What are Brand Influencers and Does Your Business Need a Brand Influencer? – Neal Schaffer | DMR #242

Full transcript:

David Bain 0:00
Digital Marketing Radio Episode 242. What are brands influencers? And does your business need a branded influencer

Bot 0:08
Digital Marketing Radio with David. I am David

David Bain 0:13
Bain. And this is Digital Marketing Radio, the show for in-house agency and entrepreneurial marketers who want to stay on top of the latest tools, tactics and trends shared by today’s modern marketing masters. Now, we’ve all seen influencers and social media share their opinion on different products and services. But how effective really is this as a form of marketing? What precisely to brand influencers do? And does your business actually need a brand influencer? that’s a topic for Episode 242 of Digital Marketing Radio where I’m joined by a man who’s an authority on helping innovative businesses digitally transform their sales and marketing. He’s a fractional cmo and the author of four sales and marketing books, including the recently published Harper Collins book, the age of influence. Welcome to DMR Neal Schaffer.

Neal Schaffer 1:02
Hey, David, how’s it going?

David Bain 1:03
I’m very good. Thanks, Neil. Great to have you on board here. So you can find me over at Neal schaffer.com. So do let’s get straight into it. What does a brand influencer do?

Neal Schaffer 1:14
Yeah, it sounds like an easy topic. But let’s sort of unpeel some things about influencer marketing, right. And I think many marketers listening to this. And I’ve been on a few podcasts where the hosts are like we cringe at the word influencer, influencer marketing, but I’m here to set the record straight. You know, influencer, marketing is about leveraging other people to incite word of mouth, in social media is really the best way to look at it. And influencers are people that have social media profiles, but they’re also content creators, it’s from their content that they yield influence. So instead of looking at influencer marketing as a, let’s find someone with a lot of influencers, or a lot of followers, reach out to them, pay them a lot of money, and maybe they’ll talk about our product. We’re gonna look at it the other way around. We’re gonna look at as who is already talking about us in social media, who are our customers? Are they talking about us on social media? Who are followers? And are they talking about us in social media? So it’s really starting with those that already know like and trust the brand, and then finding ways to collaborate with them. And it’s a you know, you could say it’s, you know, part brand advocacy. I think what’s happened over the last five years is just media influence continues to be democratised. And even in the influencer marketing industry, which I’m not, you know, I don’t work for an influencer marketing agency, what have you I’m very neutral. Even they said, you know, maybe two three years ago that below the micro influencer you out you now have a nano influencer and a nano influencer could have as little as 1000 followers and 1000 followers on Instagram, I mean, it, it’s not easy to get to. But the idea is that, you know, if at the 1000 follower level, these people have influence, then there’s a lot more people out there a lot more your customers a lot more your followers, perhaps your employees that are already talking about your brand that you collaborate with, or that you can activate. And when people are tied to your brand, it’s almost like you know, before they come to a brand infinite, they might already be a brand ambassador, but let’s make them a brand influence on the words, let’s bring them into this programme, to try to strategically leverage their voice and get back to what social media was about social media is not it was never paid media. I think marketers are going down a really weird highway of Well, let’s just do you know, social media equals paid media. And social media is originally about inciting word of mouth about your brand. And I don’t see any other way to do it than by leveraging other people. And that’s where I see the role of influencers and ideally, brand influencers, people that already tied to your brand that can help talk that you can, like I said, strategically collaborate with on content creation, content amplification. As a sounding board, there’s just so many different ways in which they can be leveraged. But that’s to give you my to summarise this long answer. That is my concept of what of who a brand influencer is.

David Bain 4:10
So you talked about nano influencers. 1000 people usually talked about word of mouth marketing, actually. And that was a topic that we covered in Episode 241, just the previous episode with JB Clements. So go and have a listen to that if you haven’t listened to that already. But there must be millions of nano listener, nano listeners and nano influencers out there. How do you actually define the ideal brand influencer for your brand?

