Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Building a Sustainable Marketing Machine for Small Businesses: Expert Advice [Andrew Schulkind Interview]

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 317

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In this episode I interview Andrew Schulkind, the author of "Marketing for Small B2B Businesses: How Content Creates Marketing Muscle and Powers Traditional and Digital Marketing."

The episode focuses on building a sustainable marketing machine for small businesses, with a particular emphasis on B2B businesses.

Andrew shares his expertise in working with small businesses and provides actionable advice for creating effective content marketing strategies.

The conversation covers topics such as the importance of audience-centric content and the role of AI in content creation.

Show Notes

Andrew's background in video [00:02:08] Andrew talks about his background in video and how his company, Indigo, evolved from video to web to content marketing.

Andrew's background in video and evolution to content marketing [00:04:38] Andrew talks about his background in video and how his company, Indigo, evolved from video to web to content marketing.

Definition of small businesses [00:06:10] Andrew defines small businesses as companies with under 100 employees or under $100 million in sales.

Definition of small businesses [00:08:11] Neil and Andrew discuss the definition of small businesses, which Andrew defines as companies with under 100 employees or under $100 million in sales.

Small Business Definition [00:08:40] Andrew Schoen defines small businesses as companies with under 100 employees or under $100 million in sales.

Writing a Book [00:09:54] Andrew Schoen talks about how he was approached by a publishing company to write a book and the process of writing it.

Marketing Mindset [00:14:47] Andrew Schoen emphasizes the importance of understanding that marketing is not about you, but about demonstrating that you understand the problem your target audience is experiencing and creating content that provides value to them.

The Importance of Audience-Centric Content [00:16:25] The speakers discuss the common mistake of companies creating company-centric content instead of audience-centric content, and the importance of focusing on the end customer's needs.

Challenges of Measuring ROI and Attribution [00:18:17] The speakers talk about the challenges of measuring ROI and attribution in marketing, and how it depends on the management team's expectations and opinions.

Simplifying Marketing for Small Businesses [00:23:20] The guest emphasizes that small business marketers don't need to understand the technical minutiae of websites or copy the social media strategies of national consumer brands. Instead, they need to know how to build successful marketing machines that they can sustain with their available resources.

Building a Sustainable Marketing Machine [00:24:17] Andrew Schoen gives advice on building a sustainable marketing machine for small businesses, including re

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Neal Schaffer:

data, it's all about the data. You got to understand marketing data and apply those insights to improve your business. But how do you do so? I think this is a challenge that I face that a lot of marketers and businesses face and I believe you my podcast listener faces as well. That's why I decided to reach out to an expert on this very topic to teach us how to best leverage marketing data to fuel our business growth. This is going to be a free masterclass where I'm gonna know Russell, CEO and co founder of one of digital marketing's best kept secrets. A digital marketing ROI dashboard, called Digi advisor is going to come and present on 10 ways to use data to transform your digital marketing and drive business growth. Tuesday, May 30 11am, Pacific 2pm Eastern free masterclass, go to Neal schaffer.com/did your visor dash webinar, this will be in the show notes as well, but Neal schaffer.com/di GIVIZ e r dash, w EB i n AR deviser dash webinar neosurf At our comm slash divisor dash webinar. Don't make me repeat that again. I will see you on May 30. How would you like to build a sustainable marketing machine for your small business? No, this is not a dream. It is a reality. And my special guest for today is going to give you the advice to do just that. On this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast digital social media content influencer marketing blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM PPC, email marketing, whew. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody. This is Neal Schaffer. I am your digital marketing coach and welcome to my podcast. I am a fractional CMO, president of PDCA. Social where I help marketers small businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, content creators with anything and everything digital content, influencer, social media marketing, I have fractional cmo consulting, I have a group mastermind called the Digital First mastermind community, a very, very small number of people that get together on a weekly basis to up our digital marketing game, and to achieve more for our businesses through digital marketing. And I do a lot of speaking, write some books, teach at universities, you get the picture. But this podcast the concept behind every single episode is that I am your digital marketing coach, I am in your shoes. And I want to make sure that every single episode gives you value gives you something actionable that you can take away to improve your own marketing and grow your business. How's that sound? All right, today we have episode number 317. And today we have another special guest. His name is Andrew Shokan. And he is the author of Marketing for Small b2b businesses, how content creates marketing muscle and powers traditional and digital marketing. Now, as the title of his book suggests, his experience and advice is geared towards b2b businesses. But as we all know, for digital marketing for b2c businesses, you still need content, everything that he talks about, I believe, is equally applicable to b2c businesses. So don't just skip fast forward to the next episode. Stay tuned, there's going to be a lot of knowledge drops from, you know, helping you understand that you don't need to understand the technical background of websites. You don't need to be copying the social media strategies of national consumer brands. In fact, you probably shouldn't be copying recent strategies of consumer brands in the beer industry. It's really about building a successful marketing machine and sustaining it with your available resources. Can I hear an amen? That's what I'm all about. That's what Andrew is all about. That's what you should be all about. So without further ado, here Is my interview with Andrew Shokan. You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neal Schaffer. Andrew, welcome to the digital marketing coach podcast. Thanks, Neil. Great to be here. I'm really excited today to dive in to your perspective on marketing for small businesses. I know you also have an expertise in b2b businesses. And for those not familiar with Andrew, I'm gonna have him introduce himself briefly. But he is the author of a new book marketing for small b2b businesses, how content creates marketing, muscle, and powers, traditional and digital marketing. This is like music to my ears. A lot of my listeners know, I'd like to say content really is the currency of digital and social media. So I believe we're kindred spirits. And I'm really looking forward to unpacking all the advice you offer our listeners. But before we get to that, before we get to the book, and your company, marketing, b2b, small business, where did this all start for you?

