I am beginning to think of myself as the human wake-up call.

I’m fortunate to meet with amazing marketers around the world, and I find that too many of them are living in the past. They set a social media strategy and then execute the same plan for years without looking up to see how the world works today.

So, I start clanging around trying to wake them up.

One of the biggest wake-up calls has to be for social media marketing. The fundamental premise is broken. And the brands still operating in the past aren’t just leaving opportunity on the table, they’re building irrelevance at scale.

Social media is not just a distribution channel for your podcast or YouTube videos. It is the operating system for a modern brand. Let’s do a deep dive on this today.

The brands pulling ahead right now have made five fundamental shifts in how they approach social. Not tactical tweaks.

Today I’ll cover:

• The central role of social media in culture
• Connecting brand messages to values
• An experimental approach
• Onboarding to the community
• Measurement

1. Connect to the culture

Most brands still approach social as if it were a publishing calendar. We have things to say. We will say them on a schedule. We will boost the ones that perform.

But culture doesn’t care about your schedule.

The shift is from broadcasting to tuning in to culture, to community, to what your audience is already talking about. Your community is telling you exactly what they want to engage with. The question is whether you’re listening or just waiting for your turn to talk.

This is a harder shift than it sounds. It requires giving up the illusion of control that a content calendar provides. It requires trusting that participation in real conversations is more valuable than polished proclamations. And it requires speed of execution.

Social-first brands aren’t just responding to culture, they’re creating it. They’re the emcee at the party.

2. Visible values

You can’t fill a social feed with product content without sounding like an advertiser. Nobody follows an advertiser.

The brands that win on social have what you might call vocal values — a clear point of view on the world that extends beyond what they sell. Consumers, especially younger ones, increasingly want to buy from brands that share their values. But values only count if they’re visible.

This creates a different kind of content challenge. Not “what should we post about our product?” but “what does our brand actually believe, and are we willing to say it out loud?”

Warning: I’m not saying you need to be political or divisive. That can be a hazardous strategy. Brand values can be positive and uplifting. For example, LEGO stands for wholesome, positive, creativity.

3. Decentralized and experimental

This is where organizational culture either enables or kills your social strategy.

The old model: every post has multiple approval layers, legal signs off before anything goes live, and brand guidelines are applied like brand armor — everything perfectly coordinated, perfectly safe, and perfectly forgettable.

The new model is decentralized and experimental:

• An agile social team that is empowered and trusted, with a direct line to the CMO
• Social managers are natives in the brand community
• The legal relationship is built on trust rather than friction.
• A bias toward trying things rather than perfecting them.

Today’s winning brands are elastic, moving when the moment arrives rather than when the approval chain completes.

A great example of this is the Duolingo owl, a brand mascot that has created social media mayhem for 15 years. The owl is not just responding to culture. The social media team is making its own. The owl is starring in his own anime series.

The phrase “just try it” sounds scary to many traditional brands. They’ve spent millions over decades to build trust and protect their images. They’re not going to risk over an experiment. How will they overcome that legacy? They probably can’t.

4. Onboarding for the community

I wrote a few years ago that social media is no longer a strategy — it’s the beginning of a process.

My thinking goes like this. A brand strategy means creating an emotional expectation between your products and your customers. The best way to do that is to use social media to drive customers to your content and hope they subscribe.

When people opt-in to your content, in a virtual way, they’re saying, “I like you. Tell me more.” It’s a higher level of emotional connection. Now you have an audience. Fantastic!

But most organizations stop there. They don’t take it to the next level: community. In a community, you can realize the highest level of emotional connection and create an experience where customers literally feel they belong to the brand.

This is a great opportunity — most businesses overlook the role of social media leading to brand community.

5. Measurement: The hardest shift 

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Especially for me.

I’m a measurement junkie but the science lags the current physics of business growth. The tools we have don’t adequately capture how trust accumulates, how cultural relevance translates into purchase intent months later, and how organic social builds the conditions that enable paid social to perform.

The dominant measurement philosophy — everything must trace to revenue, every dollar must be accountable — made sense 20 years ago. Marketing needed discipline. But this mindset has calcified into something that prevents a relevant strategy. When every social investment must prove direct revenue, you will systematically underinvest in the things that build brands over time.

You can be part of the culture, or you can measure. You probably can’t do both.

I’m not suggesting blind faith. We need to consider evidence-based trust. Organic social builds trust, engagement amplifies trust, paid social scales reach, campaigns scale relevance, and all of it fuels traffic to retail. Sales prove the trust. Reviews reinforce it. It’s a flywheel, and you can’t optimize one part of it while ignoring the rest.

The Underlying Problem

Strip away the frameworks, and what we’re really looking at is an identity crisis that most brands haven’t resolved: Are we a company that uses social media to advertise? Or are we a brand that participates in culture?

This new reality requires completely different organizational structures, talent, success metrics, and relationships among marketing, legal, and the C-suite.

The reframe is simple enough to put it this way: social is the operating system, not the megaphone. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Making it real requires organizational courage — the willingness to trust your team, loosen the approval chains, invest in brand-building that doesn’t trace back to a conversion pixel.

That’s the reckoning. Most brands will read something like this, nod along, and go back to their content calendar.

The ones who act on it will author the next great social media case studies.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post Five shifts in social media strategy that separate winners from wallpaper appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Too short for a blog post, too important to ignore, here are some short observations from the world of marketing and beyond.

The personal brand journey

It had a busy year, and it was nice having some downtime. What did I do with it? I was WRITING!

I have a long trip to Asia coming up. I won’t have time to blog. That means I need at least four great posts teed up and ready to go ahead of time.

Building your personal brand isn’t a project; it’s a lifestyle. No excuses. Keep going. Get it done. Show up for your fans.