Neal Schaffer 4:37
Well, ideally, like I said, it’s someone that already knows your brand. And I think this is a mistake and I want to give a shout out to ads on there from sem rush. How’s it going? My friend saw his comment on YouTube. So you know, I think the whole idea is that if authenticity rules social media today, you want to collaborate with someone who is authentically Talking about your brand without you even having to collaborate with them. So for me, the follower count is not as important. Okay, let’s say they only have 1000 followers, maybe your brand account has 5000 followers, on average, they’re probably getting more engagement per post than you are with the way that algorithms work, favouring people, but also, businesses feel the need, like every day, Oh, we got to publish, you know, five posts a week and or templates a week and it over time, what I’ve seen on almost every business is that their engagement starts to go lower, and lower and lower. This is obviously profoundly clear on Facebook, but also on other social networks, without a doubt, because of that need to publish content, even though it may not be the most engaging content, obviously, people are different, and algorithms favour them. So really, it’s a matter of taking stock, you know, if I was going to come in as a expert to your company on the marketing side, I’d first want to do an SEO audit, I’d want to do a content audit, right. And I think it’s a similar thing, it’s not just doing a social media audit, but let’s do a brand affinity audit and social media who’s talking about you, um, who are your followers, are your customers and social media. And I know the tool is really only available right now for Shopify. But there is a great free Shopify app called Cairo. And maybe this is the secret sauce app, and I’m going to give it away, I’ll come up with another one. When we get to it, it says CA, rr o or get Cara calm. And this app will integrate with your email marketing software, integrates with your Instagram account, and integrates with your Shopify shopping cart, and it will show you just exactly what I’m talking about bringing people in your brand affinity they’re on your list, they have past transaction history, or they’re actually following you on social media. And it will just immediately show you who are the influencers, who are the brand influencers that are out there that you didn’t even realise. And when I did this with one of my clients who’s a b2c, you know, I’d say beauty product clients. Immediately, we found two people that had six figure Instagram followings verified, that were actual customers of their product they directly bought from the company. So this is the exercise that I you know, I would want everyone to go through and you may not have a Shopify cart, that’s okay. It’s gonna take you a little while, you know, there are as marketers, we know that if we have an email address, we can probably use an appending service to find a social media profile, we can, you know, hire people hire virtual assistants to go through and track who these people are, we can, you know, have assistants go through our followers, and you begin to build a list of people that have say, minimum 1000 followers, I mean, it might be different per platform. And from there, what’s gonna happen is, you know, now that they already know you and you reach out to them, you need to have a story, right? Hey, you know, we want to start a programme to celebrate our fans. And, you know, we’ve seen that you’ve posted about us, obviously, you’re a customer of us. And we’ve, you know, we’ve checked you out on social media, whatever it is, but really getting that conversation going. And maybe it’s saying, Hey, we have a new product out, we’d love to just send you you know, free product as as you know, because you’re our customer. And we’d love if you posted about if you do, by the way, use this hashtag. So I you know that you don’t need to necessarily change money, right. But if you have some sort of loyalty programme, you can consider this an extension of it if you have sort of like, and I know that we might have b2b marketers as well, this applies equally to b2b as it does to be to see, what’s going to happen is when you find those 100 or 250, or 500, people I don’t know, and you reach out to all of them, they’re not all going to respond, right. So at the end of the day, it begins to be a sale, you want to convert people, and not everybody’s going to convert for various reasons. So that’s why I think, you know, I would take a broader approach, see who actually engages back, see who is really passionate, and really go with those people. And you know, if that means you’re only dealing with nano influencers, you don’t have any micro influencers, that’s awesome. Because a few of them can have major impact. Just compare it to your own organic, social, and then compare it to the amount of money you’re spending on advertising. And advertising does not incite word of mouth, it has to be from people. Right. And it has to be authentic

David Bain 9:09
nano influencers can become major influencers in the in the future. I mean, I’m sure the famous Neal Schaffer 10 years ago, perhaps didn’t have quite so many followers as you do nowadays.

Neal Schaffer 9:19
Yeah, I was that UFO behind me flying around trying to look for a place to land. No. And that’s the idea is that, you know, you want to actually invest in them. If you’re able to get your own little army of nano influencers, maybe some are employees, maybe some are customers, maybe some are followers, and you know, whatever it is, I would invest in them. Right. And, you know, I went in when I was writing the book, I had a chance to meet with a CPG company, a European company that had their APAC headquarters in Singapore. And they said, you know, we we have a lot of nano influencers to talk about us, but their photos aren’t the best. The videos or maybe the copywriting is not the best So they were actually investing in training them on how to take better photos, how to take better videos, how to, you know, do better copywriting and actually bringing in other influencers from the programme that are maybe you know, have a higher influence level to teach them and I it’s a brilliant idea why doesn’t every company do this because that pays dividends as these people become more influential. They’re already read influencers already speaking about your brand, it’s only going to get you more and more ROI. And you know, the same goes with employees and I think when we talk about B2B influencer marketing, that’s where that becomes more important. But you know, my message is invest in people not in you know, Facebook shareholders.

David Bain 10:39
So kk Diaz is saying on LinkedIn, this is good stuff guys loving it. Thank you so much for leaving a comment there. Kk great to have you on board, Hansa seeing on YouTube. What about your employees saying they should be the first one that they should perhaps be the first nano influencer says Who does this? Is it something that can be effective is an appropriate strategy, Neil and and perhaps Is this the only strategy for brands that perhaps are just launching and don’t have a lot of people talking about their brand already in social media?