Andrew Schulkind:

Sort of, I won't say in the pre internet days, but really early on, I founded the company in 1996, which goes back aways, I don't think we built our first website until 1998 or so. And we certainly didn't have our own website until at least then. So set top boxes and other sort of marketing tools for company, laptop presentations and things along those lines. That's really where it started, I was working in digital, I mean, video post production. And as that industry was going digital, it was just like, what the writing on the wall was pretty clear. And so this was a fascinating thing to get into. And I was just telling someone the other day that there was no, and some cases there was no pressure because we were all figuring it out. At the same time. It wasn't like there was someone out there who was an expert, there's no imposter syndrome. Because we were all imposters, we're all sort of trying to figure it out. That's really

Neal Schaffer:

interesting. Before social media, one of my careers was selling middleware software for set up boxes. The IPTV set up boxes, so who knows maybe our paths crossed out at IBC are one of these conferences very cool. So you started the video side. So you are the founder and CEO of indigo. So at what point did you launch the company? And you know, what, what made you create your own company around all that you were doing?

Andrew Schulkind:

Well, I hadn't had another company before this that was sort of focused on a couple of different things, and my co founder there wanting to go in the direction of consumer work. And I wanted to stick with marketing work, I think consumer, you know, really not marketing work, just actually creating products. And I thought, gosh, that's an uphill battle. As small as we are, you know, people have bigger marketing budgets than we, you know, had capital to start our company with. So we split there. And that's where I started and ago, and you know, coming out of video, we had a lot of contacts in pharma, because that was sort of the lifeblood of the video post production world in New York City back in those days. And so we did a lot of work in the in the pharma industry in education. And pretty quickly, in part because of what happens in New York and what kind of companies there are in New York, we were working for a lot of small b2b companies, and small companies in general. And that's really where things grew. And for us, I would say that there was a big, sort of a watershed moment. You know, I mentioned a minute ago that, you know, there was no imposter syndrome, because we were all, you know, sort of figuring it out as we went, I don't have a background as a as a graphic designer, certainly, I don't really even have a background as a coder, though. I've picked up a shocking number of skills over the years. I'm really a message guy. And you know, so it was all about the message and trying to get a message heard, what should that message be? What was going to be effective. And so, you know, when the big search engines, most notably, Google began to pay attention to all the Blackhat, SEO that was going on, you know, the white text on a white background to try and fool people into what a website was really about. And they started paying attention to the content on the page. That was that was it for us. And that's where we really sort of came into our own and began building out the content marketing side of the business, as opposed to just the web development side, the technical side of the business. And so we've been running with that ever since.

Neal Schaffer:

So it sounds like your business has evolved, from video, to web, to content similar to how marketing has evolved over the past two decades in a very natural, organic way.

Andrew Schulkind:

Yeah, that's a fascinating way to put it. I hadn't thought of that.

Neal Schaffer:

So when we say small businesses, it's funny. A lot of people think small businesses like you know, one or two people. And I have friends in the industry that go No, there's nothing small about small businesses. You know, the way you categorize a small businesses, anything under like 100 million or anything under 100 employees, the types of companies you work with just to give a frame of reference for our listener when you A small business, what is the sort of scale in terms of employees or sales that would define a lot of these companies?

Andrew Schulkind:

Yeah, you know, maybe the most amorphous phrase in all of marketing small business, right? Yeah, we very much don't work very often with those one or two person, folks. You know, a traditional two or three person law firm, or, you know, a couple of partners in an accounting practice, are companies, cleaning companies are typically between two and$25 million in revenue, size matters less, we do actually work with a couple of solopreneurs, who really place high value on and get a lot of return from the kind of marketing work that we can do for them. So that's really what the for us is the telling tale, is there going to be a return on the investment we're asking you to make because we're not building websites for 3000 or$5,000. We're not offering you know, social media management services for $50 a post, that's just not our market, not who we're working with. So it's that two to $25 million range where we work most effectively. We work with some bigger companies as well, but not, you know, not certainly not enterprise level or even mid market type companies.

