your list, follow you on Instagram, and then… just sit there. They never get a reason to cross the line from “passive consumer” to “actively pursuing you.” Sophie’s solution is regular activation events. These can look like workshops, masterclasses, paid events, in-person days, podcast episodes, Instagram Lives, a Telegram space. Format matters less than frequency. The goal is to give your audience repeated opportunities to hear your voice, see how you think, and move closer to a decision.
All three layers have to work together. Specific messaging brings in the right people. Human copy builds trust. Activation events convert that trust into buyers.
The sticky things strategy (and why Sophie argues about chocolate)
One of my favourite things Sophie shared was this idea of “sticky things”, the details from your real life that are easy to share consistently because they’re already happening anyway.
Sophie didn’t sit down one day and decide she’d build community around salted butter. She just noticed she was already taking photos of food, already watching trashy reality TV, already walking her dog every morning. She brought those things forward. And then she did something deliberately clever: she picked one topic she could have a strong opinion about without it really mattering if she was wrong. Fridge chocolate. She’s against it. People argue with her about it constantly. And now she sends clients branded chocolate and it’s become a whole thing.
The point isn’t the chocolate. The point is that having a position on something small and silly trained her to be bolder with opinions on things that actually matter to her business. And the audience it attracted? People who get it, who like her, who feel at home in her world. That’s the foundation of a superfan.
Selling to superfans without it feeling icky
Sophie described herself as a “stealth seller” and honestly, once she explained it, it made total sense.
She’s not running constant hard promotions or countdown timers. She’s just always showing what’s happening in her business and what’s happening for clients. So she’s naturally referencing her offers without it ever feeling like she’s dragging people somewhere.
And when she does sell deliberately, she thinks about which segment of her audience she’s selling to, not just blasting the same offer at everyone.
Case in point: in April, she ran a four-day flash sale on a course called the Audience Builder. Four emails, a few Instagram Stories, and she sold 22 places at 97 pounds each. That’s around two and a half thousand pounds from a pretty quiet promotion. Her email list got a concentrated push; her Instagram audience got a couple of Stories and nothing else. Different levers, different intensities, same period.
She also mentioned the power of going back to people who’ve bought from you before, and this one really landed for me. A client of hers with a fitness membership did a re-engagement campaign to people who’d dropped off in the last year. Six emails, 45 people rejoined. Just by reminding people who already like you that you still exist and you want them back.
Why selling takes longer than you think, and why that’s okay
Sophie had her best ever month in April of this year. And then May beat it. But she’s also had launches that completely flopped. She had one in March that didn’t go to plan, and she talked pretty openly about the fact that it was brutal, especially when you’re someone who teaches others how to market and sell.
What got her through it wasn’t a new strategy. It was the understanding that the seeds she’d been planting for three to four years were starting to come through. She hadn’t done anything dramatically different in those record months. She’d just kept going long enough for the momentum to build.
She used a phrase that I think is worth writing down: stay on the bus. Keep going. Keep iterating. Keep testing. Don’t make a permanent decision based on one bad month.
Superfans are built over years of consistent, specific, human-sounding content that gives people a real reason to want to be in your world. The seeds you’re planting now are the sales you’ll make in 2026.
CONNECT WITH GUEST:
Insta www.instagram.com/sophiegriffithsco
Website www.sophiegriffiths.co
ABOUT GUEST:
Sophie Griffiths is a scaling strategist and Meta™ Ads expert. She’s known for helping impatiently ambitious women scale their businesses by growing an audience of superfans, creating stackable recurring revenue, and building the team and systems that mean they stop being the bottleneck to their own growth. Her background spans the corporate world, including managing a team of 350+ at British Airways, and eight years working with small businesses, and it’s that combination that shapes her approach: empowering clients to take bold action while feeling genuinely safe and supported in how they do it.
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