Neal Schaffer 11:08
Yeah, well, I think there are two different questions there as far as the employees go, I mean, absolutely. If you’re going to create some sort of influencer programme, make it open to everybody make it open to employees who maybe want to learn more about social media, maybe they want to invest in their personal brand name, I would absolutely become the company that invests in people. And I do think it reaps dividends. I also like the idea of having one programme that includes both employees and external people, like customers and fans, think of the amount of knowledge you’re going to get by directly engaging, and talking to your customers into your fans. I listened to a podcast the other day from the one and only Ann Handley. And she’s like, you know, most marketers just never have conversations with their customers. And that’s why their messaging is so bad, and so dry and so boring. And this will solve that problem, right? So you know, think of it, it’s just a new, a new channel, a new way of thinking, I think from that, you know, there’s going to be a lot of great relationships made, there’s gonna be a lot of great content made, there’s going to be a lot of great social media engagement, you might get product ideas, just the benefits are wonderful. So that that’s where I think the employees and like I said, for B2B companies, what’s really interesting is your sales people are your nano influencers, right? And they can monetize their influence from the bonuses, they get the Commission’s they get from selling. So when you think about it that way, make them the centre, ask them what they need. Right, empower them. And I think really, everything I’m talking about here is empowering others, to talk about your brand in the easiest, most authentic way possible. And that’s really the best way to think about, you know, all of this that I’ve been talking about. And you know, I’m sorry, David, what was the there were two points there. One was on the employees, the other was on

David Bain 12:51
on a brand just launching for the first time and perhaps not having that bunch of people talking about them at the moment.

Neal Schaffer 12:56
Yeah, there’s the challenge, right of social media is about inciting word of mouth, you know, what do you do, and when brands just launch, often, you have to spend a lot of money on paid media to get the word out about and I don’t think that’s going to change. But a very, very successful tactic that a lot of startups are doing is reaching out to potential influencers, these are not brand influencers, because they don’t know about you yet. But based on what they’re posting, based on their content, they might be interested in what you have to offer. So reach out to them, and actually give them product. We’d love if you tried our product, you know, if you post about it awesome. If you have questions about it, let us know. You know, we’re also going to start an influencer programme. If that interests you. You’re let’s have a separate conversation. But first try our product. And let us know what you think. And that sort of approach. If you think about advertising spend. Now I don’t know how expensive your product is. And I don’t know what shipping, you know costs or if your digital product. But that is the best way to to incite authentic word of mouth, is you got to get it out there into the hands of people. And you get it out into the hands of people that are frequently talking about the products that they use. And not everyone’s going to convert, but some will convert and some are going to become your lifetime influencers for your brand.

David Bain 14:10
So is it important to and indeed possible to measure the impact of your brand influencers in order to preempt some be more targeted with the exact influencers that use more in the future?

Neal Schaffer 14:22
Yeah, so you know, there’s different ways of measuring ROI. And this is marketing 101, right. You know, whenever I asked companies that will, why would I want to invest in influence? I’m like, Well, you know, how do you measure the ROI, your print ads, and they don’t have an answer for that. So it’s a similar thing. Now there are interesting things you can do not every influencer is interested in affiliate marketing where you can actually an affiliate marketing is a type of influencer marketing By the way, you’re you’re tapping into people with digital influence, right? And you’re giving them a commission as the compensation so it’s a different different compensation model, but it’s the same idea. So not every You know, brand influencer wants to make an extra commission. If they did, then obviously you can track them that way. But what you can say is, hey, for your followers, we’re going to offer them a discount, you know, in the name of the influencer. So anybody who comes through, you know, your followers say, hey, if they want the product, that there’s a 30%, off coupon code that they can use. And that’s another very, very effective way of really measuring the impact. The other one is now depending on the platform, with Facebook, and Instagram, you can have branded partnerships where you can actually, you know, amplify their content, and see what sort of ROI you get from leveraging their content. But I think really, the biggest ROI in all of this is what marketers are finally starting to realise, and I talked about this, and obviously a lot of what we’re talking about here not to not to do any plug and selfless promotion. But this book called The age of influence I wrote, and it’s looking at influencers, not just for the purpose of content amplification, but for the purpose of content creation. And I know that when I’ve worked with influencers in the past, the content that they created was way better than anything the brand was creating, right. And maybe the brand has an in house team, maybe the brand works with an agency, maybe some of you listening work at an agency that is doing brand creatives. But the message now is the ROI of leveraging influencers is as much for the content that they create, as it is for the amplification of content that they can they can do. So think about what is the content you’re creating, who’s making at what cost. And then compare that with an influencer model. And we know, there’s a lot of data out there. I mean, just do some Google searches, the ROI of leveraging user generated content, whether it’s in your ads, whether it’s in your organic social, whether it’s in your shopping cart, whether it’s all over your website, I would just transform my brand message into that of my fans of my influencers. And that I think, has extreme ROI on many, many different levels. So if you’re looking for ROI, start there. If you want to reach out to an influencer, offer them free product and say, You know what, we have a photoshoot coming up, we want to hire you to do our photo shoot, or we want to get started on tik tok, we want to hire you to do our tic Tock video, whatever it is, right? We want to create a new blog post series we want to hire you, or we want to do some webinars, we want to hire you to be the host. That’s where the magic happens. And like I said, not every influencer will agree to that. But at the end of the day, if they are content creators, and that is what is getting them this engagement, that is a magical power, that we as marketers should try to tap into