Neal Schaffer:

Gotcha. Then from agency, entrepreneur, Owner, CEO to author, what prompted you to, or inspired you to write this book,

Andrew Schulkind:

someone asked me to I, you know, do a lot of writing for and to go on, and on our website, and on my LinkedIn page and the company LinkedIn page, and a very variety of other places, and a publishing company, a press who published this book, found that and approached me and said, Hey, would you like to write a book and so we negotiated back and forth for a little while on what that book would be about, you know, sort of what fit they're stable, and where they had, you know, sort of holes to fill, and what fit my expertise. And this is what came in. And so I was thrilled, it was really an interesting process that, you know, we're here talking about content marketing. So we can talk about this for a minute, if you'd like, it was a really interesting process that I had wanted to do for a long time, partly because I'm a writer, basically. And I really wanted to write a book. But also because it's something that is really valuable as a marketing resource for small business owners. And so going through the process was really pretty fascinating. I don't have anything to compare it to in the self publishing world lot folks go that route. And I think there are advantages and disadvantages I'll Apress was fantastic to work with. But of course, I didn't have complete control over, you know, what the cover of the book look like? Or, you know, what that you know, there, if you've got the book near of I, I can't even remember the subtitle the you know, the obligatory very long subtitle, but all books seem to have these days, right, that wasn't, you know, my doing. I don't have any real complaints about it. But you know, there are things that you give up, and things that you gain from, from working with someone like having a strong editorial team to say, Hey, are you sure this is the direction you want to go in this chapter? Have you ever gotten off off topic here? So really interesting process that took me about a year?

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, no, I've written four books myself, I've done both self published and have worked with with big publishers. So I know exactly what you're talking about. But it's really interesting, because it also speaks to the opportunity that you're publishing content, not only on your own blog, but elsewhere, gave you that exposure, where this publisher reached out to you. And this is really when we talk about how content creates that opportunity. That's exactly what happened, right? And then I think you'd agree that that content in the form of a book has a very, very special, it's perceived as a very special type of content. That becomes a amazing business card. Amazing credibility, something a potential customer can take back and become the trigger to convert them into becoming a lead a customer.

Andrew Schulkind:

That is absolutely right, I'll share a quick story that offers a cautionary tale. And a moment of real embarrassment for me, as we were negotiating the book, actually, I think we already signed and I was already writing. And I was asking questions about some of the specifics of marketing, who was responsible for what we're, you know, how did the book get onto Amazon and things like that? And on the phone with two of the editors, and there's a point in the conversation where I don't remember what they said, but I can't believe these words came out of my mouth. But I said, Well, I don't really care if the book sells. And there was silence for a moment, of course, and then, you know, they said, we kind of care. And I was like, No, of course, you know, I care if the book sales, but you know, it's really it's a marketing tool. For me, it's a marketing tool for the business. That's how I plan to use it. And I hope that all the effort I put into promoting the book will turn into sales, but that's not my primary goal. So don't say that to your publishers if you don't go the self publishing route.

Neal Schaffer:

But actually, what's interesting is a lot of publishers secretly want you to say that so they can negotiate. Obviously, better terms. Right, right. So you know, it's like, well, if you expect to if you expect to become a millionaire from your book, and you want to get this much Ian's are this much royalties, it that's just unrealistic. So that's actually a very realistic perspective, right? Your book is not to make money, but it is obviously in the business world that that incredible marketing piece. So I agree 100%. You know, obviously I want my books to sell as well. But that is not the primary and I'm going to promote it to my network in my community, what have you. But yeah, I totally get what you're saying and how they might have been a part. I mean, my publisher didn't want me to even start thinking about writing another book until one year after, after my last one published, and I was ready three months later, I was I have my next book idea that no, no, no, no, you need to keep promoting for at least a year or so. Anyway. So yes, it's an interesting industry. But this is not a how to publish a book podcast, as you all know. So we'll, we'll get back to the topic at hand. So small business marketing, and we you know, before we began recording, you talk about this critical piece that small businesses miss most frequently, I guess, what is like the one thing that small business marketers or business owners, entrepreneurs, that are listening this podcast, what is the one thing that are the most important thing that you think they need to do to be successful with marketing?

