“Out of everything we can do in digital marketing, we can dumb it down to three different things: Search, or becoming discoverable through digital. Email—and it could be WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger—because we need to have a way to stay in direct touch with customers and prospects. And Social. I call it the SES framework.”—Neal Schaffer
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Neal Schaffer, fractional CMO, consultant, and author, to discuss digital marketing strategies for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Neal shares insights from his new book Digital Threads to help you understand the digital marketing landscape, establish a sustainable content foundation, and access tools to help you achieve data-driven growth.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube or read through the highlights below. Order your copy of Neal’s book Digital Threads for more practical digital marketing strategies to fuel your success.
The SES Framework: Balancing Search, Email, and Social for Sustainable Growth
Neal’s SES Framework (search, email, and social) focuses digital marketing on the human relationships that drive business.
“We all overcomplicate a lot of this. At the end of the day, sales and marketing come down to human relationships, psychology, what have you.”—Neal Schaffer
Each element of the framework carries equal weight.
“Back in 2020, I wrote a book called The Age of Influence, which came out right when California was going into lockdown. All these businesses were reaching out to me for advice on influence marketing. They just set up their Instagram; maybe they had 100 followers, and did not have any posts. They didn’t have an email list, and they didn’t have much content on their website. So I realized in all this that this SES framework is a really, really good way to teach and work with businesses.”—Neal Schaffer
Platforms like LinkedIn can support all three elements of the framework.
“People think of LinkedIn just as being a social network, but especially when you’re talking about anybody doing services in B2B direct sales, LinkedIn can end up being the way that you’re found in search. You’ve got the opportunity to do articles and build up a body of knowledge both in your profile and in your article selection, and you can have an email newsletter; LinkedIn is doing the emailing of sending it out to the people that subscribe.”—Erika Heald
Building a Content Library to Boost Discoverability and Establish Authority
Generative AI search has significantly changed how people find content.
“With the Google Helpful Content update and all these other updates, they’re looking at more user-generated content. They’re looking at like the Reddits, the Quoras, what have you. Maybe they’re also looking a little bit more LinkedIn.”—Neal Schaffer
Blogs are essential for building a content library and proving your authority in your space.
“It’s really about becoming discoverable to your target audience. Yes, people still do searches. I talk about this concept of a library of content, which I still believe, even in the age of generative AI search, you need to have a library of content that proves your authority. It also gives you a base. It gives you a brain. It gives you your own mini LLM, your own mini database of your own thoughts and ideas and perspectives that then you could repurpose later on.”—Neal Schaffer
Any channel could be a way to get discovered: Podcasts, YouTube, social media channels, etc. The key is learning where your target audience is active and what media they consume.
“Discoverability has really become fragmented. The whole idea is understanding where your target audience hangs out and doing your best to become discoverable to them, and often inevitably, that means creating content.”—Neal Schaffer
Experiment with different social media post types to understand what performs best with each unique algorithm and audience.
“I look at my analytics, and here’s the thing: You need to be publishing different types of posts, whether it’s LinkedIn or any social network, to understand what the algorithm favors and doesn’t. And newsletter is one of those things, because it keeps people on the platform. For any other platform you want to do video, because it keeps people on the platform.”—Neal Schaffer
Repurpose content for different formats and channels to maximize your resources.
“I have B2C clients that repurpose blog posts for Instagram reels and TikTok. So it’s really mastering the art of content creation and of repurposing that’s really going to give that content a lot of legs and help you become more discoverable.”—Neal Schaffer
Neal explains his approach to prioritizing content ideas:
“One [approach] is pure SEO. Let’s look at the keywords that are related to your product, your company, your brand, your industry, and let’s take a look at the search engine demand that each of them have. Let’s look at the search intent. And I go through these steps in the book and in the companion workbook. So that’s one way of doing it.”—Neal Schaffer
“Another way is if you have a customer base and you have salespeople that are interacting with customers, you can ask them what are the questions they often get asked. They ask, you answer type of approach.”—Neal Schaffer
“I talk about having 52 keywords and blogging once a week for a year. This isn’t going to happen overnight. I think search engines find it weird if all of a sudden, you’ve never published a blog post, and you publish 52 in 24 hours. You get better as you go on, and as you go on, trends change, the priorities will change. Maybe you find new topics. So that gives you a little bit of breathing room.”—Neal Schaffer
“Start small and build authority. Start to get noticed by search engines. Start to build high-ranking keywords. Maybe you start with a maximum monthly search volume of 100, but once you see that you can rank for those keywords in that search volume, then maybe you go up to 250, instead of going for the 25,000 or 250,000.”—Neal Schaffer
Email Strategies for Content Marketing and Business Growth
Email is still a highly effective channel that can address many customer and buyer needs.
“Marketing folks have said email is dead ever since the 90s. Every two years, marketing is like email’s dead—we’re going to do something else. But here we are, and we’re still sending emails, and they’re still doing amazing for actually selling.”—Erika Heald
Lead magnets are essential for earning first-party data to keep in touch with leads.