David Bain 17:33
wonderful advice. I’ve actually done some work for a luxury fashion company beforehand as well. And the amount of money spent on influencers and giving away free products and but the value that you get back from that the if you target the right people, they will actually take so much pride in being associated with your brand. And doing things like hosting live events or hosting online events or even featuring a blog post as well. Challenging sometimes to measure but certainly effective. And just because you can’t measure it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not highly, highly effective. Neil, we can carry on discussing this for a long time. But let’s say we depart to our discussion, it’s time for new thoughts on the state of digital marketing today. So starting off with SECRET SOFTWARE. So now share a lesser-known martech tool that’s bringing a lot of value at the moment and why that tool is important for you.

Neal Schaffer 18:25
So I already talked about get carried on. So this is going to be an extra one, a tool that I really like is a tool called phrase.io. fr a sc.io. So we hear a lot about content marketing and AI. And what this tool is there’s a bunch of tools out there like niches maybe some of you have heard of it, you they basically can spin using AI, they can spin ad copy, right for like, you know, 20 to 50 words they can they’re pretty good at what a great, what phrase does. And there are a few other tools out there. I’m partial to phrase then an app Sumo like, you know, Ricky ridiculous $69 lifetime plan no longer available and $49 a month now still worth it. Because what they do is, you know, we all know that as part of digitally what we do. Content is a part of it, right and blog content, specifically as a part of it. So what phrase does is when you type in a keyword, it goes out to the top 20 results on Google at the time, and it starts to analyse them. And what it what it basically does is it says look, the top 20 ranked blog posts have these keywords in them. It also is using natural language processing. I know it’s using some AI. But as you enter your blog post, it’s gonna say hey, you know, if you’re talking about this subject you want to rank for, you probably want to introduce this topic. So it’s AI but it’s not you you still have to do the work, but it’s a really good way of vetting. There’s so many marketers that they do their keyword research, and they they write about a topic and you want to write about Your own opinion and your own perspective, but it never gets ranked. And then when you put it in a phrase because it can import existing content and give you a score as well, you’re not covering the sorts of topics that are being covered in what all the other top search results have. In other words, it’s basically standing on the shoulders of giants and saying, hey, for this keyword, Google is recommending content that includes these topics. So you might want to include that as part of your blog. It’s the reason why it drives me crazy. I know. It’s the reason why there you’ll see a blog post of influencer marketing ROI, for instance, and there’s always a paragraph at the top. What is influencer marketing. Now, perhaps they’re trying to rank for a featured snippet. But you know, if 15 of the top 20 results on influencer marketing ROI, include this topic of what is influencer marketing you you normally wouldn’t consider including that in your post, you might want to consider including it. So it’s really helped me together. And I know Anton was on before, I’m a huge fan of sem rush. That’s my SEO tool, combined with the keyword research and tracking, I know that my SEO using phrase.io has definitely been increasing, my ring tracking score is going up. And for every post I do, I just feel like I have a much better chance of actually ranking for it than I did before. So you know, without keyword research, you’re you’re sort of creating content in the blind. I think without using a tool like phrase.io, you’re sort of creating content in the blind, you’re blogging in the blind, so highly recommend. There’s another one clear scope, which I think it might be a little bit better known. But I definitely recommend you look into this new world, it’s really going to help you get great content, ideas and help you create content that I believe will better rank on the search engines.

David Bain 21:39
Wonderful. Okay. phrase.io clear scope. I will certainly look into that. I haven’t tried either of them, I’m afraid but um, let’s jump back into LinkedIn. Kk Diaz is asking what is the extent that influencers are used and effective for marketing B2B brands? Any difference at all there?