If your personal brand is a priority it has to be part of your lifestyle like working out, going on a date, or going to church on Sunday.

The two personal brand failure modes are 1) the person never started 2) the person quit too soon.

Out to sea

Had a friend on LinkedIn comment: “You can be noise in a sea of calm or calm in a sea of noise” — either way you have a choice. You alone can decide what you want to be to stand out.

I don’t think it’s that easy. In reality, you will be calm in a sea of calm or noise in a sea of noise. There is a third choice. Do something completely different! Be audacious in a sea of boring.

So true.

My friend Billy Dexter says, “We don’t look like our stories.”

Six words. So powerful.

His point: Ask questions before you judge. Lots of questions.

The real AI advantage

I’m astounded by the number of professional people I encounter who are not even dabbling in AI.

AI isn’t democratizing marketing; it’s creating a new aristocracy. The “AI-haves” will run circles around the “AI-have-nots.”

But here’s the twist: the real power won’t lie with those who own the AI, but with those who own the questions. In a world where AI becomes a commodity (everyone can have the latest and greatest for $20!), the competitive edge goes to those who know which problems are worth solving.

Bacon diplomacy

Just got back from a vacation in Europe. While Europe has so much wonderful food, I don’t understand why it has not picked up on American bacon. So crispy. So delicious. So much better than the limp, greasy fare across the pond.

Free business idea: Start a cafe in European capitals called “American Bacon” and watch the lines form. No need to thank me.

The wrong question

Maybe we’re asking the wrong question about AI in marketing. It’s not “How can AI make us more efficient?” It’s “What if efficiency is the enemy?”

In our rush to optimize, we’re creating a world of frictionless, forgettable experiences. AI won’t drive the next marketing revolution — It’ll be a rebellion against it, championing the beautifully inefficient. Leave a little dust on the lens. Be the glitch in the story.

Being real is becoming a luxury.

Word to the words

I really love Grammarly. It might not be considered a leading AI app … but it is the AI app I use the most! It’s also cool to see my monthly stats. Here is one that has me flummoxed.

This is cool in one respect. I’ve used more unique words than just about everybody. But I’m not sure if this is a badge of courage or shame. I’m using that many unique words, it probably means some people don’t understand what I write, especially if English is not their first language. Not sure what to make of it.

And I’m guessing “flummoxed” might be word number 12,859!

Marketing speed

One of the least-discussed challenges in marketing today is speed. It’s not just reaction time. It’s also impacting time to market.

The line between marketing and product development is blurring. When AI can predict what customers want before they know it, marketing becomes less about promoting what exists and more about shaping what could be. The future of marketing isn’t just about selling products; it’s about co-creating experiences with our customers in real-time.

I’m eager to see how this rolls out!

Need an inspiring keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Your personal brand isn’t a project, it’s a lifestyle appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Guest post by Richard Bliss

Last week I read a new analysis of LinkedIn’s latest engineering research papers by Trust Insights. After spending days going through it, I’m not exaggerating: everything we thought we knew about LinkedIn changed in mid-2024, and almost nobody noticed.

Not an update. Not a tweak. A complete teardown and rebuild.

Here’s what happened:

LinkedIn ripped out their entire ranking system and replaced it with a foundation model AI that reads and comprehends your content like an expert consultant would.

The old system counted signals. “Comment = 15 points, like = 1 point, keyword detected.”

The new system reads your text, understands context, and makes expert judgments about substance and relevance.

This means all those tactics we learned are obsolete:

Post at 7:43 AM on Tuesday? Doesn’t matter. Keyword stuffing? The AI detects and penalizes it. Engagement pods? Flagged. Generic thought leadership? Dead on arrival.

What works now: Clear communication. Genuine expertise. Strategic engagement with industry leaders.

The LinkedIn engagement paradigm

But here’s the part that blew my mind.

Your recent LinkedIn engagement (your last 5-10 actions) is incorporated into a real-time “prompt” that the AI reads before deciding what to show you next.

You’re literally training your own algorithm through every click.

Every comment you leave becomes a training example: “This is what I find valuable.” Every post you engage with teaches the system: “This is the conversation I belong in.”

This is called In-Context Learning, and it’s why some people’s content suddenly reaches exactly the right audiences while others are shouting into the void.

The practical impact

Your profile is now a narrative document, not a keyword repository. The AI reads it like an executive summary before every ranking decision.

Your engagement strategy matters more than posting frequency. Quality signals from strategic interactions outweigh volume.

The first sentence of everything you write carries exponentially more weight than anything buried later (technical limitation called “Lost-in-Distance”).

You can prime the algorithm right before you post by strategically engaging with related content 10-15 minutes beforehand.

I know some of you are crushing it on LinkedIn already. But many of you are frustrated because great content isn’t getting seen.

This shift explains both.

The people winning aligned their approach with how this reasoning engine actually works. The people losing are still using the old playbook.

Authority in context

This paradigm validates what I’ve been teaching for years. LinkedIn is a business platform where authentic professional communication wins. That philosophy is now literally encoded in the technology.

But the technical details of HOW it works changed so dramatically that even correct instincts need new tactical applications.

Quick example: I’ve always taught “the currency is in the comments.” That’s still true, but now we know WHY. Thoughtful comments on expert content create textual training data that associates you with that expert’s community in the Economic Graph. The AI literally starts showing your content to people interested in that expert’s topics.

Aspirational networking with algorithmic leverage.

I’m doing a deep dive on all of this because this is the single biggest opportunity for professional visibility in the last decade.

If you understand this shift, you have a 12-to-18 month window to dominate visibility in your space while everyone else is still using engagement pods.

