Karine Abbou: Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of Marketing Leaders. Today I'm welcoming Mark Schaefer. Bonjour Mark!
Mark Schaefer: Bonjour!
Karine Abbou: I am very very happy to welcome you today. We have tons of things to talk about, which I'm very excited about.
Mark Schaefer’s interview for Marketing Leaders - May, 13th 2021
I've made a little video that I shared, so I assume people in the audience already know who you are, but just to say one thing about you, if I may. You are known to have predicted some of the most important digital marketing trends for the past, let's say 10 years at least, and this is unbelievable. You wrote a book on influencer marketing (Return on Influence) way ahead of time, like two years before the expression was even ranked on Google, you predicted the booming of Instagram, you explained in detail all the economics behind content marketing and of course, last and not least, you predicted the current big booming of personal branding today. So my first question to you is, how do you do this? I want to know!!
Mark Schaefer: Well, you know, it took me a long time to figure out what I was good at. When I was a little boy, I wanted to be an astronaut, but that didn't work out. Sometime in my early 30s, I realized I was good at seeing how trends come together. You know, a lot of people in business might see a trend and sort of becoming obsessed with an idea that's happening now, but what I've always been able to do is see what are the implications once we see these things starting to happen? What's next? What do you know? Let's think a step ahead. I can do that.
Karine Abbou: That's really impressive. I want us to go deeper into your last three books. I'm just going to give a very quick introduction about this: your most recent book is called Cumulative Advantage, to me is a masterpiece and I will explain why. It is the last one of three books; the first one on personal branding, the second one, “The Marketing Rebellion”, and the third one, “Cumulative Advantage”. I see those books as the recipe for success. It truly answers the question: How do you build success? Solutions that can be applied both in personal lives and, of course, in marketing, and I think it's always related to personal branding in a way. Here is how I understood your three books:
“Known” provides us with the answer to the question everyone has been having. How do I become famous? How do I become known? How do I build my personal brand? It's becoming like an obsession for everyone, even if people don't really admit it. And you provide us with a methodology based on hundred of interviews.
“Marketing Rebellion” is providing us with the “stadium”, meaning the rules of the game that we need to understand to build this brand: the new rules of marketing today.
“Cumulative Advantage” to me, is all about the psychology, the mindset that we need to acquire in order to be able to build a brand, build a personal brand, be successful in marketing and be successful in our lives. At each step of the process.
Based on this global understanding of your books, it seems that there is a major misunderstanding in the marketing area today between what we think we're doing as a marketer and what the customer’s opinion is on what we're doing. You say there is a difference between what they think marketing is and what marketing really is in real life. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
Mark Schaefer: Yeah, first I want to mention that I have a lot of really provocative ideas in the book, and it's not just my opinion of the world, this is all backed up by my research. The main theme, I think, of the book is that marketers really are no longer in control of the marketing, that two-thirds of our marketing is occurring without us, that our customers are our marketers. So this requires a pretty radical change in an approach and a mindset to marketing to think about: how do we earn our way into that? Two-thirds of this is where the sales are occurring, and that's where we want to be, but we can't buy our way in anymore as we've done for decades. What does marketing really mean today? I mean, it's an important question.
Now you're asking me about this gap between what we think we're doing and what we're really doing, and you would expect if you did a survey, then you asked businesses, how are you doing on your marketing? They'd say, oh, we're doing pretty good. And then if you ask consumers, it's about, you know, maybe not so good, you'd expect there'd be a difference.
But the research shows really across the world that marketing is sort of asleep right now. Businesses are asleep. They've been working on doing a little bit better on their content and their SEO and their Facebook ads. And they’re going to do a little bit better than last year. But meanwhile, while we've been working on these incremental improvements, the customers have moved elsewhere. They have the accumulated knowledge of the human race in the palm of their hands, and they expect something more from us. They don't need to be manipulated by companies anymore. They're making pretty good decisions on their own, so marketing today, I think, is not about manipulating people. It's about coming alongside people at their point of need and saying, how can we help you today? How can we help you make money, save money, have a happier life, have a healthier life, be more entertained today, or whatever? However, we need to connect to the customers, but that's really where the customers expect us to be today.