Neal Schaffer 21:54
Yeah, think about when you have an event who you’re inviting to speak there industry influencers, right? Who and they might be customers. So it’s, it’s the same concept. But in B2B, the influences on Instagram, the influence, maybe because they’re a blogger, or they’re very popular on Twitter, they’re very popular on Reddit. And it’s it’s interviewing these people for your podcast for your blog. It’s inviting them to do a webinar with you. Right? It’s a similar thing, the medium is different, it’s even more content centric, and I believe B2C influencer marketing is and employees, because content becomes so important. And you have a B2B, B2B sales force you have inside sales of always providing content, this is what we want our salespeople to obviously be equipping our customers, our prospects with this content at every step of the journey. So really, I believe it becomes much more content centric, I believe that sales and marketing need to be very much aligned. You need to get your employees more involved, but the same way of getting customers and industry influencers involved. And a lot of it comes down to these events that are very content centric as well. I believe that is the way that companies are very, in a savvy way leveraging influencers

David Bain 23:04
in their industries. Oh, moving on from something IE phrase that you currently use to something that you’re going to use that as NEXT ON THE LIST.

So now what’s one marketing activity or tool that you haven’t tried yet, but you want to test soon?

Neal Schaffer 23:16
Well, I just started using one B, I’ll give you two. I just started using one because I launched an online community. It’s a it’s a group coaching, paid membership community. And I read somewhere that by the end of 2021, I think 45% of B2B brands, it was one of my B2B consulting clients, 45% of B2B brands would have an online community. Now, when most marketers think of online communities, they think of Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, you can also try to do something on slack. There are other you know, jive, and there’s some old solutions out there. I’m really excited about this platform that I’ve invested in that a lot of people are creating communities on called circle dot s, they literally came out of nowhere over the last year and I bring them up because they were founded by people that came out of teachable and that’s the next software tool that I want to use and really creating a course now, even corporate marketers can create courses for their clients to better learn how to leverage their product, for instance. So it’s a way of just organising content using a learning management system that you know, right now it’s primarily being used by course creators. I think that’s a corporate use for it as well. And I’m really excited to dig into that later on in the year

David Bain 24:32
so circle don’t so what’s the main difference between using that and using see Facebook groups to build a community I would imagine circle to SEO lets you do it on your own domain name.

Neal Schaffer 24:42
Yes. So if you go to Neal schaffer.com, slash membership, you’ll you’ll sort of be able to see where you can’t log in unless you’re a paid member. But first of all, it’s not Facebook. There are, you know, whether it’s 10% or 20% or 30% of the public, there are people who are not going to go into your community. If it’s a On Facebook, this is a fact today, it differs by country differs by demographic number to Facebook is a very, you know, I don’t know how many people say Facebook is beautiful. I know a lot of people say Facebook is ugly, because of the conversations that go on there. And it leads to this environment in Facebook, in Facebook groups, that may not be the most ideal. They may not be purely focused on what the community is about, because they just came from an argument about politics or, you know, who knows. So that’s number two. Number three, is that Facebook makes it very hard to, to basically discover information in the community. It’s it’s basically this discussion board, right? But circle.us is really good. It’s almost like Slack, where you have these organised channels. So for instance, you know, on my group, we have an organised channel for podcast, if you go there, you’re gonna see everything that we’ve talked about visa v. podcasting, and I know that with a Facebook group, there are ways of doing it with notes, what have you, it’s not as intuitive as it is with a circle, not so and because you’re on another platform, I think people feel a lot safer. They feel, you know, I think you get more of a community feeling because you are in another place. So, you know, there’s other sort of bells and whistles that they have to allow people to subscribe to different spaces just like on Slack, you’re you’re not part of every channel, but you choose the channels you want to become part of or be invited to. So I believe it just allows for more compelling networking, education, and at the end of the day community, and a lot of people have launched communities there recently. So yeah, definitely check them out. If that sounds interesting to you or your company?

David Bain 26:39
Well, you’re showing me up here because yeah, it’s another platform that I haven’t tried yet. give that one a go. Hey,

Neal Schaffer 26:45
David, I used to run a conference called the social tools summit all about marketing technology for social media. So I’ve worked with a lot of tools in the past,

David Bain 26:53
I’ve worked for a fair amount, but not as many as you by the time that Yes, he’s gonna give me that one. We’ll move on to the this or that round. So this is the quick response range. 10 quick questions, Just 2 rules here trying not to think about the answer too much. And you’re only allowed to say the word both on one occasion, so use it wisely. Are you ready?

Neal Schaffer 27:13
I’m ready.

David Bain 27:15
Tick Tock of Twitter, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube or podcast, YouTube, traffic or leads,

Neal Schaffer 27:25
leads,

David Bain 27:27
paid search or SEO,

Neal Schaffer 27:29
SEO,

David Bain 27:30
ads or influencers, influencers, Google ads, or Facebook ads, both email marketing or chat marketing,

Neal Schaffer 27:40
email marketing,

David Bain 27:42
more tech stack or all in one platform Mar tech stack, and one to one or scale? scale. I was disappointing. That was probably the fastest round ever. And I don’t think there was one answer that challenge you at all. Did you not have to think about one of them at all?