Andrew Schulkind:

The first chapter, my book is titled, The marketing mindset. And one of the things I say in that book, which I say, far too frequently, probably for the people around me, but is the idea that you need to understand that your prospects don't care about you, your prospects don't even care about what you do, your prospects care about what you can do for them. So that mindset, understanding that marketing isn't about you, marketing has to be about demonstrating that you know, and understand the problem that your target audience is experiencing. And then creating content that demonstrates that and provides value to them as they are either trying to solve the problem directly, or more likely trying to find out well, what's the best way for me to solve this problem, what's going to work for my particular situation, my industry, my, you know, the state of the market, and here what I can afford to spend, because the problem is worth X, all those kinds of things I think we see too much from from folks and everything from, you know, sort of very small ways. Like, you know, everyone's got their pet peeves. As someone who builds websites, I look at a website, and I see the about item on the main menu as the first thing and like, we know, that's wrong, you know, that really, no one cares, I don't care, it's about your, you know, combined decades of experience for the fancy schools you went to, they will care once you make them care. But first, you've got to get there. And you've got to make them understand that you you, you get them and their problem, and you're worth investing more time and even, you know, just to subscribe to your email newsletter, or listen to your podcast or wherever it may be. And it also, you know, I see it in larger ways as well, where just the language on the website is very much about me and us and what we do, and here's our structure. And, you know, again, at some point, you know, there's real value, of course, to having a process, you know, with a TM after it, you know, to something that you can say, this is a key differentiator, there's always going to be value in that. But that's not the first thing people are going to look for, they're gonna look for, you know, what, what works for us? And does this work for us at all.

Neal Schaffer:

I'm reminded of a quote from Joe Pulizzi, the godfather of content marketing, when I saw him speak live many years ago, it still sticks with me, and I still use it in my presentations, which is 90% of content that companies create, is company centric. And only 10% of it is audience centric, where it actually should be the other way around. I think you you speak well, to that. It's really interesting. You talked about it from a website copy perspective, I'm assuming once we go off the website into, you know, blog and social media, it becomes even more important, correct. Do you see this mistake a lot of companies make where they think they need to talk about something or about themselves or showcase themselves when they're not focused on that end, and customer that prospect and their needs?

Andrew Schulkind:

Yeah, that's exactly right. And it really does. You're absolutely right, it does come out much more on social media and email marketing. Gosh, I mean, talk about, you know, the hair trigger that most of us have on hitting the delete button, you really better grab their attention, make sure they understand it's about them before you ever, you know, hit send yourself. So yeah, that is absolutely true. I have not heard that Joe puts the quote before it, but it definitely brings to mind the idea that someone I read recently 80% of content marketing content is never seen by anyone outside the company, which kind of tracks but if 90% of it is about the company, then that's who's gonna care and you've got to figure out a way around it.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, that's so hopefully the listener going forward before you publish or create any content, you'll have that end user that prospect and it's really funny and in the YouTube world, they talk a lot about this the importance of psycho psycho graphy of really understanding the psychology of that target user that. So a lot of what we talked about, it's funny it. And I've had discussions with other marketing authors that a lot of things that companies need, it really comes down to the basics, like understanding that target persona, and then really focusing on that with your content at some point, I think a lot of people, they stray away for whatever reason, do you find that to be the case as well?

Andrew Schulkind:

Yeah, absolutely. You know, the classic example of that is, you know, the syndrome of the next great thing, another shiny object, right, like, you know, it's a new platform, it's something instead of not just, Well, certainly not blindly sticking with something forever, whether it's working or not, but having a plan going in to say, hey, we're going to try this new platform, this new avenue, and here are the metrics that we're going to look at at these points in time to see if it's working to see if we're making progress and make a decision based on that not the fact that something new just came out, or the fact that you haven't had anyone knock on your door yet, based on what you've done there specifically, because depending on the kind of business you have, attribution is really hard. I mean, that is the holy grail, I think, for a lot of us, and it's just super difficult to, to come up with a foolproof and tight way to make to know, hey, this is the content that got them here. You know, whether it's the last piece of the first piece or a piece in the middle, it's that that is a super challenge. I imagine you found something similar.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah. It's funny, it was a pharma company that I've worked with before, they were questioning the ROI of this is the early days of social media marketing, you know, what's, what's the ROI, and at some point, you just have to understand it all becomes part of this modern marketing infrastructure, right? But I'd say well, what's, you know, what's the ROI of your website, it's something that you have to have to do business. And the marketer said, Actually, our CEOs us, whenever we want to do a website design change, what's the ROI of our website? So it's, it's, you know, attribution is really funny. And I think it depends on the management team. And their expectations. And the way I've had, you know, I have one of my fractional cmo clients are a very small business, they want to go out and buy, like, you know, 100 different variations of the domain name of their brand, to protect their brand for the future. There's no immediate ROI from that spend, and it's going to be an annual expenditure of maintaining these domains. But it's an SEO says, we have to do this. So. So yeah, there's, it's, it's a fascinating subject, there's so many different ways of looking at it, it's so opinionated, depending on the people in charge of the budget and the company. So I agree.

