#MarketersTalks: Buscando a inovação no marketing digital - uma entrevista com Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer is one of the most influential marketers in the digital world and the author of a few books on social media marketing. We asked him how to stay innovative in the ever-changing world and how to work with influencer marketing.

He also shared some tips on how to re-engineer TikTok marketing and gave beautiful advice to junior marketers.

Neal Schaffer é uma autoridade líder em ajudar as empresas em sua transformação digital de vendas e marketing through consulting, training, and helping companies of all sizes with social media marketing strategy, influencer marketing, and social selling initiatives.

He is the president of the social media agency PDCA Social, and also teaches digital media to executives.

1. Como você começou sua jornada com o marketing digital?

I started my journey with social media marketing. Before that, I had a professional career in B2B sales and business development.

However, as a country manager or regional vice president of sales in a start-up environment, I often needed to wear many different hats, including, in many cases, the marketing hat.

I learned a lot about marketing on the job. Shifting my career to social media, I began to transfer that business knowledge more and more to marketing. It started with digital/social and Linkedin because of my B2B background.

Also, at the time, it was the only social network for professionals. I started with teaching companies how to leverage Linked in B2B sales, but also sales for media marketing. 

Like today, marketing was the biggest driver for social media back then. There was much more demand for social media marketing than social sales or social selling. But, over time, I wanted to avoid becoming a one-trick pony.

So, even though I published two books on LinkedIn, I realized that my clients didn’t need just LinkedIn. They needed support in all social media. And that’s when I invested in learning and experimenting and creating my own brand across every social media channel that made sense. 

Isso culminou com a publicação de Maximize Social em 2013, que trata da criação de uma estratégia abrangente de marketing de mídia social. Depois, em março de 2020, publiquei meu quarto livro, The Age of Influence, sobre a influência no marketing. Isso me levou ao marketing digital. 

I like to say I am a social media market turned digital marketer because when I published my book, it was impossible to physically meet people. So I had to find ways to digitally market my book, and social media was only one piece of the puzzle.

There is also search and email, and that’s where I’ve spent a lot of time over the last two years. I built up my blog to focus on the stuff many digital marketing experts are a little jaded by – search engine optimization, email marketing, and automação de marketing.

But with my social media marketing background, I see them in a new light. I’m trying to breathe new life and new perspective into these areas. 

2. Há alguma ferramenta indispensável em sua caixa de ferramentas de marketing? 

Se eu tivesse que citar algumas ferramentas obrigatórias, começaria com os painéis de mídia social Agora Pulse e SocialBee. Eu os utilizo para publicar diferentes conteúdos em diferentes redes, e ambos funcionam bem para mim. 

Também uso o Inoreader, que me ajuda a criar grupos personalizados de feeds RSS. Em seguida, posso importar esses feeds para uma ferramenta de mídia social e usá-la como meu painel de criação de conteúdo. Isso também ajuda a me manter a par das últimas notícias sobre mídia digital e social. 

Outro painel de mídia social que eu acrescentaria à mistura é o Tailwind, que é muito específico para o Pinterest. 

Other must-have SEO tools that I use are Semrush and, obviously, Google Analytics. And while I don’t use much AI for writing, I use Frase.io for SEO analysis. When I need an AI tool for simple content ideas, I use Jasper.

My favorite email marketing tool is ConvertKit, but I know a lot of clients prefer active campaigns. Whenever I need help with anything I am not an expert in, I usually find and hire experts on Upwork. 

3. Qual é o melhor estudo de caso de marketing digital que você já viu? Qual é a primeira coisa que lhe vem à mente quando você pensa no melhor? 

Bem, escrevi algumas postagens de blog sobre estudos de caso de marketing digital e muitos estudos de caso de marketing digital. estudos de caso de marketing are in my own book. And the first thing that comes to my mind is number one: what was the actual business impact of the case study?

Not how many likes and impressions they get but how they impact their business. How much more sales did they generate? And, compared to other channels, how much more effective was it?