Neal Schaffer 28:00
We are the one you know, podcasting, YouTube. That’s another one that I wanted to say both on. But I had a feeling you’re gonna check me later. So I went with

search volume.

David Bain 28:11
Okay, sorry, you remind me which one did you go for podcasting? or YouTube?

Neal Schaffer 28:14
I went for YouTube. Although I’m a podcaster. And I’m trying to do more with YouTube. But yeah,

David Bain 28:19
so you’re getting more success at the moment from podcasting, but have a better feeling with regards to the future of YouTube?

Neal Schaffer 28:26
Well, YouTube has always been huge. And it’s just something that I’ve never strategically invested in for, you know, for a variety of reasons. But it’s something that I definitely want to do more with. And just starting, you know, I’m actually starting my strategy now to really build up my channel and get more content going. But podcasting has been great. And podcasting has led the business, multiple clients. In fact, a lot of the members of my community say they joined it because of my podcast. So podcasts really builds this unique connection with people just today on Instagram. Hey, you know, I listen to your podcast, such great information, keep going. It works in hidden ways. It’s sort of like people are in Twitter. Neil, you only got one leg for that tweet, why you tweet so much. It’s like, dude, you don’t see the clicks I’m getting. It’s hidden engagement, right? LinkedIn as well. You don’t see clicks, when when you look on public posts and social media. And it’s the same sort of like hidden power podcast, you don’t necessarily see it. But it’s out there. And people are thinking of you. And when you give them the opportunity through a call to action to engage with you, you get incredible power from it. And I do believe that YouTube, you know, I think that people listen to podcasts for one reason people do searches on YouTube for another reason. And I just want to be able to fit every channel every medium with the type of content that they’re looking for. And I believe that a lot of people are looking for how tos. They’re looking for tips on YouTube. And that’s, I mean, I built my brand on that. So it’s just a matter of repurposing my thoughts into something more engaging using video on YouTube. And that’s sort of part of the plan. I

David Bain 30:00
I should have done a lot more with YouTube. So I published my first YouTube video in 2007, which seems like an Aeon ago nowadays, I even had one video, I uploaded a seminar of me kind of teaching a digital marketing programme. And I managed to rank number one for digital marketing for at least two years on YouTube. And I got about 200,000 views for that video and maybe 6000 subscribers to your channel, but I still did nothing with it. I just left it with one video and didn’t have an ongoing strategy. But no, I do. Now I’m gonna have regular videos published in this channel, you heard me say it,

Neal Schaffer 30:36
I have done nothing. I have 447 subscribers. I’m looking at my channel right now I have one video on how to blog on the LinkedIn publishing platform that has 39,000 views. So I’m with you. It is a it’s a very magical place. It has its own algorithm. But I believe that you can sort of build this this community there and get your name out there. Now at the end of the day, you know what I tell businesses, right? Well, if you want to increase your search engine rankings, you got to show up, you got to have content, right? why are all these companies that you’re better than Why are they ranking higher than you? And I think that the same with podcasts I see the same with YouTube. Why are all these people you know, getting all these subscribers when I think I can create content that’s better than them. So if you think that way, you got a blog, you got a podcast, you got a YouTube, I started with blog in 2008, podcast 2013. And hopefully 2021 is the year I say I started with YouTube.

David Bain 31:25
Yeah, yeah. If you know, you can produce better content, be consistent, and keep on being consistent. And if you’re consistent, then eventually you’ll get there.

Neal Schaffer 31:32
Amen, brother.

David Bain 31:34
Let’s move on to the $10,000 question. If I was to give you $10,000, and you had to spend it over the next few days in a single thing to grow your business, what would you spend it on? And how would you measure success,