Andrew Schulkind:

And I think it's a little bit we're sort of, you know, being held to the own standard that we've created, right in the beginning of all this is like, Hey, you can measure everything, this is going to be fantastic. And, yeah, we can measure this a lot more than you can measure how many people have really looked at that ad in a newspaper or a print newspaper, but, you know, what's the value of they're trying to assign value to that? And, you know, deciding what, you know, brand building is versus, you know, lead gen and Yeah, exactly.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah. In fact, I teach a class on influencer marketing at UCLA Extension. And just last night, question, I should a case study of someone that they did one of these roundup blog posts, you know, invited 20, industry experts, very effective, especially for b2b companies. And they one of the points from the case study was that they achieved 20% increase in brand awareness. So immediately the students like, Well, how did they measure that? Right? And one thing and you know, there are like with the Facebook ad platform, this brand lift, there's various things you can do that businesses do one hack, and this is a hack. But if you look at Google Analytics, look at your direct traffic. And while the direct traffic could mean a lot of different things, I just will say, if that is going up, you have more brand awareness, just keep it very simple, right? Yeah. And that person actually nodded and said, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is that 100%? scientifically accurate? Absolutely not. But it does make sense compared to last year, if your direct traffic is up three, four or five times, you're probably known by more people. So I like to keep it try to keep it simple rational, not get 100% accuracy, because it's impossible. Yeah, that's

Andrew Schulkind:

especially valuable for smaller companies, right, who just aren't going to have the budget and the bandwidth to make it complicated anyway.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. So one of the things also we talked about before we hit the record button, was you said and I'm going to quote you small business, marketers don't need to understand the technical minutiae of websites, or copy the social media strategies of national consumer brands. They need to know how to build successful marketing machines that they can sustain with their available resources. What does a successful marketing machine look like?

Andrew Schulkind:

Well, you know, to tie that back to the very beginning of that, quote, I think people get really hung up on the specifics of hey, I really have to know how to build a website or maintain In a website or understand what my social media marketing metrics mean, or you know, any of 1000 really tiny details that are tech focused, and that really matter. And the truth is, unless you're on a crazy, crazy tight budget, you know, it's just you, you should be farming that out, you should be working with experts who you know, particularly on a lot of this online, you know, SEO or SEM, where if you're not doing it all day, every day, you're just not going to do a good job, there's just so much detail that you have to dive into to understand why a particular campaign isn't working, or what you should be doing to test why one is and what you can do to create another campaign sub campaign to hit another audience segment, you're just not going to be able to do that unless you either are doing it all day, every day, or really dive deep, which probably means as a business owner a couple of hours a day, but most business owners just don't have. So for starters, you really should rely on folks who can, who can help you with their expertise, because it's not just a matter of knowing you know, which which button to click, it's knowing why you're clicking that button. So to me, that's the first step. The second step is understanding your resource limitations and your needs to create content, right, put marketing out there. So it might be great to be on the top five social media channels that where your audience gathers, first, I hope you've done the research to know where what those five are, but if you're resource constrained, and don't do it, don't do those five things poorly do one really well and expand from there. And, you know, I think a lot of people make the mistake of on social media in particular. Or even, I'll just say, across marketing, and I'm trying to put together an omni channel marketing plan, which is, you know, to use a term that enterprise level folks use that small businesses probably shouldn't, that they feel like, well, I can just create this content once and publish it five times. And to some extent, that's true, but there really is, there are pitfalls to doing that. And there's value to really understanding the specifics of a platform, its strengths, its weakness, what the community there is expecting, and adapt that same content across those platforms. So that, you know, again, you talked a minute or two ago about, you know, just sort of the basics of marketing, marketing 101, that's kind of, you know, very much a piece of that. And then of course, internally having systems to make it easy for you to recreate and do what you do. And you know, it consistency does matter. If you set out to publish a blog post, every Tuesday morning than do it every Tuesday morning, your your audience, you know, for the most part, except for your mom, they're not waiting by their inbox for notification every Tuesday morning that you've published something new. But they'll notice if it's six months go by, and I haven't seen anything from you, right. So you definitely want to make sure that you build those systems. And to me that you know, means thinking through what you're doing in sort of bulk fashion and putting together your ideas so that you can generate them together. Whether that means taking a Saturday morning to do it or carving out time, one day, a week, or two days a month, just doing it together. So that it gets done, and you're not sitting there every Tuesday morning. I hate to admit this, but you know, when I first started publishing our own content, that's what I did. You know, I was like, alright, every Tuesday and Friday, I'm gonna publish something. And every Tuesday and Friday, I sat down to write it, which is just insanity, right? Like you're, you know, there's always a client conflict or something else that comes up or, you know, your car breaks down, or whatever the case may be. So preparing for all that and making sure that you're aware of what your limitations are, so you can work around them. I think that's a good start.

Neal Schaffer:

That's really such excellent advice. And I think a lot of people talk about consistency, but very few talks about sustainability. Because if you can't sustain it, obviously you're the consistency means nothing. And really understanding your limits. I don't know if you use any use do you use like a project management software to manage your agency clients and all the different activities and tasks?

