Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

The SES Framework: A New Lens for Digital Marketing

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 326

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What if you could streamline your digital, content, influencer, social media, and marketing strategies with ease?

Join me as I unravel unique frameworks and processes to make this aspect of your business more manageable. 

Using insights gathered from crafting my upcoming fifth book, I want to share with you not just theories, but practical, implementable strategies to help you navigate the digital marketing maze.

Ever heard of the SES framework for digital marketing? 

Or the Digital Relationships Funnel?

Let's explore how these game-changing ideas can help your business convert prospects into advocates, using the trifecta of search, email, and social media. And it doesn't end there! We'll be uncovering how organic and paid social media, along with influencer marketing and strategic website content, play pivotal roles in this conversion process. Tune in for an enlightening conversation that will revolutionize how you approach your digital marketing strategy. Be ready to take notes, you won't want to miss it!

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Speaker 1:

There are lots of things that we talk about in this podcast, but are you looking for a way to simplify all the different things you hear SEO, content marketing, blogging, influencer marketing, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook? Do you want to manage all this in a simple, easy to understand framework? Well, if so, I think you'll want to keep listening to this next episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

Speaker 2:

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing. 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 Neil Schaefer is your digital 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 Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, this is Neil Schaefer, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to another episode of my podcast. This is actually episode number 326. This podcast launched back in 2013. There were some times where there were some pauses, i should say, in recording, but I have been pretty faithful to doing this weekly from the beginning of approximately 2020, going on my well, three and a half years now. For those of you that are new, half of these episodes are interviews with thought leaders, authors, people that I think really bring actionable value to helping you better understand and leverage anything and everything digital content, influencer, social media, marketing and half of these episodes are solo episodes, like we have today.

Speaker 1:

I'd also like to remind you that I work with my listeners in a variety of ways, two of which might be of interest to you. One is my digital first group coaching mastermind. We meet weekly on Zoom. We have a private Slack group and it's a group of well, digital entrepreneurs that want to better leverage digital marketing as their strategic engine of growth. If you'd like to join us, go to neilschaefercom. It is a limited to 15 people so that I can give every single person the attention that they deserve, but if that is of interest to you check it out, and I do also offer fractional CMO services for one-on-one marketing consulting with your organization. You can go to neilschaefercom For more information on that.

Speaker 1:

Well, this podcast and I say this for all of social and digital marketing if you don't have a utilitarian use for it, don't use it. When everybody was talking about Web 3 or crypto, well, how specifically are you going to use that to drive your business forward? And if you don't have a specific answer for it, then don't worry about it. And we can say the same thing about, for some businesses, tiktok if it doesn't make sense and your audience isn't there, don't worry about it. So to me, the podcast has served many utilitarian purposes. Most recently, i've been talking about how I use the podcast as a way to live stream, to create more video content from an audio medium.

Speaker 1:

Now this episode is going to be very different in that this month I am finally committed, as in bought an airplane ticket to Berlin, germany, to meet with my developmental editor to make progress on my fifth book, which I'm hoping publishes in the spring or summer of 2024. I will keep you all posted on how that goes, because I want you all to be part of it and I want to make sure that the book serves you all. If this book cannot serve my podcast listeners, then it's really going to have little value and it's not going to sell very well, right? So as part of that process, i realized that as I go through my table of contents for the book, i'm realizing that I have I'm literally swimming in content from the podcast to four blog posts a week to now doing several YouTube videos a week. Man, i got a lot of content to work with, but I'm realizing that there's certain gaps in the content, gaps I need to fill and create this new content which is going to help me flesh out some of these chapters in my new book. So this is the first time you've heard of people blogging a book or creating a book from tweets. Well, this is going to be the first time I'm going to use this podcast to help me make progress on my book, but to also give you some invaluable advice and really to give you a preview of what you can expect in my book. You know, like all of you, and after listening to that intro to my podcast, bombarded with all these different things you could be doing in digital And I have a friend of mine in my digital first mastermind.

Speaker 1:

He knows who he is and he has also a marketing consultant and he has a client saying well, the blog, the SEO, the social, that's all great, but we need to do Discord and Telegram. Well, do you really need to do Discord and Telegram And at what point should you do those networks? These are all very, very intricate questions and we can all just get way too busy for our marketing, for our business, and just not go forward or potentially go forward on the wrong foot. So I've been looking for ways to simplify all of this craziness of all of the digital content influence, of social media marketing and create some unique frameworks and processes to really simplify all this for this book, which I hope becomes a playbook and really becomes the definitive playbook, not just for all of you, but for all of the other entrepreneurs, startups, business owners, content creators and larger businesses that want to be more nimble, like everyone else I mentioned. So, without in mind, i would like to introduce and if you've seen me speak before or been to some of my webinars, i'd like to just put everything in a container. So I talked about all that digital content influence of social media. Let's put that in a container and let us see, first of all, what are the boundaries for this digital marketing container? Now, i believe that everything can do a digital marketing. We can put into six silos, so six compartments within this container, right?