Neal Schaffer 31:45
I would hire a writer to help me write my next book. And I am in the process of writing, I’m actually coming out with a free preview ebook of it. Before I write the entire book, I want to get feedback, you know, using the E book. But you know, for me, I am a fractional cmo, which is a type of marketing consultant. I’m also you know, speaker and an author. And part of why companies want to work with me, is because they view me as a thought leader, that’s why they want to hire me to speak what have you. So I have my own take on digital marketing. This next book is intended to be a post pandemic digital marketing playbook. And just like with influencer marketing, I view SEO differently. I view blogging differently. I view email marketing differently. And I want to get these thoughts out to the world. And I think it will have tremendous impact when you have a book. For those of you that want to write a book, let me know I can give you some advice. But you know, when you have a book it, it makes it it’s something that people can talk about, right? It incites word of mouth. People with products in sight, word of mouth for the fact that they have people that buy those products, and I never had my own My only products in my books. So it’s why I launched a community, right, that becomes a product that can incite word of mouth. But a book does as well. And you know, I recorded a podcast about six months ago, of why I invested time in being interviewed on 100 different podcasts, right? So when I launched my book, the age of influence last year, I wanted to reach out to all these podcast hosts and appear on podcast I thought was really relevant to the message of the book. And that got me out into the ears of 10s of 1000s hundreds that maybe millions of people through the art of doing that it’s really unparalleled if you think about it. So the book and then obviously, you know, a CEO buys the book says hey, we need to bring this guy in our company. And that’s led to my biggest client of 2020 and continuing into 2021. So yeah, that $10,000 spent on just getting the book up and going. And I don’t know if it would get to completion with $10,000. But it would certainly accelerated and get me closer to that Nirvana that I know comes when I have that next book out in the market.

David Bain 33:50
So are you talking about using a ghostwriter? And if so, would you have concerns about someone capturing your own tone of voice?

Neal Schaffer 33:58
Great question. So I, very early on in my career, I was invited to a nonprofit as like a CEO Roundtable, nonprofit. And the former CEO bearville was a friend that I met networking. And he’s like, Neil, just talking about LinkedIn. I just I written you know, two books on LinkedIn. So I was there talking about LinkedIn. And there was a VP of Marketing from a very, very well known brand there. And my friend said, Hey, you should check out you know, this guy’s blog. Let me know what you think. So after the event, great event, right. You know, we’re in Chinatown eating dinner. He goes, Hey, what do you think about my friend’s blog and the blog, the VP of Marketing was another speaker. I said, I thought it was really it was really, you know, thought provoking, thought leader. I thought it was great. He goes, he did not write one word of that. It was all written by his staff or maybe their agency. And this is the fact right, when companies right, but you know, when you’re a blogger when I’m trying to compete against HubSpot, I’m not competing against someone in HubSpot. That’s writing the blog. I’m competing about whatever marketing machine They’ve hired to do all the writing for them. So what’s important, though, is that hub spots perspective, and their thoughts get included in that article. So I think a lot of people think that ghost writing is just handing over the keys of the kingdom and having someone 100%. Right, what you do, when I’m talking about ghost writing is similar to how you might hire a blog writing service. Or you might have an outside agency that works on your blog content, you’re always going to tell them what you want them to write about, you’re always going to tell them what are the key points you want to be brought up, including those things that are really relevant to your product or service. And when you get the content back, you’re always going to be reavoice in it. I hope you are this is a process that I use in my own blog and my clients use, right? The same goes with a book, right? You’re always going to be you’re always in charge, you’re just finding a writer that can help you better flesh out the content. I think, you know, I went to an author conference many moons ago, I forgot what the number was 60% of best selling books are ghost written, I forgot what it was. But even if people are not using ghost writers, they’re using what they call developmental editors, which in some cases is quasi ghost writing, right? They’re going deep in your content. That might be fleshing some out. They may be saying, hey, you may want to devote more content here. A really good ghostwriter is going to give you a combination of those things. But at the end of the day, they are they have to be your thoughts, your perspective, your voice. And so it can’t be anybody you got to find the right person. But if you if you’re currently outsourcing some of your content creation, like blog writing, it’s really an extension of that if you can visualise that, and yes, anybody can everybody should write a book. I’m a big fan of encouraging everyone I meet to write that book if they have it in them. And there’s something they want to say what I’m not saying is, I have no idea how podcasting works. I want to make money to be seen like or I don’t know how clubhouse works. But I want to be seen as a clubhouse influencer, I’m just going to hire a ghostwriter. Just like write the book for me and sit back and make millions. Now that’s not what I’m talking about here. Right? You have to be an expert in it. Yeah, you have to be on it. Because what’s gonna happen is, after people buy the book, you’re going to get questions you’re going to get interviewed. How are you going to respond to that? If it’s not your voice? If it’s not your ideas and thoughts?

David Bain 37:08
Yeah, great advice. The last book I wrote called marketing. Now, I figured out that the average book is about 60,000 words in length, and also figured out that if I did an eight hour livestream, that I’d be able to get roughly 60,000 words of transcript from that. So I did a massive livestream had 134 marketers on there had it transcribed, of course, figured out that actually people don’t share the same knowledge in the same way verbally, as they actually do in Britain forums. So I had to completely rewrite everything, and took just as long writing that book, as I would have actually started just from writing the book to begin with, but it was a good learning experience. And perhaps I can do it in a similar way, but use some kind of ghostwriter to take the transcripts and turn it into a proper book, if I dare to do it again.