If you ignore it, you’ll wonder why your competitors are suddenly everywhere while you’re invisible.

This isn’t about gaming anything. It’s about understanding how an intelligent system evaluates professional value and aligning your communication accordingly.

I’m not prone to hype anything. This is real, documented in LinkedIn’s own research papers, and it fundamentally changes the game.

I’m genuinely excited by these changes and the impact it will have. Especially as the ‘influencers’ have been screaming that they are being shutdown on LinkedIn, which is great. Because they have been gaming the system to inflate their image, and I get so angry I get when I come across them.

Richard Bliss is the founder of BlissPoint Consulting, an agency to help leaders turn digital hesitancy into market authority, build a leadership presence that crosses cultures and generations, and create scalable influence systems their teams can execute.

The post LinkedIn engagement down? Here’s why. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Last week, a friend asked me to review a new research report he compiled as a lead magnet for his business. But I knew his strategy was flawed before I even saw the report. I had to provide an email address to access the research. I didn’t want to become part of his email “lead nurturing” program, so I never downloaded the report. “Gated content” killed his content marketing strategy.

I know that sounds counter-intuitive. Most marketers point to the high cost of making exceptional content … Asking for an email address seems like a small price to pay for this value. But by making it difficult for people to access your content, you’re leaving the true value of your marketing on the table. I’ll explain why.

The current state of gated content

Here are some points to provide a perspective of our marketing world today.

• People hate gated content. Even marketers who gate their content know this. Research shows more than 90 percent of the people interested in the content abandon the sign-up process because they don’t trust what happens next to the email address.
• Many marketers justify gated content as a fair value exchange but research shows this is not true. Consumers state they are “resigned” to annoying marketing practices and more than half immediately unsubscribe to a site even after they opt-in.
• Acquiring email addresses in exchange for gated content may not be compliant with privacy laws in Europe and many U.S. states.
• We are clearly in an era of Content Shock where the competition for content views is vicious. One of the visible manifestations of this trend is BuzzSumo research showing how social shares on a topic decline precipitously as a subject becomes saturated. In other words, unless you are among the first to create content on a topic, getting your content to be seen and shared is extremely difficult.

A new content marketing philosophy

In my book The Content Code, I provide an updated view of content marketing strategy.

The philosophy behind the book revolves around the practical idea that the economic value of content that is not seen and shared is zero. Therefore, we must develop competency in not just producing content but igniting it so that it is seen and shared by the most people possible. The most economic value of content marketing doesn’t come from the content, it come from the transmission of the content.

Creating great content is no longer the finish line; it is the starting line. The book outlines six possible strategies to remove barriers and give your content the best possible chance to flow and reach the most people possible.

Requiring people to provide an email address to access your content is about the worst thing you can do in this new view of “content success.” In essence, gated content places a stop sign in front of your content flow. It is an anachronistic way of thinking.

The value exchange

The decision to provide a barrier before your content must boil down to this: Are you going to receive more value from a trickle of people providing their email address, or the flood of people seeing and sharing the content freely? Let’s look at a case study to figure this out.

My friend James Carbary provided this example of how the gated content value exchange played out for his own business. He wrote:

“It took five months for us to get 295 people to sign up for the gated opt-in offer on our website. This progress seemed incredibly slow, so I tried something different.

“A couple weeks ago, I published a status update on LinkedIn explaining that I’d developed a list of 67 content topics that work well on that site. If people wanted the ideas, I asked them to leave a comment that said ‘I want it.’ Then I explained that I would turn the ideas into a free PDF if 100 people left a comment.

“In three hours I had over 150 comments. That post has now been viewed more 160,000 times, and 692 people left a comment saying they wanted the content ideas. We turned the ideas into a PDF, and replied to every comment with the link.

“In five days, my content spread to 692 people, compared to to 295 people in five months. We collected ZERO email addresses through the LinkedIn content but I’m beginning to see why un-gated content might be a smarter strategy.”

The case for amplification

James told me that the most tangible benefit of the ungated strategy was a connection with a high-potential customer and a podcast interview with this powerful new connection.

Some implied benefits in this un-gated content example would probably be easy to track down:

• Of the 692 people who asked for the content, how many were entirely new LinkedIn connections for James? He didn’t get an email address, but he did get a signal of interest and arguably these new LinkedIn connections might be more valuable in the long-term than an email address.
• How many of the 692 people responded to a call to action at the end of the report and visited a website, or organically subscribed to receive more content?
• How many shared the free content with more people inside and outside the company? How much additional flow did this receive because it was free?

Even if the percentage of people sharing content is the same whether it is gated or ungated, you will reach many more people with a base of fans numbering 692 versus 295. And that is happening in a matter of days versus months!

Finally, I shared James’s story, and linked to his website. I can’t recall ever linking to gated content that would require my readers to sign-in to something. So the benefit created by this post would have never happened if he hadn’t given his content away for free.

If you subscribe to my philosophy that the company that moves the most content will win, there is no question that un-gated content provides more potential value.

Branding and trust

I was discussing this issue with a colleague and she said “gated content annoys me. Why would a brand want to be annoying? The company is making me distrust them because I have no idea what will happen to that email address.”

A few years ago, I gave up my email address and (shudder) phone number to access a report from a company I loved and trusted. The next day, I was interrupted at a birthday party from a sales rep calling me from this company. My email was placed on lists for newsletters, webinars, and holiday sales.

Even after I “opted out,” of communications, I was still receiving phone calls and spam from this company.

By abusing me in this way, the company ruined its brand. It went from a company I loved to a brand I would never work with again.

A simple thought exercise: If you’re in a hotly-competitive field (like SEO or digital marketing) and one company has gated content and the other gives their best content away for free, which one will have a more positive brand view?