Karine Abbou: In the book, you have an amazing analogy about an island in Greece. Can you tell us a little bit about the analogy, how you noticed it, and how it can apply to marketing today, and the new way of doing marketing?
Mark Schaefer: Well, the analogy that I used in the book is from a few years ago; I had the most amazing experience cruising around the Greek islands and the Cycladic Islands, and these islands are very close together. You can be on one island and literally see the other island, but when you go on each island, they're so different. They have their own culture, their own local foods that they love, their own arts and crafts. It's amazing that they're so close together, but they have their own community bonds. Now, this is really how we need to look at consumers today.
In the past the focus was on mass broadcasting - we had an ad or we had a PR thing, and we had a billboard on a road someplace and, you know, an ad in a magazine or something, and we just hoped that it hit the right people. Nowadays, because of the Internet, people can come together on Like-Minded Islands, and one of the problems I see in marketing today is, in fact - I was talking to someone about this yesterday- they're building this new community site which almost always fails because we spend all this time dragging people to our site and dragging people to our content. We're creating this thing where you can connect to us and meet all these people. But you know what? They're already doing that. They're doing it on Facebook, they're doing it on LinkedIn, they're doing it on Twitter chats, they're doing it on YouTube, they're doing it on Reddit - they're already in their own communities.
There's a community for everything. There are communities for dog groomers, there are communities for construction people, there are communities for educators. And this is where people go and they share ideas. And guess what? That's where marketing is taking place, so a new way to think about things is instead of spending all our energy, dragging people to where we are. Why don't we just fish where the fish are? Go where they're already connected and then be generous, be helpful, build our brand in that community, and hopefully, we'll connect and be welcomed there.
And so it's another way, a different way to think about marketing today. But it's important because we can't ignore these changes. This is the way the world works. We can't hold on to what we wish it would be, we need to wake up and most marketing is asleep. We need to wake up and see this is the way the world really is. We built this marketing department ten years ago for social media, and it worked really great. But it doesn't work really great now because we've worked on it 10 years ago. It's time to wake up.
Karine Abbou: What I like the most in all of your books is that everything you're saying is the result of tremendous research and a lot of work. I know on each book you almost work two years before putting out a book. And I'm curious to know, according to you, what are the main drivers, the main ideas that should drive marketing leadership today? Based on your research and data.
Mark Schaefer: I want to boil it down to one thing, because we're in a historical moment in time in our lives and with our businesses, and everything is being changed by this pandemic, right. The other day there was someone on LinkedIn who posted this research from 2019 and said: “look at this research from 2019. This is what we need to do based on this research”. I answered by a comment: “I don't think we can believe anything from twenty nineteen or twenty-eighteen or twenty seventeen. Everything has changed”.
The number one goal and perspective in marketing today, post this pandemic, has to be humble. We just need to reconnect with customers and get out there and watch what they're doing and listen to what they're doing because they have been changed in millions of ways, both large and small.
I wrote a blog post, Karine, recently that said we are entering the era of unintended consequences. And what I mean by that is that when we went into the pandemic, we guessed wrong on almost everything!
One of my favorite stories is here in America, we've got this huge store called Home Depot, which is where people can go to get things to fix up their home. It could be tools or wood or paint or whatever. Well, when the pandemic began, this huge multi-billion dollar company thought: “oh, my gosh, it's a pandemic. We're going to enter a recession. Let's start taking down our stock, laying off employees, and closing stores”. What happens now? We entered a building boom in America, there are shortages of wood and paint and bricks and labor. Nobody could go on vacation, so everybody said: “We're stuck at home. Let's make our houses nicer”.
We guessed wrong on everything. Who would have guessed that there would be shortages of acne cream because when we wear masks all day, our faces are breaking out?
No one could really guess these things. And here's the key idea. As we come out of this period, we're going to guess wrong on everything again, because we cannot even imagine how the world is going to be different.