Speaker 1:

You, first of all, obviously, you need a website or you need an app, but for most companies it is a website. You need a website. That is your digital storefront. It is very hard to be successful in digital marketing without a website to drive people to where you convert them. Now, there are exceptions, like companies that just sell product on Amazon, but even a lot of those companies reach out to me because they want to go D2C or direct to consumer, and they end up building their own website on a Shopify platform. But anyway, i digress. Website, right? Well, if you have a digital storefront, you want to be registered in the local directory. That is the search engine, right? So you need to be doing search engine marketing And for many of these things I'm going to talk about, there is an organic way and there is a paid way. Seo is the organic way, pay per click, or I mean display ads that's a little bit different, but there are different ways of doing this organic and paid, but you want to be found in search engines because you have a website.

Speaker 1:

Then we have email marketing. This is container number three. You have to keep in touch with your customers. You have to build rapport with prospects. There is no better way than doing this than with a medium that is still very popular and that you own. Now we can also in here with email. We can put an SMS text, we can put in Facebook Messenger, whatsapp messages. These are all very similar, more modern versions of the traditional email marketing, but it's the same concept of one-to-one communication with our customers and our prospects or potential customers. It is something that we own, right, the website. We own. The email. We own the SEO. we don't own because Google can and will change their mind about their algorithm on a daily or, if not, minute by minute basis, and it's all personalized. We have absolutely no control. The website and the email we have full control over assuming we can get people to opt into our list, and list building is an integral part of email marketing.

Speaker 1:

Obviously We then have the content market. Now, content serves many purposes. You have a blog for your content, which helps you with SEO. It also gives you content for your email newsletter and it gives you content for social media. But we also have other types of content that don't necessarily fit into blog, the social media, the email, the SEO container. We can call these lead generation assets. This is content designed. It could be blog posts that are repurposed into webinars, that are repurposed into eBooks, and they all serve a purpose of trying to get people to opt into our email list, to acquire email addresses. It's really the most common way these are used.

Speaker 1:

So that's container number four. We then have container number five, which is social media marketing organic and paid, obviously. And then we have the sixth one, which, for those of you that read the Age of Influence, you know is going to be influencer marketing and it's going to be based on my framework of brand affinity Those who know, like and trust your brand, employees, fans, customers, advocates, and then influencers, external influencers that ideally you want to convert into becoming your advocates. And obviously we can work with influencers over social media, over our content marketing, over our email marketing, over SEO and on our website, right? So a lot of this interchanges, but let's begin to simplify our efforts here by looking at these six different containers.

Speaker 1:

Now I want to introduce you a framework that I'm going to talk a lot about. It's going to be the central piece of my next book, called the SES framework. I want to. I think that having six containers is still too complex, so if we further simplify this and one thing I'm going to be talking about in this book as well, even though it is about digital marketing, is the importance of relationships, both digital and analog, both with people and with algorithms. So if we look at what a funnel of digital relationships means or looks like and I introduce this SES framework I think we can see that we can simplify everything I just talked about into a very, very actionable way, and this sets the framework really for the book.

Speaker 1:

So, ses framework SES stands for Search, email, social. The idea is that at the beginning, there are people that don't know about you. How are they going to find out about you? Well, search is one really, really beneficial way in which they can find out about you right Now. How else are you going to build brand awareness? Well, why not on search engines? Now, search engines, i should say, are not only Google. It could be Bing, but it could also be Amazon Is a massive search engine. It could be a podcast search engine, it could be YouTube. These are all ways in which we can get exposed, but we need to figure out those channels and we need to have a search strategy right Now.

Speaker 1:

Social media is also a way in which we can get ourselves exposed to a new audience. However, i said SES, social is at the end. Search and email have come before it, because without a website and without some content in your website and without some authority like user testimonials, logos of companies you work with, whatever it is, it's going to be harder to get traction in social. You're not going to have much to talk about either. So that's why the search comes first. But obviously social media is another great way to build brand awareness.