The research supports un-gated content

Roger Dooley is an expert in the field of neuroscience and marketing. In a post, he points out that from a psychological perspective, un-gated content is the undisputed content champ. Roger writes:

Requiring a user to give up his info before viewing good content is a reward strategy – give us your info, and we’ll reward you by letting you see our wonderful content. This is an appealing strategy at first glance – 100% of the people who use the content will have completed the form, and the information should be a powerful motivator for visitors to proceed.

In fact, most users confronted with a form won’t complete it. If they arrived at the site looking for some specific information, they will likely hit the back button and see if they can access it without the aggravation of form completion and without the risk of getting spammed later.

It turns out that a reciprocity strategy works better – give them the info they want, and then ask for their information. The research shows that twice as many visitors gave up their information if they were able to access the information first. It’s counterintuitive, perhaps, but even though these visitors were under no obligation to complete the form, they converted at double the rate of visitors seeing the “mandatory” form.

The neuromarketing takeaway here is that if you invoke reciprocity, you’ll be working with the way our brains are wired and will be more likely to get your visitors to do what you want them to. (And, as an added bonus, your SEO person will be happy that along with your visitors, Google will be able to see your content, too!)

Gated content and measurement

A compelling argument for gated content is measurement. Providing a tangible demonstration of the value of content marketing is difficult. It’s intoxicating to tell a client or your boss that an eBook (or whatever) resulted in a countable number of sign-ups that might be stretched into a claim of “leads.”

Measuring content marketing can be exceedingly hard. Most can’t do an adequate job. I acknowledge that gating your content may be the politically correct thing to do even if the strategy is flawed based on today’s market realities.

However, I think “social shares” is a more powerful measurement than “number of email addresses.” An email address may translate into … nothing. But a social share represents organic advocacy — better than any ad you could pay for.

An unpopular view

I’ve had many negative reactions to the idea of un-gating content. Here is one of them:

I think if you understand Funnels and the importance email still plays in the sales process then you wouldn’t have written this article. It’s not just about sharing good content — it’s also about turning your audience into customers. How do you do that when you never ask for an email address to move the relationship forward?  It’s all about moving folks through your customer journey. 

I would politely suggest this is an anachronistic view of a world that works in “funnels.” It’s not “your customer journey.” It’s THEIRS.

Most marketing today is not your marketing — it’s the sharing of information that’s going on without you. And if you have a gate, that clogs up the information you want to be shared. Let’s do the math and generously assume that 10% of the people who see your post will call for an appointment. We know that 90% of the people who come across your gate will go away. So for every 100 potential customers, you earn just 10 content views, and one call.

If I un-gate the content, I get 100 views and 10 calls. I am 10x more productive. Also, I have 100 people potentially SHARING my article instead of 10 for you.

By the way, what will you do after getting that email address? Spam your way to glory? That’s why people don’t trust gated content in the first place. You’re part of the problem.

I realize it’s a new way to think, but I can’t imagine a business today working hard to get customers to their site and then letting 90% of them walk away. If you ask people for an email AFTER they see the content, research shows it works better.

In any scenario, the numbers work in my favor, not yours.

A simple rule of thumb

One of the themes in my recent writing is that we have lost our way in marketing. Often, those setting the “standards” we follow aren’t marketers; they are SEO experts, statisticians, and IT professionals. I am not diminishing the worth of these resources, but maybe a statistical evaluation is not always the best guidepost for a marketing decision. Perhaps we need to get our heads out of dashboards and spreadsheets and look at what is happening with our customers in the real world.

Just because something seems favorable because of an A/B test or backlink strategy, it doesn’t mean we should do it … especially if people hate it.

So I’ll end this post with a simple piece of advice. People hate gated content. Don’t do things people hate.

Instead, dig deep to discover what your customers love. Now, go do that thing better than anybody else.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney.

The post Why Gated Content Kills Your Marketing Success appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

The topic for this blog post came to me in a dream. I woke up from my dream thinking, “Yes, it’s true. There really is one big mistake content creators make. I should tell others about it!”

I’m sorry this dream wasn’t more exciting or titillating. Maybe my other dreams will be a story for another day. Or not.

Before I reveal my dream-truth, I need to review a basic content marketing philosophy:

Content must be unleashed.

It doesn’t matter if you’re creating epic content or the best work of your lifetime if nobody sees it. The power in your content doesn’t from the content. It comes from the transmission of the content. We want our work to move, which leads to awareness, fans, subscribers and people who will buy things from us.

The biggest mistake content creators make

OK, let’s think this through.

You create great content. You post it everywhere. Somebody bites. They click on the link and what do they see when they arrive at your website?

A blog post? A video? A podcast episode?

Of course … but what else? If you’re like most people, the answer is … nothing. And this is the problem.

When I visit most blog posts or other web content, I can’t even tell who wrote it. I don’t know what this site is about. I don’t see a place to subscribe. I don’t see a place to share the content on social media if I like it. It’s a marketing dead end!

When people click on a link to your content, they don’t arrive at your home page. They arrive at your content. And if all you have on this page is your content, you’re missing a massive opportunity. In fact, this is by far the biggest mistake content creators make today.

In essence, your content page needs to be a mini-landing page for your business. You spend all this time bringing people to your business, but it’s not your business—it’s just a piece of content. They read it and leave. TRAGIC!

Here is your goal: Keep them on your website. You should put as much thought and design into your standard content page as your home page. The longer you keep them on the page, the bigger the chance they will subscribe to your content, share it, or even buy something from you. So don’t miss this opportunity.