Let me give you one quick example. One of the things they found in China as they came out of their very strict lockdowns is that children, teenagers had taken over the e-commerce function for their families. Because, of course, everybody knows now you've got to buy everything online because we can't go out to the stores and what the teenager said was, “we know how to do this, let us do it, we'll take care of you, Grandma”. Now, that is a really interesting trend, right?
Who's the real consumer here? And if we're trying to sell something to senior citizens, who's the decision-maker? We don't know. We really don't know. What is our world going to look like? What are the long-term implications for little children today who are growing up in a world where they're not being picked up by people? They can't even see people's faces because everywhere they go, everybody's wearing masks. They can't play with every child, any children, every time they run over to start playing with other children, they're picked up and carried away. How is that going to show up 10 or 15 years from now? We don't know. We really don't know.
My friend Martin Lindstrom says we're conditioning an entire generation to have post-traumatic stress disorder, this is something that occurs to enlisted people when they're in a war, right? He said we're in a war. We're afraid every day we're grieving, every day we're being rewired, so this is a time really to just be calm, stay centered, and really pay close attention to what's going on because lots of things are going to be changing.
Karine Abbou: This is very interesting. You really think there is no way precisely considering the fact that we're sort of going out of this pandemic, there is no way to anticipate what’s to happen next? I recently heard your podcast, and you were having this very interesting conversation about L'Oreal putting out makeup, for women and mixing AR and gamification to allow women just to try what they want to buy because even if they go into shops, you're taking the risk with a mask to going into the shop, you are not even allowed to touch the products before you're buying it. So in a way, some companies already tried to anticipate life afterward.
Mark Schaefer: There are obvious trends about remote work, there are obvious trends about remote learning, there are obvious trends about new concerns about safety. We're going to be in a no-touch kind of economy, I think maybe forever. You know, what I'm reading now is that a lot of people are projecting that the Coronavirus is going to be with us always sort of like the flu, and we're going to have to keep adjusting. And so that could be one of the permanent ways that the world is changing is that we don't want to get our money from an ATM anymore because we don't want to touch the keys. So I think the idea of safety, security, comfort, touchless, that's a big trend. The question is: what's going to snap back and what's going to stay the same? I know a lot of people whose lifestyle has changed in many ways. Here's another one that's going to be really interesting to see: since people have been spending so much time at home, they've been putting a lot of money into making their home experience better so they are buying bigger TVs with big sound systems and swimming pools and recreation rooms. For example, my wife said to me the other day, why would we ever go to a movie?
Karine Abbou: That's so true.
Mark Schaefer: My wife and I went to a movie at least once a month. You could go out to dinner. We have a theater here that plays sort of like artistic movies that they win at film festivals, but they're not big blockbusters. It’s a little theater and it's a nice experience. Before the pandemic, we were subscribed to Netflix. Now we're also subscribed to Hulu, and we're also subscribed to Disney Plus. We have so much amazing comic content, we're literally overwhelmed. There's just too much to see and watch. Right. We're already paying for this, so why would we go to a movie and have someone chomp popcorn behind us? And then they're going to be sneezing on us. Why would we ever do that again? So… we just don't know. We just don't. We don't know what's going to snap back, but we just have to really pay attention right now. I think the big buzzword for marketing is humility. Be humble.
Karine Abbou: Following this idea that the customer is the marketer, you go deep into the new sort of marketing techniques, and of course, you discuss customer experience and word of mouth marketing, content marketing, peer observations, and all those things. And, of course, you're getting deep into influencer marketing. My first question on that, just as an introduction, is how do you make the difference between word of mouth marketing and influencer marketing? Because I know in France, lots of people are using one word to describe the other one. So I'm curious...
Mark Schaefer: That’s a very, very important question. I'm glad you asked that because there is a lot of confusion about that. They are distinctly different. And here's how they're different.
When you employ influencer marketing, you know who the influencers are. When you do word-of-mouth marketing, you don't.
