Lessons - On The Future of Content & Influence | Neal Schaffer, Author & Marketer

So I love so I think that the way you've done this is the way that you should do it like you just focus on what you love and you put it out into the world and that's who your target customer is and you don't care about all the other noise. So I see you know you mentioned everybody's trying to you know have influence be an influence and not everybody I think that some of the wrong people are trying and some of the people that should be aren't trying but that's another point but why do you think that people have such a hard time just focusing on what they know and what they love when they start to create content and they just sort of go with the I don't know garbage to be quite honest. Yeah you know um social media can be overwhelming and you can be influenced I mean we know you know fake news and and influence and elections we're all influenced by what we see. So I you know this may be a shock to a lot of people I don't go through my news feeds. The only news feed I go through is actually Instagram and I'm pretty selective as to who I follow with the rest I just go in what I need to I'm primarily looking at my notifications and maybe I'll check out what a friend's doing here there but I'm not there on the feed letting Facebook you know tell me what I need to see or letting Twitter tell me what I need to see because if you do that you you're going to tend to see very opinionated content one way or the other or a lot of provocative content so I just stay away from that and I think that really it comes down to just a very very and and I realize this at the beginning when I was consulting with companies just a very very strategic approach. What are you trying to do or in the words of Tim Ferris or one of my favorite podcasters Pat Flynn he uses this quote a lot and I'm going to give them both credit what would success look like so if you wanted to you know if you wanted to try to become more influential right or build a side hustle what would success look like okay because that's going to pave the road as to what now do I need to do to get there and when you think about it that way all that other garbage that noise just goes away it's it's it's you and your internal battle to get yourself out there right and inevitably no matter what you choose it will come down to content creation so you better pick something you love to do because if you burn out if you start a podcast two months later you ran out of fuel that was two months wasted right so you have to think this is something I want to do at least give yourself a 12 month plan and it's cool we change careers it's totally cool and in fact I I encourage it right maybe you'll go back but you know you don't write as a spice alive you don't have to stick with the same thing for 30 years but if you're passionate you're you're 30 years worth of passion and you then go for it yeah I love that and and the the quote you just said like find what success means to you is that like you're you're so you're basically saying like not to summarize Tim Ferris or I can't I don't remember the other gentleman but like if you if you aren't defined in how you're creating the content and you don't have that set path then you won't see the outcome that you want even it like I see a lot of people just put stuff out there and not have purpose for putting stuff out there and I think you know I fall victim to that as well sometime so is that define what success is that like your North Star metric that you'd like to achieve if everything goes well or would you just say just start and figure that out as you let's put it this way okay let's put it in in the sales paradigm so in Japan we all had to learn this methodology that you can apply to any job you do called PDCA and it's actually the name of my agency PDCA social and it was created by the godfather of quality control professor Edwards Demi like in the 50s but it's this teaching that Japanese companies took the heart and they became you know world class manufacturers in the 80s you know Sony to it what have you so PDC is really simple if you're going to have an experiment right you want to try to measure you want to know if you're if you're going to do an experiment and life is one experiment trying to build influences and experiment what are you going to do you you're sort of going to figure out well I want to achieve this well how do I go about achieving that well if I do this if I do A B and C I think I can do that so then you actually create the plan you do according to plan you check and then you're always going to be optimizing this never any encircle chisened right so you're in sales right okay you have a zero pipeline what are you going to do you're not just going to randomly do stuff you're going to be some thought who's our target audience who's our target customer who are competitors doing business with you might do some online reading and try to you know get some more intel do some LinkedIn searches but you're first going to probably build a target list then you're going to go on the target to see who you know that might be able to introduce you you're going to have a process right and then you're going to have a pipeline that says okay now I know that if I have 30 people my pipeline I'm going to get calls of five of them I'm going to be able to submit proposals for three maybe I'm going to close one and the average value of closing one is like $5,000 okay well I need to have like 360 deals in my pipeline in order to achieve my annual goal unless that annual you know a sale value goes up so I'm very process oriented and that's why I love sales and I also love sales because I see the results of my efforts in terms of a sales amount so every salesperson has a process and or you should have a process you should have the good ones do yeah that's I mean the sales process we don't talk about a marketing process but we do talk about a sales process and this is why I think that all of you listening that are in sales should should get this immediately it's all about that for whatever you do in life okay whenever I want to buy something I always get three quotes because I know my clients do that with me it's all out right yeah it's the process right that that does everything I do so if you want to try to build influence you're not just going to have how to create content what