And then, overall, did this double their sales? Did it add to a one percent increase in sales? These are the first things that come to mind when I think about the best digital marketing case study.

No matter what case study that is. I’ve seen too many good ones, but those are the things I look for. 

4. O que as marcas podem fazer para intensificar seus esforços de marcação?

Há muitas coisas que as marcas podem fazer, mas acho que o marketing de influenciadores é uma grande chave que permite que elas se relacionem e se envolvam mais profundamente com os criadores de conteúdo que têm uma participação cada vez maior na mídia social, onde está ficando cada vez mais difícil para as marcas competirem por vários motivos. 

5. Como se manter inovador no marketing digital?

Você precisa estar sempre consumindo conteúdo nos canais populares de marketing digital. E isso significa muito conteúdo de formato curto - curtas do YouTube, Instagram Reels, vídeos do Tiktok - todos eles são muito diferentes. 

A melhor maneira de se manter inovador é consumir, analisar, fazer engenharia reversa e, no final do dia, criar seu próprio conteúdo ou colaborar com influenciadores para criar esse conteúdo para você. 

Você precisa estar alinhado com os tempos e inspirado para inovar. Pelo menos, essa tem sido minha experiência. 

6. O que você acha do conteúdo escrito por IA em termos de SEO e das últimas atualizações da Pesquisa Google? Você acha que esse setor crescerá ou será mal visto?

Vamos dar uma olhada neles separadamente. 

Google Helpful Content update. Clearly, Google is sending the message that not only should your content be helpful, but it should be relevant to your niche.

That’s what I read out of that. So it’s easy to use AI tools to quickly generate decent copy about anything you want.

But if your blog is about social media and you suddenly you start posting about cryptocurrency, you won’t rank as high as similar posts from a website that just talks about cryptocurrency because that’s what they’re experts in. 

Obviously, Google also said things like “add personal experiences” and what have you. But every time Google updates, it just sends the same message differently: post relevant content that looks like it was written by humans. So I don’t think that there’s anything new.

They’re just responding and constantly tweaking their algorithms. I definitely saw an increase in my traffic, and I am a user of AI tools. 

Então, vamos dar uma olhada na outra questão, ferramentas de IA versus conteúdo escrito com IA. 

AI algorithms determine what we see in social media news feeds. AI is already being used in the technology around us. I don’t think AI is necessarily evil.

With the emergence of DALL·E 2, AI-powered visual content generation is a compelling use case. In a few seconds, marketers can create an image that looks better than any stock photo.

If you’re looking for stock photos for your blog posts or PowerPoint presentations, it will save you a lot of time, so I am all for that, and I plan to do more with that as well. 

Também uso ferramentas de IA para análise de conteúdo, que são muito úteis e economizam muito tempo. 

Quando se trata de conteúdo escrito. Já temos ferramentas como as de paráfrase, em que você pega uma frase e ela produz algo único - o mesmo significado, mas diferente. A tecnologia sempre esteve presente. Acho que a IA está evoluindo e acredito que, do ponto de vista da criação de conteúdo, a IA deve ser vista como um ajudante. 

I think that AI for content creation is most effective when you’re looking for various ad copy when you want 20 variations of the same thing. AI can come in handy and generate those for you and give you lots of ideas.

For example, if you’re stuck writing a paragraph and need some fresh ideas, you can get inspired with AI-generated copy. This can guide you on what to write or not write about. AI-generated content has a lot more value for shorter texts, like ad copy, SEO titles, and descriptions.

But the longer content you need, the less value it has. 

At the end of the day, it may not be compelling compared to human written content, although that gap is shortening. So the net-net is that AI-written content has a place, but I look at AI more as a helper than as a tool that will write all the content for me.

If every time you write content, it’s just a summary of what’s available on the internet, then AI can write that for you. But that type of content will be harder and harder to rank.

And it will be harder and harder to get people to actually read it and want to take action after reading it. So it’s not going to serve your best interest.