Let me explain what I mean: there are really three different kinds of influencers for influencer marketing:
one which is, you know, a lot of people would be like a celebrity. So this would be a big sports star, a movie star or something like that. One recent example: Nicki Minaj announced she's got a new album coming out and she posted photographs on the Web this week of her wearing pink crocs. Now, for those of you in France and around the world, you may not know what crocs are. They're like these cheap, cheap, cheap rubber shoes. Guess what? They're sold out. One photograph on the Internet, pink crocs sold out, period, everywhere. That's celebrity influence.
Now, what a lot of people consider influence marketing would be people like me; we create our authority through content. I blog, I do podcasts, some people do videos or Instagram or live streaming. They've built a built-in audience who trust them about automotive, fashion design, home improvement, whatever. So it makes sense for brands to connect with these trusted authorities and make sure that these influencers, these content creators, know these stories.
Now, below that would be what I call advocates, these are people, smaller audiences, maybe ten thousand or five thousand. And they just love things. They just love Ralph Lauren. They love L'Oreal. And so just all they want to do is talk about L'Oreal. So what L’Oreal would need to do, is just find out who these people are and say: “We love you, we're going to send you some free stuff, we're going to send you a L'Oreal shirt or whatever”. So those are live but you know who they are. Because they're so public now, the research shows that 10 percent of every population in every culture are super sharers. These are people who love to tell stories when they find something new. They can't wait to tell their friends. My wife is like that, if she's standing in line at the store, she'll be telling whoever it is about a new bargain that she found, a new restaurant, that she found a new TV show that she loves. She's talking all the time about her favorite products, her favorite brands, her favorite, everything. She can't wait, right? I'm not like that, but she's like that. She's in this 10 percent.
Now, word of mouth marketing is: you put the stories out there, you put out stories that are authentic and interesting and relevant, and those influencers will find you. And if you do your job correctly, they'll start talking about you because that's what they do. That's what they do, that's what they love to do.
That’s the difference between influence marketing (you know who your influencers are) and word of mouth marketing (you don't know who they are, but you've got a good story to tell and those people will find you).
Karine Abbou: Thank you for those explanations. Pretty unique, I have to say. To prepare for this interview, I asked many people what their main issue was regarding marketing. Of course, lots of people talked about marketing and influence marketing, especially brands. And one of the questions they have and they're struggling with, is how do we reinstate trust from customers to a brand, and how do we pick the right influencer to fix this issue? Is influencer marketing one way to reinstate trust between the brand and its customer?
Mark Schaefer: Well, there are problems in every part of marketing. There is a lot of corruption with ad fraud. There's a lot of corruption in SEO. There are problems everywhere and there are problems in influence marketing too, but the problem is that the stories that we hear about influence marketing are the bad ones. The influencers do something stupid and so now influence marketing becomes really stupid. We're going to make fun of that. But the fact of the matter is, people, don't see ads like they used to. They avoid them. They skip them, they block them. They're spending a lot of money to stream content, so they don't have to see ads on video, audio, podcasts, Spotify. They never hear ads, so how are we going to get our story out? The truth is influence marketing works, and it's just starting. It's going to become bigger and bigger and bigger.
Now, around trust, two big ideas, one of the big problems with influence marketing is when a company said, oh, who should we work with?
They look at the size of their audience and they look at their engagement and they said, oh, let's choose this person. But here's the problem. That person, if they're representing your brand, they're going to be the best-known person, maybe in your company. Now, would you hire somebody in your company just based on how big their audience is? No, you would first do an interview with them. What do they stand for? What do they believe in? What's their track record? What are their hopes? What are their dreams? That's what you want to know when you hire an employee. So when bad things happen in influence marketing, it's not necessarily the influencer’s fault. You know, maybe the company didn't do a good job hiring their influencers. That's the first thing.
The second thing is, as influence marketing is maturing, the best influencers, the best authority, break the trust with their audience. They're business people, they know what they need to do. So the best influencers will rise to the top. They are going to be people that you trust because they know if I ever do something and my audience doesn't trust me anymore, their career is over.
So trust is everything. The company has to take responsibility for who they're hiring. And number two, over time the influencers who gamed the system and can't be trusted, they'll fall away.