Let’s learn how to do this …

The mini home page

If I were sitting with you over coffee, I would pull out my laptop and give you a demonstration. I would probably even buy you the coffee. But since we might be thousands of miles apart, I’ll walk you through it and owe you the coffee when we finally meet. Deal?

As I give you this lesson, it would be helpful to look at how I display my own work, the result of many years of testing. If you like, open up this blog post as you read the rest of my tutorial so you can visualize the lesson.

We’ll start at the top and learn how to make your content into a mini home page.

On my post, what’s the first thing you see under the headline? Social sharing buttons. I can’t believe how often I go to a site and have to work to figure out how to share the content.

Research shows your content will be shared 400% more if you simply add social sharing buttons. The total social shares displayed on my buttons isn’t accurate. It’s sort of a long story why they’re not, and it’s frustrating that nobody has worked that out, but put the buttons up there anyway. No excuses.

Next: An eye-catching graphic. If somebody sees your content shared on LinkedIn or Twitter, the first thing that grabs their attention is the graphic. Maybe you can stop them long enough to read the headline and get a click. The image that goes with your content is also an SEO boost because you can add meta tags to the photo to help Google figure out your content.

Let’s start looking at the right-hand column. You first see a call to action to spend time with me. Cool.

However, the next field, an invitation to subscribe, is the most essential item on the entire page. Why? Because a subscriber is opting in to you and what you do. They are volunteering to hear more. They are becoming members of your email list and possibly future customers.

You might be asking yourself, if the subscribe button is the most critical part of the page, why isn’t it at the top of the column? Heat map studies show that the top right corner of the web page is invisible to many people. I don’t know why, but the conclusion is consistent. So, the top of the column is sort of a throw-away item to get people to the next block which encourages them to subscribe.

As you go down the rest of the column, you’ll see:

• An opportunity to buy my book
• An invitation to attend my marketing retreat
• News about a class I am teaching
• An ability to search the site
• A little welcome message so people know who I am
• Boxes to search my posts by topic, date, or recent articles.

These are all things you might expect to see on a homepage. But most visitors who click on a link never see your home page. We need to fill that gap and give them lots of things to do. Remember, we want to keep them on the website.

Now let’s skip to the very bottom of the blog post. What have we here? A photo of me and further invitations to engage and connect. 

You might note that this page has lots of reasons to buy something from me, but I never sell within the content of the post. Some content gurus insist that you should sell something on every blog post, but I say phooey. I think that’s annoying and disrespectful. I wouldn’t want to subscribe to a constant sales pitch, would you?

But we’re not finished. Under my bio is another opportunity to share the post on social media because we want to get this content to move!

Next, there are a couple of prompts to send you to similar posts on my site. These are free WordPress apps that increase your time on my site by 18%. Huzzah!

And we wrap things up with another opportunity to connect with me on something like buying a book.

Just copy me

I just gave you some ideas for overcoming the biggest mistake content creators make today. My guess is that you have almost none of this on your page today. These ideas are easy to implement and can elevate your content immediately.

Everything I’ve covered here is free if you have a WordPress site. Nothing custom. Ask your web person to review my blog posts and copy my format. I’m happy to help you in that way.

It’s upsetting that so many people put their heart and soul into great content, only to have it languish on a boring, useless page.

I hope these ideas will give your content and business the boost they deserve.

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post The biggest mistake content creators make today appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Scottsboro, Alabama, (population 15,750) is a sleepy river town known for its First Monday craft fair, Payne’s Soda Fountain, and hot, muggy summers. It would not be considered a hotbed for influencer marketing. Well, not until Sarah Stahl made it into an influence marketing case study.

Sarah is the marketing director for ReTreet, a glamping (“glamorous + camping”) site in the woods outside of town. Faced with a 30% occupancy rate and a tiny marketing budget, she needed to build awareness on the cheap and turned to influencers to spread the word.

In what could be a travel industry first, Sarah created so much positive buzz around the tiny 17-site resort that influencers pay her to stay there. How in the world did she do that? In a word, attention to detail. Sarah delivers such an outstanding experience that influencers can’t wait to get there, even from distant states. Her approach includes:

• Partnerships with local attractions and restaurants that enhance the influencer’s storytelling possibilities and boost local tourism.
• Luxury amenities such as hot tubs, outdoor showers, saunas, and fire pits ensures visually appealing content.
• Founding a ReTreet influencer community so creators can stay in touch with each other and the resort. This community-driven approach has helped spur additional content creation and more bookings from their audience long after the initial stay.

Content is the key

“I knew we needed quality content in volume,” she said, “and that consumers might not trust us or understand the idea of glamping at first. With a small startup budget, it would be tough to convince them without help, so working with trusted travel influencers was our best choice.

“I also knew that consistency is key. We’ve averaged about one influencer visit per week over 52 weeks. And as they shared their experiences, we’ve received more interest. We now have a three-month waitlist for content creators to stay with us. Since they are always looking for new angles for their audiences, the content about our resort is always fresh and relevant.

Results in Sarah’s first year:

• Revenue and occupancy doubled.
• The advertising budget was cut in half, and the ROI of their marketing spend more than doubled from $13 per dollar spent to $28 on each dollar spent.
• Increased ReTreet’s Instagram account by 650%, making it the top source of leads.
• Had Instagram Reels that reached 1 million views
• Each influencer visit resulted in an average of two more influencer requests for accommodation.
• Expanded the resort to include a glass dome event space.

Perhaps Sarah’s most important success is the rapid momentum she gained from the effective influencer content. “We’ve moved beyond the struggling startup phase,” she said. “We’re at a point where we’re expecting reservations to be made a year ahead of time.”

An influence marketing case study

I love Sarah’s story because it’s so improbable. A resort in the middle of nowhere propelled by influencers? And yet the success is undeniable.