Andrew Schulkind:

Yes, and no, I there's not a single tool I can recommend we've kind of cobbled together over the years using a range of tools that some of which we've kind of developed in spreadsheets and things like that, that really worked for us, you know, we're not a high volume kind of, you know, we have eight or 10 project projects going on at a time beyond, you know, a much larger group of clients on the website side that are we're doing maintenance for which is, you know, much lower, you know, a lighter lift. So I don't I don't have any specifics, but you bring up a good point and that is have tools in place that make it easy for you to either work across a team or and this might sound silly, but it make it obvious to you, you know, give you some sort of signal that hey, I'm taking off one hat and putting on another right even as simple as As a I've got to write this content, but then I've also got to edit it. So other tools that can help me differentiate between the tool too, so that it becomes much more part of your system, because systems really are important. Yeah, I'm

Neal Schaffer:

gonna give the listeners advice. So I started using one of these tools. There's a few of them out there, I started using clickup. And what's amazing, is it because it allows you to think about what are the processes, what are the tasks, and then you can time them as little time tracker, and you can really begin to understand, do I need to be doing this every day. Because the more content you create, the more you tried to be active in social media, and the need to be consistent and make it sustainable, you realize, you know what, maybe this is something I don't need to do every day, maybe every other day, right? So I encourage everybody, I am actually on the free click up plan, there's a lot you can do for free. So I encourage you to there's monday.com, there's a bunch of them out there. But if you're ever curious, try to create a procedure for all the different marketing things you do, and then time yourself doing each one of those tasks. And I think you'll really begin to understand how much time all this is taking that you might not realize, and to be able to create something that's more sustainable. So thank you for allowing me to talk about that. It's been a real, I'm gonna say it's been a game changer, things like, I've stopped 50 Chrome tabs open. And now I just have one place that I go to and click up. And it's like, you know what, this, I'm gonna check just once a week, or this, I'm just gonna check once a month, and I put the reminder in there, so that I know I need to check it in case I forget it. And I know how long it takes me when I do it. And you can plan your whole month. And anyway, so a great reminder about sustainability of systems and processes. So that's great. Ya know, another thing you mentioned that if your business has a very, very small marketing team, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners are in that category, they might be doing the marketing themselves, they might have one, maybe two or three people, if content is really important. You talk about the benefits of having a great editor. So if you you know if content is so central, the messaging, website, email, social media, all the content you create, but you don't have that skill set. What is your recommendation for how companies can go small businesses with small teams? How do they handle that situation and make sure they're putting out the best content?

Andrew Schulkind:

Well, if you really, really don't have that skill set, you've got to bring somebody who does it, you're just not gonna be effective, if the content you're putting out there is subpar. If it's, you know, riddled with errors or riddled with typos, it just doesn't look professional. Not that we all don't make mistakes. But to do it consistently, people are going to are really going to be turned off. So certainly, if you don't have the skills in house, bring someone in. Ideally, you would do that in a way that allows you to grow into that role, right? So yeah, at some ways, it's not fair to ask someone to come in and teach you how to do what they do. But if you're honest about that from the outset, and say, hey, look, I can't afford to have you, you know, have this role expand in the foreseeable future, I need to keep it just to the minimum, and you need to help me figure out how I can take some of this on myself, teach me what I should be doing how I need to be doing it better. Beyond that, one of the things that I talked about in the book, and something that I talk to clients about all the time, I'd even, you know, try to brainwash my children into thinking this way, which is, you know, create space, create distance, and the difference between your writing role and your editing role. This nothing new in this advice, but sit down. And you know, don't, don't even start with the writing role. Start with the ideation start with the brainstorming, if that's what you want to call it, and come up with the ideas and let it flow. And if you fill a page with a great if it's just noodling, and bullet points and a basic outline, that's fine, set it aside, come back the next day, and write the article. And don't worry about the typos and grammar and did you really tie this together as well as you could have, etc. And then in the third pass, at the very least, you can do the editing and turn it into something that's really sharp and polished. And that for a lot of people that can be really a surprisingly painful process, particularly that third step where they've written it, and if that was painful enough that going back to look at it, again, really is you know, an almost a traumatic, but you know, really does cause stress. But once you begin to get more practice at it, it becomes a really effective way to write if you don't have a team to help you do it. But it the whole goal, of course, is a fresh set of eyes and even 24 hours, but you know, ideally, maybe a little bit more than that, in between passes can give you a fresh perspective on it.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, you know, a lot of people in content marketing don't talk enough about the role of an editor and if you've ever written a book for a publisher, and seen how an editor I can completely tear apart what you thought was a perfect chapter, as I'm sure it's happened to you and me and, and all the other authors, it is both humbling. But also it gets, I think back to your original point, it's not about you. It's not about how great of a writer you may be, it's about that audience and is your message, giving them a solution. And having that extra set of eyes just tuned on making sure that your content is meeting that objective? Is is a really, really great solution that is not talked about or valued enough, I think in content marketing. So thank you for bringing that out. Since we're talking about content, and since this is very top of mind, probably after you published the book, you might be getting asked this, if you haven't been getting asked this by now I'm sure in the near future, you will. But it's this role of AI in content creation. And I know as someone who is, you even said that you're a writer, I know you're probably very opinionated on this. But I think as marketers, we also sort of can't ignore the emergence of AI. So I'm really curious, as to your opinion, is this something that companies should look at using today? And if so, what are the areas in which you would recommend them use it? Or is it something where you know what, it's not ready for primetime a year from now? Or you should stay as far away from AI and make it as human as possible? What what's your take?