“We need to have a way to keep in touch that’s not ruled by any third-party algorithm. We need our own first-party data. The way to do that is through acquiring email addresses. And really the best way to do it is something we talk a lot about in content marketing, called a lead magnet. We’re basically giving away something of value so that when someone comes to our website, at a minimum, we can try to get their email address so we can keep in touch with them.”—Neal Schaffer
“It’s really about finding offers—whether it be webinars, checklists, ebooks, or white papers—that have value to the end users. So in many ways, they have to be aligned with that library of content and also with your product.”—Neal Schaffer
“The easiest way to do this is just go to your competitor’s websites and look at the pop ups that show up. Go to blog posts, look at pop-ups. Look at any form that you see. That’s going to give you a good idea. Go to their company page and look at what they’re promoting. That’s going to give you a good idea as to what sort of lead magnets your competitors are doing, whether they’re successful or not.”—Neal Schaffer
Emails should explore topics relevant to the recipients. Neal recommends crafting targeted email drip campaigns tailored to a lead magnet and then ending the series with an email that explains what they’ll receive next.
“You do a webinar on a topic, you get all these people to subscribe to your list, but then you don’t talk about that topic in your email. Then you get the unsubscribe.”—Neal Schaffer
“The ideal way to do it is to have some sort of sequence. The way that I do with my own newsletter is I will have a sequence of emails that’s hyper-targeted on that lead magnet. Then at the end of it, I’ll say going forward I’m gonna communicate with you on a weekly basis, I’m gonna cover this topic, but also these other topics that I think would interest you.”—Neal Schaffer
Shifting the Social Media Mindset: From Traffic Generation to Relationship Building
It’s harder to drive traffic to your website from social media than before.
“I have a whole set of chapters in Digital Threads before I get to my advice, which is all about rethinking, recalibrating, reprogramming the way you think about some of these channels. For social media, I think it takes the biggest reprogram because the writing is on the wall. It’s just getting harder and harder to generate traffic from social media.”—Neal Schaffer
Use social media to build relationships with a diverse set of audiences.
“Let’s not look at social media as a way to generate website traffic. Let’s look at it as a way to develop relationships. And if you look at developing relationships, yes, you need your own media on there once in a while, once a week at least. But it’s also about developing those relationships. The relationships could be with prospects, could be with influencers, could be with customers, could be with partners.”—Neal Schaffer
“For every post that you publish, are you commenting and engaging on 5, 10, 15, 20, other posts the same day? That’s how you develop relationships.”—Neal Schaffer
Essential Tools and Resources to Streamline Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Every organization needs its foundational elements—a documented brand voice, content strategy, defined taxonomy, etc.—to ensure every content creator (including AI) can create on-brand content consistently.
“You’ve got to have these kinds of fundamentals in place, so that way your brand is reflected in everything that you do and you can scale. You can use the generative AI or a consultant or a freelancer to help you with some of the things that aren’t your best things to focus on.”—Erika Heald
“I 100% have a template, my brand guidelines, and my brand voice chart, and I will use ChatGPT or Copy.ai and say here’s my abstract, and all my content governance frameworks, please write me a draft. And then I’ll do some edits.”—Erika Heald
Embracing AI: How Generative Models Can Revolutionize Your Business Operations
Use AI to create repetitive or formulaic content that does not require human storytelling. However, always review your AI outputs.
“We’re starting to see with generative AI that there’s two types of content. There’s functional content, and that value add storytelling and creative content. And for the functional content—we’re doing a webinar, we need to get the word out three times, one week before, three days before, one day before—it becomes sort of formulaic no matter how many times you do it. Meta descriptions and things of that sort. That sort of functional content is just perfect for AI. It’s not never going to be 100% generative AI, because you always want to review it with a human eye and make edits, but that’s where you should be.”—Neal Schaffer
AI is great at repurposing content, not creating full articles from scratch.
“We’re all trying to do more with less and have things be faster and scale. You’ve got to find those ways to be more efficient and effective. Generative AI, that’s what it’s good at. It’s good at summarizing. It’s good at making derivative content. It’s so much better at that than it is writing a blog post from scratch for you, which will sound like it was created by AI.”—Erika Heald
“The key is you need to start with your own content. If you start with your own content, it’s repurposing your voice, your perspective. That’s the key. I think a lot of brands, smaller businesses, got off to a bad start because they started by having ChatGPT write the entire blog post. What’s the value there?”—Neal Schaffer
“How do you get your content onto every platform, and how do you make it relevant to every platform? Every platform is different. Maximum character counts, use of hashtags, different audiences, more professional, more casual.”—Neal Schaffer
AI should free your time to focus on strategy and explore new ways to grow your business.
“I think you get to a point where it’s not that hard to post daily on social media once we have this core content, and we have these ideas and we have AI. I think you’re going to get to the point where you can really start to focus on the quality and the emotion and the storytelling. And that’s what AI allows you to do. It actually allows you to get to that next stage, like in a role-playing game, to go from level 10 to level 20. That’s what really excites me that I hope more people listening to this will get to.”—Neal Schaffer
More Takeaways: Practical Strategies to Elevate Your Digital Marketing Game
Listen to the full conversation to learn more, including:
- What to consider when marketing a first-of-its-kind product or solution (15:26)
- Tips for crafting a great SMB email using AI (23:42)
- How to find the right social media channel to reach customers (30:42)
- Neal’s favorite tools for scaling your content operations (38:53)