Most of the time, influence marketing is in the news for something silly, like a creator falling off a wall in search of the perfect selfie. But creators are crucial to our marketing future because they are believed and often adored. Chances are, your business is neither believed nor adored, so partnering with talented and trusted creators might make sense.

I asked Sarah if she’s ever had any problems with divas who were hard to work with. The creators who have come through her resort have been professional and appreciative. If you’re going to make it as an influencer these days, you’ll have to be business-savvy. I think Sarah’s experience reflects a growing professionalism among creators.

The creator economy is massive and growing. Is it time for your business to become an influence marketing case study?

Need a keynote speaker? Mark Schaefer is the most trusted voice in marketing. Your conference guests will buzz about his insights long after your event! Mark is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books, a college educator, and an advisor to many of the world’s largest brands. Contact Mark to have him bring a fun, meaningful, and memorable presentation to your company event or conference.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram

The post The ROI of creators: An inspiring influence marketing case study appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

OK, I’ve had enough of this. In four out of my last five coaching calls, the business leader on the other end of Zoom told me their main platform for content is LinkedIn. No blog. No content on a website. Just LinkedIn.

No, no, no. Also, no.

It’s time to stop the insanity. Today I’m turning you from the dark side and explaining why LinkedIn cannot be your primary content platform.

Back to basics: What are you doing?

Why are you creating content in the first place? There are two main reasons: Enhance your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or build personal authority.

Increasingly, I favor the authority strategy because I believe SEO success is out of reach for many businesses.

Building authority means you don’t have to depend on SEO algorithms any more. You create content so worthy that people subscribe to it so they don’t miss a thing. In a virtual way, subscribers are saying, “I believe in you. I’m interested. Send me more content.”

That’s a beautiful thing. But it all depends on:

Your email strategy

When you publish on your website, or even a place like Substack, you own the email addresses. This, my friends, is probably the most valuable commercial asset in your business.

If you own the email list, you have the opportunity to directly grow relationships, announce commercial deals, and collect information that can be used to personalize offers.

How many email addresses do you own from the content you publish only on LinkedIn? None. So why is LinkedIn your content platform? They own your audience, and we don’t want that.

The SEO killer

Let’s say you’re one of those rare businesses or individuals who have a real chance to win the game of SEO roulette. You’re publishing your brains out on LinkedIn. Content every week. Maybe every day!

Now, if somebody wants to find you through search and give you their money, they go to Google and enter juicy keywords. What’s the chance they’re going to find some post you created on LinkedIn? Go ahead and try it. Do LinkedIn posts show up in any Google search? No.

But what about a blog post, or a YouTube video, or a podcast episode? Yes. That’s the content that fuels SEO on Google. When was the last time you ever had a post on LinkedIn go viral? That’s what I thought.

Oh, one more thing. Who owns LinkedIn? Microsoft. What else does Microsoft own? Bing. Google’s enemy. I don’t think Google is going to give LinkedIn a search assist.

And it gets worse …

AI and LinkedIn do not play well together

A friend is studying the impact of AI on search more closely than anyone I know. And she recently made a shocking observation.

When she queried AI bots about the top thought leaders in AI and search, none of the familiar experts posting through newsletters and LinkedIn showed up. In fact, all of the information provided by AI bots was absorbed from bloggers she had never heard of (but she is following them now!).

Her suggestion: Start a blog right away! At least for now, blogs on websites are driving the content on AI, not LinkedIn posts. This is the future of search.

Evaporation Station

There’s one other risk I should mention.

Do you remember when Facebook had a popular blogging platform? It was called Notes. In October 2020, Facebook eliminated this feature without warning. Millions of people lost their blog content in a moment.

Do we expect LinkedIn to do anything like that? Well … did we expect Facebook to do anything like that?

How to do LinkedIn right

Here’s where people get confused. LinkedIn is not a content platform. It’s a distribution system.

Your brand is fueled by four types of content: written, video, audio, or images (like Instagram). For most business professionals, there really are three: written, video, or a podcast. Pick one and put everything you have into it.

Now, once you have that content, you can use social media to deliver that content to your audience. For example, once you have a blog post ON YOUR WEBSITE, you can distribute it on LinkedIn, Substack, Twitter, and other places. But your website is the home base, the primary platform, always.

Here’s a strategy to create and distribute your content in a smart way on LinkedIn.

1. Research shows that text-based content does best on LinkedIn. Neither video nor podcasts are effective because those content forms do not start conversations in the comment section. Conversations mean dwell time for LinkedIn! So if LinkedIn is important to you, I would focus on blogging.
2. Publish a blog post on your website.
3. Publish this same post as an article (not a link) on LinkedIn two days after you publish it on your website. I post a little later to send a signal to Google that I am the author of the content. I am the original source. Send the search traffic to my website.
4. When you publish your article on LinkedIn, be sure to include an attractive graphic or photo. As people scan their LinkedIn feed, their eyes will be attracted to the image, then the headline, and then, if you’re lucky, the content. So images are important.
5. At this point, LinkedIn will expose your post to a small percentage of your followers. If you can attract comments (conversations) in the first hour after it is posted, LinkedIn will then expose it to the rest of your audience, and perhaps even people outside your followers. Huzzah!

Going forward

Starting with a blog-first strategy provides many other benefits, of course. It might not be the sexiest content in our TikTok world, but for business professionals looking to stand out on LinkedIn, it makes a lot of sense.

A blog can also serve as a portfolio of your work. It provides a centralized location where potential employers, clients, or collaborators can see your expertise, writing style, and the topics you are passionate about. Whether you’re building a brand, looking for a job, or hiring somebody, eventually, people come to your website.