7. Como você aconselharia aproveitar o marketing de influência nos tempos atuais?

Eu defino marketing de influência como aproveitar as pessoas que têm influência. Se sua conta no Twitter tem 500 seguidores e alguém tem 1.000 seguidores, essa pessoa tem mais influência do que você.

I also look at influencers in terms of brand affinity. Who are people that have some influence in social media that like and/or trust your brand?

It begins with your employees, customers, and people who follow you on social media. They’re not customers yet, but they have an affinity for you. They know you. They have engaged with you. And then, obviously, come partners, distributors, resellers, et cetera. I’d always start with those that already know you.

And when you start with your customers and create programas de parceirosIsso é marketing de influência. O marketing de afiliados é o marketing de influenciadores. Você está aproveitando os afiliados porque eles têm influência. 

So when you look at influencer marketing holistically like I do, it’s not about fake Instagram followers. It’s about companies deciding who they want to engage with as influencers. And they should always start by asking:

“Are you a user of our product?” And if they’re not, you want to send them the product first and ask them: “What did you think about the product?” 

The influencer marketing industry has had a bad vibe for a while, but it wasn’t caused by the influencers. The influencers were incentivized to buy fake followers because the brands were only interested in vanity metrics.

But this is pre-COVID influencer marketing. This was before I wrote A era da influência on influencer marketing. It has changed significantly since then, and people can see through phony advertisements quickly.

But on the other hand, when I look at my Gen Z kids and millennials, they don’t mind sponsored content from influencers if it adds value to them. So it’s something to think about. 

8. Você tem algum truque ou dica sobre como lembrar ou fazer engenharia reversa, como você disse, de um bom conteúdo do YouTube Shorts, do TikTok ou de outros canais?

I presented at Content Marketing World on how to reverse-engineer your competitors’ social media content strategy. And I’d say, with general social media – how do people work?

They have content calendars and content categories, and they usually publish content according to these categories. I think it is not easy to do with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

But you get in the process of tagging the objective of each piece of content, and obviously, what the content is about and then organizing those tags, looking at engagement, looking at frequency, you can begin to look at your competitors’ social media content strategy.

This is effective if you’re new to the industry, think you’re falling behind, or just want to reset your social media content strategy. And that’s based on my clients who wanted to do a reset on their social media content strategies. It was perfect for them.

Para plataformas mais criativas, como o YouTube Shorts, o TikTok, nem vou falar sobre o Instagram Reels, porque ele tomou uma direção muito diferente. O TikTok é o mais atraente porque é o mais difícil para as marcas e as pessoas entenderem como criar conteúdo se você não estiver consumindo-o cinco horas por dia, como meus filhos fazem. 

Então, com os curtas do YouTube, por que é diferente? Bem, no YouTube Short, você pode criar um curta a partir de um vídeo do YouTube, certo? Você pode pegar um trecho de um vídeo do YouTube e criar um curta a partir dele. Então, novamente, é muito diferente do TikTok, que é 100% criativo. 

I’m currently reverse-engineering TikTok to create my own strategy, and I’m a little late to the game. But still, you’re never late to do social media, and older people are consuming more TikTok.

In addition, there’s more informational content and more B2B content.

So it’s an excellent time to get started. Just like Instagram has become more B2B over time as well. Or rather, it’s okay to publish more B2B content there than it would have been 10 years ago. 

With Tik Tok, it really understands that it’s, first of all, based on memes. A lot of popular videos are based on trending audio. It used to be based on trending dances, and I think now it’s turned to trending audio, where a lot of people are given their own spin on audio, and I’m not talking about music.

I’m talking about people talking, like “Help me! Help me!” and then seeing how all these different people create content around that. 

O que você perceberá é que se trata de uma combinação de algumas coisas. Você tem cabeças falantes, vídeos em que as pessoas estão em silêncio, olhando para a câmera ou para longe da câmera, e diferentes tipos de sobreposições de texto. 