Neal Schaffer 37:57
Yes, this is what for those who follow Pat Flynn, he publicly said he did that. I have done that in previous books where I’ve created a PowerPoint presentation, just like your live stream for a chapter and then send the video over. So instead of working from a transcript, have a writer work from the actual video, and develop and develop the chapter out of that? So you’re not it’s not I think ghost writing. It’s, it sounds like an evil word. It’s not authentic, what have you. It’s just an assistant that’s really good at writing, that’s really going to help your thoughts, be even stronger on paper is really good way to think of it, I think, I think only the positive of it. But it has to start with your live stream, your transcript, your PowerPoint, whatever it is, but get some help, it’s going to go a lot faster. And that’s why for me the $10,000 invested there. That’s a no brainer.

David Bain 38:47
Oh, very well rounded back at circle squared. And back to the original topic. How come every single topic you bring up new I want to have a half hour conversation about

Neal Schaffer 38:55
me shout my friend.

David Bain 38:58
The finish off, let’s shift the focus to someone else who deserves it. And that is

Neal Schaffer 39:02
MAGICAL MARKETER. So

David Bain 39:04
who’s an up-and coming marketer that you’d like to give a shout out to? What can we learn from them? And where can we find them?

Neal Schaffer 39:09
So Well, you know, I don’t necessarily think she is up and coming because she has a book that’s been published. But I recently interviewed her. She spoke at my social tools summit back in I want to say 2015. She was a community manager at Microsoft. And she has worked her way up to becoming one of Microsoft’s key influencers. And she recently actually the same month that my book came out in March of 2020. She wrote a book called brand storytelling, putting customers at the heart of your brand story. And I know that you know, we have Donald Miller, you know, storytelling brand, what have you there’s just it’s a buzzword that we hear a lot about her take on it. It’s just very different. And it’s really about leveraging your employees to tell your brand story to become storytellers. And it’s it’s compelling on in a lot of ways, but but I think that she is truly, if you want to get a preview, I have two different podcasts. But I interviewed her for the school of influence podcast, which just came out two days ago. And you can hear the interview with her. But just her her experience, you know, within Microsoft, from that community manager, and really leveraging the outside voice to now within Microsoft leveraging inside voice, and getting the executive team to take storytelling seriously makes for some really, really compelling and you know, so these are things you know, community managers, social media, employee advocacy, storytelling, she weaves together a lot of these elements in a really, really compelling and insightful way that I think a marketer is going to get some lightbulb moments reading it. So definitely the name of the book, as I said, brand storytelling customers, the harder your brand story, Mary Rodriguez, she has a shining light, she should be better known. And if you ever have a chance to meet her, if you listen to the podcast, she is one of the sweetest souls you will ever meet in marketing. Sorry, that was Mary Rodriguez was Mary Rodriguez M. I ri marry rom com. Go check her out

David Bain 41:07
wonderful stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I’m sure I will do and I’m sure many people will do as well. Well, this was Episode 242 of Digital Marketing Radio where Neal Schaffer shared so much specific tips included, get carroll.com find your brand influencers. We talked about things like actually affiliate marketing as a form of brand influencers as well. And we also talked about employees perhaps being your own brand influencers, the importance of using nano influencers as well as well don’t go after people with 100,000. Followers necessarily, perhaps the people that you’re looking for are the nano ones with about 1000 followers in the various platforms. You shared a phrase.io as your SECRET SOFTWARE and you also mentioned clear scope. As your NEXT ON THE LIST. You talked about group coaching, group coaching community circle, or SEO SEO was the website that you told people to try it out. And instead of using Facebook groups, he also mentioned teachable is something that you’re going to try out as well. Brand storytelling by Marie Rodriguez as your MAGICAL MARKETER, marries the MAGICAL MARKETER brand storytelling is the book. Everything Neil mentioned in today’s show, and more will be listed in the description below the video on YouTube and in the podcast show notes at Digital Marketing radio.com. Neil, what’s the best social platform for someone to follow you and say hi.

Neal Schaffer 42:29
Well, I’m everywhere on social media. Neal Schaffer, the real Neal any al Well, if you’re watching the video, you can see all my name is valid. So you know every I mean, every day, I’m on Twitter, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m in Facebook, I’m an Instagram. If you send me a Pinterest message, I might not see it. I don’t go in there as often. But any of those networks and obviously Neal Schaffer calm is where you can be in direct touch with me.

David Bain 42:51
absolutely superb style found Well, I’ve been your host, David Bain. You can also find me producing podcasts for B2B brands over at Casting cred.com. Please remember, wherever you’re tuning in, feedback is fantabulous. Until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish and stay subscribed. Aloha

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