Andrew Schulkind:

So my take on that is, it's complicated. We have, of course, been playing around with AI quite a lot, you know, because the first thing you read about it is it's coming through your job, you know, get ready to lay on the beach all day. And I just don't think that's true. It certainly will shift things as so many other technologies are, in some ways, it strikes me as being search engines, taken to the extreme, right. It's just really fantastic at finding stuff for you immediately without making you sift through a search results page. And another level, I look at it kind of the way, and I'm really dating myself here, but you know, desktop publishing software, if you remember, those tools were

Neal Schaffer:

perfect, one of the best pieces of software ever.

Andrew Schulkind:

Exactly. But it didn't put all the people out of business who, you know, made newsletters and print pieces for everyone back in those days. It it devalued the value of someone doing physical layout and, you know, work for it for a piece, you know, no one's doing that anymore. And I think a similar thing is going to happen here. If you don't pay attention to these tools, then you are going to be underpriced and outperformed by your competitors who are using them intelligently. And of course, that last word intelligently is is the kicker here, right? Because I don't know how that works yet, like we've we've played around with everything from as we've started web development projects recently, there are a whole set of documents that we create specific to each project during discovery, to ask questions about strategy and goals and what's going to happen and making sure we all understand what this website needs to do to succeed. And we started putting prompts in chat GPT, and a couple of other engines and spit back some pretty good stuff. I was hoping it was going to I mean, I was I guess nervous, but also hoping I was going to learn something I was nervous that it was going to come back with these, you know, a discovery questionnaire document and like, geez, we should have been using something like this for the last 20 years. It didn't it unearth some things that like, oh, that's an interesting way to phrase that. I wonder if that wouldn't elicit better responses from you know, clients who may not have this vocab vocabulary. And, you know, we've done that with a variety of documents. And you know, that's been interesting, we just for fun, I put through a prompt to ask it to write us a contract for a specific kind of engagement that we do. It wasn't exactly like the one we're using, but it wasn't far off. So you know, that's, that's sort of interesting. What, to me, the evolution here, I think will be, and I hope will be not this broad search engine esque type tool, but for content creation, to be able to create your own library, your own database, your work, you're thinking your ideas, and then ask it to, hey, write me 800 words on GDPR regulations in the style of me, right? I mean, to me, that seems much more interesting than, hey, just write me, you know, 800 words on GDPR. I just I'm not sure how well that goes. And of course, I think all that's going to be influenced by the inevitable arms race. It's already started between the engines creating this stuff and the detectors that are you know, bent on not letting it happen.

Neal Schaffer:

I love that idea of having this personalized AI that can tap into the blog posts you've already written to understand your style and really just just repurpose that content in an intelligent way on new subjects. I obviously were I'm not even close to that today. But it's it's really interesting how it is changing a lot of things. There was a point I was going to talk about that I just completely forgotten right now. But But yeah, I see different companies approaching different ways. And I do agree that if you're not going to use it, your competitors are and now I'm remembering that point. So I was at a, they call it generative AI when they talk about AI for content creation. I was at a conference last week put on by Jasper, who I believe to be one of the leaders and creating marketing AI content. And there was a gentleman sitting next to me, and he runs his own website, agency, website design agency. And he was able, it really comes down to those prompts. As you know, there's actually titles that people prompt engineering that are being offered hundreds of 1000s of, you know, annual salary these days in Silicon Valley, apparently. But he basically was able to fine tune these prompts to the point where he could pretty much you know, all the questions that need to be asked of new clients in order to build the website, he could pretty much automated through getting responses to these prompts for each of his customers. And now he wants to productize that template for others and set yourself to us, right. So it's almost like this brand new world that is evolving around these prompts. So I think that's the message for anyone listening is to understand when we talk about prompts, what does that mean? And just to play around with it and find what might make it more optimal for you to, to use. So, yeah,

Andrew Schulkind:

I think as long as you're, you know, understanding that you've got to add more value on top of what is now going to be able to be automated, you'll be fine. But if you're stuck just doing really mechanical stuff, your your job and your livelihood probably are at risk.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, I almost equated to, you mentioned, you know, desktop publishing software didn't put everyone out of business, I almost think you know, Canva, dumbed down Photoshop, it made everyone a graphic designer, like AI can make anyone a writer, but it didn't put graphic designers out of business. And in fact, has been sort of a backlash, oh, backlash in market. Oh, that looks like any other Canva template, right. And Instagram graphic alone won't cut it, you need to have short form video, right? Or you need to do something special with that graphic. So I think that's going to be come the same with content, it will raise the level in terms of depth of content you can write, but at the end of the day, it still has to speak to that person. And that's where the magic is. Yeah, yeah. There's no emotion in AI. So. And speaking of that, I want to get to one last point here before we wrap up, which is that marketing message of like jargon, and I know you have you're very opinionated on this. I think this is one of your pet peeves. So. And obviously, when we talked about AI, I think maybe some of it will spit out jargon that's commonly used. Or maybe it won't spit out appropriate jargon. So what is your take on in your messaging, the use of jargon, regardless of what business or industry you're in?