I’m currently doing this reverse engineering in the category of blogging. What’s really cool about TikTok is you don’t need to enter a hashtag. You enter a keyword, and it just introduces your video after video after video.

So if you had an hour to spend, input a keyword and take a look at the first 10 or 20 videos that pop up. You can look at their descriptions and their hashtags.

But more importantly, looking at the visual ways in which that content was created, you’ll begin to see patterns.

As I said, TikTok is a meme culture based on a lot of patronized content. And what are the most frequent patterns? What makes sense for you to create content on?

And that would be my starting point. After that, you want to do different formats. You want to collect data and see how it drives business, and so on. But that is a good starting point. 

9. Você nos contou sua receita para se manter inovador - mas como encontrar tempo e lugar em um ambiente de ritmo acelerado? Quais são suas sugestões sobre quando encontrar tempo para melhorar?

Costumo não marcar nenhuma reunião às sextas-feiras, que são meus dias de P&D. Gary Vaynerchuk foi o primeiro a defender isso, mas muitos outros também mentioned essa regra 80-20: faça com que 20% do seu tempo seja tempo de P&D. 

Isso lhe dá tempo para experimentar diferentes plataformas e consumir novos conteúdos. Eu me esforço ao máximo para que as sextas-feiras sejam esse tempo. Se você acessar meu calendário, as sextas-feiras estarão cheias daqui até sempre. Essa é uma maneira de fazer isso. Se isso não for suficiente, você precisa entrar em seu calendário e bloquear o tempo. E essa é outra maneira eficaz de fazer isso. 

Mas não há receita secreta. É preciso tempo para se manter inovador, e você precisa investir esse tempo nisso. 

10. Você tem algum plano interessante que possa compartilhar conosco? Algum livro novo a ser lançado em breve?

Bem, estou agora no processo de criar minha primeira aula de aprendizagem baseada em coorte. Ela será sobre o tema do marketing de influência. 

Dou aulas de marketing de influência na UCLA Extension, o que me permitirá oferecer os ensinamentos que dou em nível universitário a todos. Portanto, estou muito animado com o lançamento disso. 

Também ainda estou escrevendo meu quinto livro, que será um manual de marketing digital para a economia pós-COVID. E estou dando uma nova olhada em tópicos antigos de marketing digital, como SEO, marketing por e-mail, automação de marketing, mas também incluindo minhas dicas mais recentes sobre marketing de mídia social, marketing de influência e marketing de conteúdo.

Também planejo fazer mais com meu canal no YouTube. O vídeo será um foco estratégico. E é no YouTube que planejo começar o Tiktok, por vários motivos diferentes. Podemos falar sobre isso separadamente.

11. Você tem algum conselho para profissionais de marketing iniciantes? 

A única maneira de aprender é fazendo.

I spent the first 15 years of my career in Japan. There’s a term called shokunin, which is a culture of craftsmanship. It represents not only Japanese culture but many Japanese creators and business people that I know – you’re always crafting your skill and sharpening your knife. The only way to do that is to get experience.

And if you don’t have that experience, create it with your personal brand (like I did) or as an intern, or contact a local nonprofit and ask if they need help. Most of them probably do.

So you get experience and confidence you learn when you start to manage multiple brands because then you see trends, and you have more data to work with. 

It’s like my daughter, who is still a high schooler. She interned for a company and was doing influencer marketing for them as a high schooler. Every influencer with over 10,000 followers on Instagram wanted to be paid.

But everybody under 10,000 followers agreed to do the influencer campaign just for a free product without asking for additional money. This is valuable insight. Now, when she does influencer marketing for another company, she can start assuming that she will not pay anyone under 10,000 followers. And she can negotiate that with anyone with fewer than 10,000 followers.

Gifts should be sufficient, and if that doesn’t interest you, she’ll find other influencers who would be interested in it because she knows that it works. 

Com os dados vem o conhecimento, com os dados vem a confiança, com os dados vem o crescimento. Portanto, você precisa gerar esses dados.