If you take one thing away from this post, I hope it is this: If you’re only posting your content on LinkedIn, you’re grotesquely sub-optimizing your personal branding and content marketing effort. LinkedIn and other social media platforms can play a crucial role in personal branding. But please post all of your content on your website first and then send it into the social media distribution system.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Top photo courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Why you need to ditch LinkedIn as your content platform appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Many times in my career, I’ve used a variation of this phrase: “I want this (product / content / service) to be so good people are addicted to it!”

In a way, that’s the ultimate dream. Sergio Zyman, ex-CMO for Coca-Cola, used to tell me the goal of marketing was to “sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money.”

The idea of being addicted to what you sell seems like an elegant goal that would make you strive to be the best at everything you do, especially when it comes to social media marketing.

Here’s the business case for social media platform success: Create a recommendation engine that delivers content so insanely relevant that people spend increasing amounts of time on the site. Use that engagement to collect personal information on preferences that lead to highly targeted ads.

In other words, create social media addiction … at all costs. Create addiction. That’s social media marketing success.

Here’s the problem. It’s working. And if you work in marketing, you’re probably playing a role in the global mental health crisis.

The algorithms win

A recent Gallup survey revealed significant insights into U.S. teenagers’ social media habits. More than 51% of teens spend an average of 4.8 hours daily on social platforms. Age and gender differences are evident: 13-year-olds average 4.1 hours, 17-year-olds reach 5.8 hours, and girls spend nearly an hour more than boys.

YouTube and TikTok are the dominant platforms, with usage times of 1.9 and 1.5 hours daily, respectively, while Instagram lags behind at 0.9 hours.

Adolescents with lower levels of self-control spend about 1.2 hours more on social media than their more conscientious counterparts. Those with strict parental screen time rules report 1.8 hours less time online.

Unsurprisingly, insights from the survey suggest that design strategies by tech companies that encourage prolonged use are working.

Should we be concerned? Here’s what Gallup had to say (slightly edited for brevity):

Amid declining teen mental health, many scholars have carefully investigated the role of social media. Studies have pointed out how technology companies manipulate users into spending more time on the apps through their designs. There is hard evidence to support this view. In a 2022 article published in the journal American Economic Review, economists reported the results of an experiment with young adults designed to affect their social media use; they conclude that 31% of time spent on social media stems from what the researchers describe as “self-control problems.”

Consistent with the literature on “social media addiction,” these data show that teens who spend more time on social media rate themselves as being less conscientious more generally and live with parents who are less likely to restrict screen time. This analysis reveals that these characteristics also predict poor mental health — and seem to explain at least some of the observed relationship between social media use and mental health problems.

The marketer’s responsibility

These addictive and compulsive behaviors are troubling. But even more disturbing is how the largest corporations in the world are investing billions in promoting and accelerating this compulsive use of their tech tools.

If you look at the 10 largest companies in the world, half of them are trying to create this addictive relationship to technology. The days when the dealer in addiction had to hide in the shadows are over. They now operate freely in your home, and every other sphere of your life.

I am sincerely conflicted by marketing’s role in this mess.

We absolutely have a responsibility to our customers. We need to cut through the noise and ideally earn more attention than competitors. We have this amazing tool at our disposal — social media algorithms — especially if your target market includes teens who live their lives online.

But isn’t there a higher goal? Do No Harm.

Incrementally, my individual marketing efforts won’t have any meaningful impact on social media addiction and the world’s mental health. In all good conscience, I can say that I’m not personally causing any problems.

But when every social media marketer is creating addiction and profiting from it, the cumulative effort is the root of the global problem. In fact, marketers are the entire problem because the purpose of creating addiction is to sell more stuff to more people, more often, for more money. Sergio would be overjoyed!

Social media addiction. What’s next?

The other day, I littered. It was a bad choice, but I had a dirty, wet napkin in the car and I was miles away from a service station. Out the window it went. Perhaps this is the first time I’ve littered in my life. So despite my poor choice, the impact on the global pollution problem is near zero. Heck, the darn thing is biodegradable, right?

But if everybody littered like that, we would create an environmental disaster. And that’s where we are with marketing and social media. No individual TikTok ad hurts anything. But when it’s a way of life for millions of marketers reaching billions of people, it’s a disaster.

I can make a pledge to not pollute anymore through litter. It’s easy. No personal impact. But making a pledge to not market on social media is existential. With our advertising “litter,” many marketers no longer have a career.

Let this sink in: Social media marketing is directly contributing to social media addiction and the global mental health crisis. Perhaps YOU are directly contributing to the mental health crisis.

I thnk deep down we know this … but we never talk about it. Social media expert Arik Hansen said, “Some days I feel like I work for Big Tobacco.”

Anna Bravington, a UK marketing strategist, had this perspective: “Social media addiction and marketing is such an interesting dilemma, and balancing act. I think your thoughts in Belonging to the Brand about community seem like the best middle ground. In community, time spent online is quality and human, not artificial and forced. It feels like that approach is less addictive, and given the mental health side, the right community can be an asset rather than a burden.

I have no universal answer for this, but I needed to start a conversation about it. We can’t keep looking the other way.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Who’s responsible for social media addiction? Me and you. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

On the latest episode of The Marketing Companion, I decided to take a deep dive into the nooks and crannies of social media marketing, and there’s nobody better to accompany me than marketing genius Dennis Yu.

Dennis studies the art and science of social media success to the Nth degree and we get into some fascinating discussions that include:

• The ROI of a blue check mark
• The viral power of feel-good stories
• A social media platform that is killing it right now
• How social media platforms are using facial and image recognition to elevate content
• Why replay rate is the key to success on TikTok
• Insights into what’s happening with Meta and the metaverse

Dennis also shares a unique perspective on how search engines and social platforms are turning over information to the US government. But TikTok doesn’t have to … which could be influencing the government’s position with that platform.