Andrew Schulkind:

I'm a little more comfortable with it than it seems a lot of people are, there's someone whose name I'm sure, I'm sure you will know, I will not mention names if you want to, as I tell the story, you can maybe go Google and see this post. But someone talked about how their local supermarket had a sign up in the butcher's section and saying, We'll spatchcock your chickens. And he thought that that was just silly and pointless use of jargon. And he said, Well, how many people in that in that supermarket audiences, you know, regular supermarket, not Whole Foods or some fancy high end market? How many people even know what that word means? And maybe it's because I do know what spatchcocking is? That? I thought? I don't know. You know, there's some portion of the audience. I

Neal Schaffer:

don't know, I have no clue. I have an idea since you mentioned the context. But I don't know specifically what it means myself.

Andrew Schulkind:

So it's, you're basically breaking the chicken in half. So it can lie flat on like a grill or something so that, you know, you're sort of de boning the chicken. And, yeah, there's a part of that audience that you've just completely missed, right? Like, they just, they don't know what it means. They don't care. They like their chicken the way they like their chicken. But there's another part of that audience who are looking at that and saying, Hmm, maybe I don't have to go to the fancy butcher down the street. I got to come here to get produce and everything else. I'll get my chickens basket here. So I think something like that, where you let your audience know that you understand the language. I think that's a perfectly appropriate use of jargon. And here we can start talking about you know, buying processes and sales funnels. And, you know, as you get further along, both, you better be talking to talk you gotta be using the language that your audience is using and is expecting you to use because that's what's appropriate. Laying hole up jargon on a piece of content meant that people who are just beginning their exploration, that's not going to work. You sound like you're showing off and they're gonna tune you out because they don't understand what it is anyway, so it's not it's not providing any value to them. But jargon can be provide value. And I think that people shy away from it a little too often. I don't need, you know, if you've worked in pharma, you know, the alphabet soup and you know, all the acronyms that they have there, don't use that anything that's sort of internal facing, you should remain internal facing, but you're marketing to the words that are being used by the people in and out, maybe not the general public. I think that's absolutely appropriate.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, I think if any of you have teenage children, they use completely different jargon than our generations use. So if you're targeting that audience, obviously, you'll want to speak in a similar language. If you want to market your product in France, you want to speak French. So I think it's a great reminder. Once again, we began this conversation focusing on the end customer, the target persona, and we sort of ended in the same way from not just general content, but also to the specific language. So really great advice, Andrew, if people want to find out more about your book more about your company, where can they go.

Andrew Schulkind:

And to go.com is our website, you can find me on LinkedIn, by publishing a lot of content there. And you'll certainly find a lot of information about who we are what we do. And of course, the book,

Neal Schaffer:

we will put all this in the show notes and to go it's a n d i g G o.com. It sounds like your specialty is small business marketing, you work with a lot of b2b companies. So if that if you're looking for a partner, definitely contact Andrew, thank you so much for your time today and sharing all your expertise with us.

Andrew Schulkind:

Thank you, Neil. It really was a lot of fun, enjoyed the conversation. Alrighty, I

Neal Schaffer:

hope that you'll take Andrews lessons to heart and you will, either I'm sure you're probably already building this machine. But I hope this helps you further optimize it and get a greater ROI from whatever limited resources that you may have. Hey, are you the first to know? And what I mean by this is, are you on my list? Just last week, we had a great webinar with my friends over at tailwind on how to begin to leverage AI for small business marketing. I have a number of educational webinars that are going to be that are in the pipeline, but I can't wait to talk about them with you. So make sure if you are a podcast listener, I don't always announce anything and everything on this podcast and make sure you're on my list. The easiest way to go and join my list is to go to Neal schaffer.com/events. That's it. If you go there, you'll see that be the first to know. And then you'll be able to type in your email address, and you'll be good to go. So I hope you'll take me up on that offer. You'll sign up so that I can keep in better touch with you as your digital marketing coach to help you achieve more both inside and outside of this podcast. Already, buddy. That's it for another exciting episode of the digital marketing coach podcast. If you want to do something good and feel good about yourself today. How about click on that five star rating whatever app you listen to this podcast on, give it a five star, write a comment whatever it is write a review. But whenever you do that, it's going to help more of your peers better discover this podcast just because of the way that algorithms work. Right. And you'd be doing me the content creator a big favor as well. So that's my final request for you. This is Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.