Karine Abbou: So it means that the main criteria for a brand to pick the right influencer is definitely not numbers. It's going deep into their content and analyzing what they're writing about, what they're sharing about, what they're thinking about, which type of opinion they might have, sometimes even on something that is not strictly related to what they're an expert in. I mean, for example, why not their position in terms of the environment or things like that. Should we do this work before hiring and picking the right influencer?
Mark Schaefer: Absolutely, and this is going to be sort of a radical concept for people to hear, but I actually think engagement in most cases is a very poor metric. And let me just give it for a lot of reasons. But just let me give you one example. A lot of people view me as an influencer because I've created content about marketing and technology and how this intersects with humanity. For many, many years, I've been hired by Dell and Microsoft, and many other companies now. I actually have very low engagement.
Karine Abbou: Really? It’s hard to believe.
Mark Schaefer: No, I really do. I have very, very low engagement and in fact, my engagement, let's say, on my blog, has been dropping year by year. Now, here's the weird thing, the subscribers to my blog have been going up. My content, I think, is better than ever, so my subscribers are going up. How could engagement be going down? Here's why, here's the biggest reason. You can draw an exact parallel line with engagement going down and the use of mobile devices going up. It's a pain to leave comments on a smartphone, right? When people were using a computer or a laptop, they just typed in whatever they wanted to say. They may like something, but it's hard, it's a pain to leave comments, so am I less effective? No. I'm more effective and let me tell you something else. Ninety-five percent of the people who hire me, I’ve never heard of before. They don't engage with me, but I'm influencing them. They're reading my content, they're viewing my content, they're listening to my podcast, they're reading my books. And when it's time to hire a speaker for their conference, they trust me because I built this relationship with them over many years. When it's time they need someone to help them with their marketing strategy, they call me when they need a workshop for their company. They call me almost all the time. Karine, I don't even know who this person is. And here's how they start the conversation: “Oh, I've been a fan of yours for years”, but I've never heard of them. They've never tweeted me, they've never commented on Instagram.
Engagement isn't everything and engagement can be easily gamed, especially on Instagram. So it's not the most important metric.
Karine Abbou: What I hear in what you say is that subscription might be the right fit today, the right thing to check. And it's related strictly to the niche we're operating in, right?
Mark Schaefer: Exactly. I gave advice to someone just the other day about how they really need to concentrate on their email subscriptions, because this is what it means when someone subscribes to your email, your blog, or your video, here's what they're saying:
“It's OK for you to market to me. I believe in you, you're creating really great content and I don't want to miss it and I want to develop an emotional connection with you because I like what you're doing. I believe what you're doing. And, you know, if I have an opportunity to meet you someday at a conference or even hire you someday, boy, I'm going to do it because I'm a fan because I subscribe. I don't want to miss what you do”.
What's great marketing? What's great branding? It's building an emotional connection between what you do and your audience or your customers. We have this amazing opportunity we could never think about the days before the Internet and social media, we just had to blast out messages and hope that it hit somewhere, and now our customers can see their names in their e-mails, and they're saying:
“I'm going to subscribe to you, I'm opting into your marketing. I don't want to miss it. And oh, by the way, if you do a really good job, I'm going to share it with others”.
Consumer advocacy, third-party advocacy, is better than any advertising you could ever do, so we need to look at this world of social media and content in a much, much different way. And believe me, that's influenced too. I think social sharing is probably the most important measurement in digital marketing other than conversions because when people share your content they're saying, I believe in this person, and I want you to believe in them, too. I love this company and look at what they're doing, I'm sharing this. I want you to love it. This is important to me. That's a big deal. And if you look at that as a measurement, it also drives the right behavior in a marketing department. What would it take to get our customers to share our stories, our content?
Well, number one, we've got to be creating really great content. Should a marketing department be doing that? Yes, we need to show up. We can't just create content and let it sit out there. We kind of need to engage with people. You need to know we're here, we're connected to you. Should a marketing department be doing that? Absolutely.