Click here to listen to episode 270

Resources mentioned in this show

TikTok Advertising book

Blog post: Why hate is good for business

Ocean Spray cranberry juice case study

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post What is the ROI of a blue check mark? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I received a message from a reader in the U.K. wondering if social media marketing still matters. She had read my book The Tao of Twitter (which is really about social media strategy) and wondered if the book’s main ideas were still relevant in a world where it is so difficult to earn attention and connect with customers.

The short answer is, yes — it still matters, but probably in a way that is much different than you think. I believe the essential nature of social media marketing has changed forever, and I will address that today.

Is it really marketing?

I have never really liked the phrase “social media marketing.” The power of social media is connection, and I can assure you that you people will not connect to you if all you do is “market” to them! However, if you come alongside people at their point of need and help, inform, or perhaps entertain them, there is a chance for a spark of new connection … and that is a great starting point.

Instead of viewing social media as “marketing,” I would like to reframe the strategy today and contend that it is a first step in a powerful marketing process. To take advantage of the wonderful opportunity of social media, you need to view it in the larger context of today’s consumer realities.

The role of emotion

To understand this process, let’s step back and identify the two types of marketing.

The first type is direct marketing — driving sales through ads, promotions, coupons, etc. Social media has some role in this transactional world, especially if you have “conditioned” followers to pay attention to your social media marketing for bargains and special offers. And, of course, social media plays a crucial role in customer service. Twitter is the homeroom for complaints!

But I contend the larger opportunity for marketing is brand marketing. A simple example of brand marketing is Coca-Cola. What comes to mind when I mention Coca-Cola? Probably this:

Coca-Cola spent billions of dollars over many decades to move your attention away from brown-colored sugar water to the emotional relevance of cuddly polar bears.

Brand marketing creates emotional meaning between you and your customers. It creates an expectation that you will have a certain feeling when you interact with a brand. You probably have wildly different emotional reactions to the following words, a result of decades of brand marketing:

• Harley Davidson
• Patagonia
• New York Yankees
• LEGO

Social media and content can also fuel the emotion behind your personal brand. I’ll talk about that more in a minute.

The emotional continuum

Social media can play an important role in brand marketing that creates long-term, loyal customers.

Here is a graphic illustration from my book Belonging to the Brand, which simply depicts social media’s role in brand marketing.

We see that the emotional connection of social media is weak. It is ephemeral. Often, you might feel like posting is like throwing a message in a bottle into the ocean, hoping somebody will notice.

The true power of social media marketing is in its ability to connect us to a world of relevant new people — people who may want us, need us, and maybe even love us as loyal customers. In sales parlance, this is the top of the funnel, the beginning of a relationship and possible sales.

This real magic starts when you interact with people in a way that provokes their curiosity. Can you move them to your audience?

An audience is the group of people who subscribe to your content, like blogs, videos, podcasts, Instagram, and other opt-in channels.

When you have an audience of subscribers, you’ve achieved an entirely new level of emotional connection! Your message is no longer floating in the media ocean, you have reliable reach. A subscriber is telling you, “It’s OK to communicate with me. I’m interested.” This is also the fundamental strategy of personal branding.

Unfortunately, this is where most companies stop. They are falling short of the ultimate emotional connection with customers — community.

Social media marketing that leads to an audience

In my book Belonging to the Brand, I explain that community, characterized by 1) relationships between your fans or customers, 2) a shared purpose, and 3) evolving engagement, is unparalleled in its ability to create meaningful emotional bonds with customers.

In fact, an active and engaged community creates a layer of emotional switching costs. Your customers literally feel like they belong to your brand.

Here’s a small example of the emotional continuum in action. I will talk about myself and a personal brand, but I think you can see how this can apply to anyone or almost any company.

Case study of the process

If you add up my social media audience across all channels, it is somewhere around 500,000. Pretty cool.

If I put out a message on social media announcing that I have a new book, how many books will I sell? Almost none, and I’m speaking from experience! Even with this large audience and more than a decade of continuous engagement, I’m throwing a message into the ocean.

But I still post on social media and interact genuinely because I know many people will become curious enough to click my profile, visit my website, absorb my content and subscribe to my blog or podcast.

Oh happy day!

Maybe this was you? Or maybe you’re reading this post and discovering me for the first time? If you become part of my audience of subscribers, we’ll enter into a new emotional relationship. We’re getting to know each other and perhaps even develop a parasocial relationship where I feel like part of the family.

If I announce to my audience that I have a new book, how many will buy it? Lots. Because with every post and podcast episode, they form a tighter emotional bond and with people who want to support me.

But that’s not the end. The ultimate bond comes when members of the audience grow into a community.

Reimagining social media marketing as a process

The RISE community is a vibrant group of marketing geeks trying to discern the future of our profession together. And this is where I have my strongest bonds.

If my community knows I have a new book, how many will buy it? Everyone. And they will also review it, promote it, and give it away to their friends.

The bond of community means so much more than just reliable reach. It enables organic advocacy, which is the most incredible marketing you could ever wish for!

Waking up your strategy

I think this new characterization of social media — a top-of-the-funnel relationship that leads to audience and community — is the most accurate depiction of the role of social media marketing strategy today.

The problem is, most businesses are stuck on a view of social media marketing that emerged 15 years ago. The world was much different then. You could attract attention simply by having an interesting social media account — it was a novelty!

No longer. If the entirety of your social media strategy is posting content without a larger strategy that leads to audience and community, your organization needs to wake up and see the new world as it really works today.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Does social media marketing still matter? Not like you think. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.