Speaker 1:

We then have the E for email, now the general public. They come to our website. They may not convert into a customer, but can we get them on our newsletter? Can we get them to opt in to a coupon, to a lead magnet? Then they become those that know us and, in social media terms, they are following us. So there's some brand affinity. But this is where email becomes very popular, or powerful, i should say, because email gives us the ability to really hone in and develop that relationship through intelligent email communication, which often includes some sort of marketing automation. So we now have the general public. We've used search and social to get people to know us And now we have the role of email. Once they know us obviously, the social media they're hopefully following us. They don't open all of our emails, but if they open 40% of our emails, they're going to see a lot more of us than they would on social media, where we're only going to be able to hit one, two, 3% of our audience. Right With the way that organic reach works today, in social media Now we convert them into customers And through email, through social, these both can still play a very critical role in converting all these prospects that know us but aren't yet customers into customers. I'd say, more so on the email side.

Speaker 1:

You don't want to be too overly promotional with your social media, but this is where the paid social media comes in. You may not want to be overly promotional with your organic social. You can once in a while, obviously But this is where paid gives you the ability to be as promotional as you want And really, if we think about it, influencer marketing really being almost equivalent to organic social media marketing or paid social media marketing, however you want to look at it. In many ways, influencer marketing also becomes this really, really powerful way within social media, or part of social media, to convert people into customers. In addition to our own paid ads and organic social media, combined with the emails that we have already accumulated from the previous funnel digital relationship stage And then we have the final stage of building. The relationship is the customer becomes the advocate, and this is where social media is huge. This is where we want to not only convert our influencers into becoming advocates, but we want to convert our customers into becoming advocates, And this is where social media plays a huge role.

Speaker 1:

Email might also play a role in terms of communication And I suppose having content on your website it's not necessarily for search, but having content to better give value and FAQs and education to your advocates is another way that we look at it. But, to simplify it, i believe that of the SES framework for advocacy that final stage of the funnel that I look at social media becomes the critical component. So that is the SES framework search, email, social And that is the areas in which they are most efficient. So I think, if you begin to look at we have a product or service, how are we going to sell this? with all the different things that we can do in digital marketing content, influence of social media, marketing included as a subset of digital marketing you begin to simplify and see the things that you should have in place. It's not about Telegram or Discord. It's about search, email, social and making sure that at every stage of that funnel of digital relationships, that you have a strategy, you have a piece in place that is going to help you acquire more and more customers and more and more advocates.

Speaker 1:

So, to repeat those four stages the general public this is where search is going to be critical, but also social media. To get them to that next stage of people that know us, they need to follow us in social media, ideally opting to our email list, converting them into customers. Email is going to play a critical role, as well as social media. You'll continue to get touches that search engines may not provide you. And then we have advocacy, and this is where social media really plays a key role. So I'm hoping, going from these six different containers of what is possible in digital marketing the website, the SEO, email, content, social media influence of marketing to converting that into further simplifying it. Through this SES framework, as part of the funnel of digital relationships, you hopefully begin to create your own simplified playbook, And maybe all you'd be doing is social media.

Speaker 1:

And one thing that influenced me in creating this was when I wrote the Age of Influence. I had a number of companies reach out to me for help with influencer marketing, but I felt that they didn't have all these other containers. They didn't have them or they weren't well oiled or the funnels of digital relationships is broken and they want to go immediately to influencers when they don't have all those other pieces in place. And that's really what got me passionate about pursuing this very, very holistic perspective on digital marketing and creating these frameworks and processes that I will be introducing in the new book. So this is just a very, very early preview.

Speaker 1:

I have no idea what this chapter is going to be like, but if you were curious, i did a search on Google what is a 10 minute podcast? in number of words, it said 1,250 to 1,500. And if you've ever thought about writing a book that is almost half of a chapter, at least you know one third of one quarter of a chapter that could be fully fleshed out. So, right there, i think I am off to a good start today on being productive on writing my next book, and that is how podcasting can be utilitarian in many, many different ways. In addition to creating relationships, like I'm creating with you or with the people that I interview, creating video content through live streaming, or just helping me create more content for my book, my blog, my newsletter.

Speaker 1:

I love podcasting And I know that you do as well, because you're listening to well, you're smart enough to listen to this podcast. So that's it for another episode. If you love this, if you want to find out more about when my book comes out, if you want to be on the pre-order team the launch squad got lots of plans make sure you reach out to me. Neil at neilshaffercom. It's neal at nealschaffercom. I look forward to serving you in the next episode of the digital marketing coach podcast, so make sure you hit that subscribe button. Stay tuned for next week And until then, this is your digital marketing coach, neal Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2:

While you're there, check out Neal'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.