We need to know who is sharing our content by name. These are the ones creating the most value for our whole digital marketing department, right? The economic value of content that's not seen in shared is zero. These people are sharing our content. We need to treat them like they're really special, we need to involve them, we need to send them things, we need to make them a part of everything we do. In my contact book, I call this the Alpha audience, they are your most important customers. Do you know, by name, who is sharing your content? Because it's not millions of people, not thousands of people, it's probably dozens of people, and you really need to know who they are.
Karine Abbou: Those can make the whole difference.
Mark Schaefer: Yeah, they're everything.
Karine Abbou: So many people want to become influencers today, and I sort of connected to the fact that they want to build their personal brand. So one common line I've seen within all three books is how you define your niche and you talk about finding your seam. Can you try to connect those two and tell us a little bit more about this, please?
Mark Schaefer: Yeah, I'm really glad you asked me that question because the books really do kind of go together.
“Known” is about, how do you have the reputation and the authority and the presence to have the best opportunity to get your job done, whatever that is? Do you want to be in authority? Do you want to build a new business? Do you want to start a speaking career? Do you want to write a book? Do you want to raise money for a nonprofit? If you're known, you've got an advantage.
In Cumulative Advantage, I talk about momentum. If we're doing this good work and we kind of feel like we're stuck, how do you get to this next place? And what I talk about in this book is that you always have to be aware of how the world is changing and how you apply your advantages, your competencies, and your skills to how the world is changing.
Let me give you a little example that I think will help people understand this.
When the pandemic hit last year, I got sick, I had the coronavirus, I was out for almost a month and during the same time, my business crashed. I was a professional speaker without an audience, I was a marketing consultant and all my clients said we have to save our businesses right now, even my college classes were canceled. And I was sort of disoriented, like, what do I do and what do I want, you know, what's my meaning right now?
My core competency is really, I'm a teacher. Whether I speak or write a blog or write a book, I'm teaching people. I'm taking very complicated ideas and distilling them into ways that people can understand and process. And I realized I'm still a teacher, but the world needs me to teach something else right now. So a scene is when there's a fracture in the status quo when there's this shift and we have the biggest fracture in the status quo in the history of the human race, it's called a pandemic. So I stopped everything I was blogging about and I started thinking, what do people need? What do the people need me to teach right now? We need to learn about how we deal with anxiety, how do we deal with this disorientation? How do we stay positive in a time like this? How do we deal with the uncertainty of not knowing when this is going to end or what's going to be next?
So that's why I started a blog about it, and the traffic to my blog doubled. Some people said this is the best content I've ever seen during this terrible time. I took all those blog posts and weaved them into an e-book called Fight to the Other Side, gave it away on my website, didn't even ask for an email address: “just take it”. The last page of the e-book said, If you love this e-book, you're going to love my talk. If you need someone to come in for 15 or 30 minutes to your boring zoom meeting and inspire your leadership, call me up. By July, I was having a record month. I went from zero to a record month, because I found this seam.
Now here are some important ideas.
Number one, I had this idea about applying my core competencies to this opportunity, and I pursued it. I didn't just let it sit. I pursued it.
The other important idea, this isn't going to last forever. Strategy today is like what is happening now: you go - and you go fast, you give it everything you've got. You take it as far as you can go. People are not going to want it forever, it's already winding down. That's okay, I didn't mean for it to last forever, but I found a seam and I went through that seam as long as I could. And now I'm looking for new seams. That's really what strategies are for today.
Karine Abbou: The Nike example was a wonderful example of what you’ve just described because it really shows us that at the end of the day, no matter where you're coming from, which diploma you can get, the money you have, the area where you were born into, at the end of the day, it doesn't count, it doesn't matter. Can you elaborate on the Nike example a little more?
Mark Schaefer: Both Known and Cumulative Advantage are really books of hope, I think. It's rational and it's all based on research, but it also shows that anybody can do this, you don't need special education, you don't need millions of dollars in the bank if you've got a keyboard and a Wi-Fi connection. You can create an impact on this world. It's a magical time. It's an amazing opportunity and the same goes with Cumulative Advantage and building momentum.