is the content that whoever I want to influence is looking for is the number one question and a lot of bloggers okay I have a blog where I have you know 20 or so guest contributors for 25 every month I'm not going to say names right and I'm not going to say if they're past or present but I have a lot of bloggers who do not who think that this is going to be a great blog post but it never gets any views and I know why because they didn't do keyword research they didn't understand what people are searching for in Google and just by changing a few different keywords they can align themselves with people actually search for in Google like you know one of my one of my top performing blog posts it's gonna sound really stupid but what is LinkedIn and how to use it and when I first started doing keyword research I was doing all this blogging about LinkedIn and I'm like okay how many of these tools and it's like this was like a top 10 search keyword related to LinkedIn I'm like are you kidding me but you always got to remember especially when you've been doing this for a while and you're an expert there's always people just starting right there's always beginners and sometimes you need to dumb down that message to to adapt to them so I know I said a lot and we sort of went a little bit off topic no it's good I like it that's very good but it's it's all it's strategic and it's process oriented and if you do it that way I think that you'll be able to better stick to that original plan and then get to that that you know that circle of of never ending Kaizen and that's really where the magic happens just like in sales as you optimize your sales process the exact same thing and that's very good and thank you so the only the the one last thing I have like a couple like life insight questions but I want to ask you just about your book so the last book you put out age of influence the power of influencers to elevate your brand how can influencers elevate your brand and our influencers write for every brand and can influencers hurt a brand as well so let's just the spectrum of influencer marketing because you wrote a book on it so like just a couple like you know I don't know key takeaways that are like the highlight reel of the book the highlight reel is that digital influences everywhere and influencer marketing has been going on for centuries we used to call it celebrity endorsements so when you see Shaqiu O'Neill advertise a Buick try to fit himself in one that's a celebrity endorsement what we're finding is that digital influence because it's everywhere with social media you know 20 30 years ago there were like three TV stations there was one major national newspaper everybody pretty much watched the same TV shows and read the same news today it's all over the place and I I talk to people like in their 50s and 60s like I don't understand I don't even recognize any of these YouTube stars on TV commercials now because everybody's influenced by so indifferent and the viral YouTube video that you saw yesterday is probably very different than the one that I saw so now with this we have new celebrities that have been born so I consider like the Logan Paul's and you know the Charlie of TikTok fame these are celebrities when you're on a TV commercial celebrity but between them and people that have 500 connections of thousand followers there's a lot of people that have some digital influence so let's say you have 5,000 followers on Instagram and let's say you know you get 10% of people to engage with that that's 500 engagements if you yourself were to put out a blog post and then boost that on Instagram or on Facebook that would cost you money to get that sort of engagement and guess what this person's getting an engagement from an audience that trust them and that probably has an interest in them because of what they're posting so because of this fragmented audiences that exist in digital today it is wise for businesses because we don't trust advertisers we you know the minute we see sponsored we sort of want to tune it out but we trust people so businesses will never be able to compete with people in fact Mark Zuckerberg even said we're always going to get priority to you know to people rather than businesses and that's just the way it works and we just trust people more than businesses so with all that in mind if businesses really want to get word amount out about themselves in social media right organic social you're not going to be seen in the newsfeed because it's paid a play paid social you're an advertisement everyone's doing it costs are going up collaborating with influencers not necessarily paying so on Instagram right to you know paying them $5,000 to post a photo but you know working with people that actually already like no interest your brand so instead of trying to find someone that's never heard about you try to actually find people that use you go in your email database go in your followers go in your customer database go in your partners work at ecosystem right in sales if you have an ecosystem that exists if these people are on digital they're influencers so there's an argument and I'm working on my next podcast that is probably going to be on this topic of influencers for sales people but that's you know it's it's the same concept so it can tremendously help brands but if you work with the wrong influencer yes it can't hurt brands because there's a lot of fraud out there yeah you could be wasting a lot of money and there might not be a cultural fit too so I don't think the danger in terms of like brand reputation it is huge but you want to do your homework and most companies fail I've had a lot of people read this book they go you know at first book on influencer marketing they rolled their eyes we wasted so much money on working with influencers and then they realized they did it wrong because they work with the wrong influencers so that's really in a nutshell I think that marketers and everybody have been miseducated on influencer marketing they've been misled they read too many provocative blog posts about the fire festival and and just all this bad stuff right yes there are people that game the system and yes there are celebrities that will cost a lot of money just execute only will cost a lot of money right but if you're homework and you do it right it should be a line item on the marketing budget for any company in any industry