Here's the thing that I think is startling to most people, they look at all these successful people and all the successful businesses and they say: “Oh, my gosh, you know, those people, they must have always been experts. They must have always been rich”. Here's the dirty little secret, it almost always starts with something random.
The Nike example you mentioned is the following: The story in the book is about a track coach. Back in the day, young athletes, when they were running track, had metal spikes on the bottom of their shoes, which were very dangerous. The coach was sitting at breakfast one morning, and his wife was making waffles. She peeled the waffle off this waffle iron and he looked at it, and without saying a word, he ran back to the high school chemistry lab, got latex rubber, poured it in the waffle iron, let it set, peeled it up, and said that could be the bottom of a shoe. And then started Nike! And by the way, that rusty old waffle iron is on display in a glass case, like a museum piece at Nike headquarters.
Nike's one of the most famous, successful, and profitable brands in the world, and that’s literally how it started. You know, Starbucks, I mentioned Home Depot, all these big companies, it wasn't a plan. It wasn't a strategy. It was, you know, listening to someone, meeting someone, having a conversation, reading a book, just having a new idea, and most importantly, pursuing it.
Karine Abbou: So pursuing it for sure, and consistency, great, that's a common word. Another major topic in Cumulative Advantage is: you tend to explain what could be considered as “the buzz”. You know, everyone is looking for that today. How do I get my idea out there and make a big boom out of this?
Mark Schaefer: If you're a marketing geek like me, this is certainly one of the most fun chapters of tech because it looks at how these stories spread in a new way. And by the way, there's a connection between working on your personal brand and your ability to create a sonic boom (an expression used in Mark’s book Cumulative Advantage which could be defined by XXXX).
So let me explain sort of how that works.
Again, I'll use myself as an example: When I launched Marketing Rebellion and Cumulative Advantage, books that you've talked about and you've been so very kind to talk about, I went out to famous people in our industry, and I said, “I've got this new book”, and I sent them a little gift and I wrote a handwritten note and I said, you know, I think you're going to love this book. It would really be great if you could help spread the word. Now, if this was not a year-long rollout, it wasn't a two-year plan, this was two weeks. That's the sonic boom. You want everything to happen. Big, big, big, in two weeks.
Now, here's how personal brand and sonic boom are connected. I've been working on my personal brand for like 12 years, so I'm known and a lot of important people know me. So I can go out to these important people and say, you're my friend, can you help me? If I was just starting out 12 years ago, I wouldn’t have those connections. I'm not known, I don't have the reputation, I haven't earned the right to go to these famous people and say, can you help me? So the more you're known, the bigger the sonic boom. If you're just starting out, maybe you can create a sonic whisper. But as you keep working - and by the way, you mentioned a very important word: consistency… - Example: I did a consultant call a few months ago and this fellow said that blogging doesn't work. I said, what do you mean? He said, Well, five years ago I wrote three blog posts and nothing happened. Well, you know that. And nothing will happen, right? The idea of creating content and building a personal brand means that you're building a long-term relationship of trust. You're trying to become a habit.
A while ago, a woman wrote me a lovely email and she said, You are part of my life. I start my morning with you. I get a cup of coffee, I open up my email and I want to read what Mark Shafer wrote for me today.
I only earned that because I blogged six hundred and fifty weeks in a row without missing. I've had a podcast for nine years, I’ve never missed an episode. Didn't miss it when I was sick, didn't miss it when I was on vacation, didn't miss it for anything, because here's the thing that always goes through my mind with every piece of content I create:
“I will never let you down if you read my blog, if you read my book, if you listen to my podcast, it will be worth your time. You will learn something. It will be interesting. It might even be fun, but I will never let you down”.
And that's how you build trust. That's how you build an audience. That's how you build your personal brand. And you've got to do it every single week, every single week. And it takes work. That takes determination. It takes grit. It's not easy, but it works.
Karine Abbou: Lots of people might think, you had this great idea when your book went out to ask a favor to your friend and say, I think you're going to like this, so please share it. How are we supposed to trigger that if we do not have 12 years of blogging behind us? Even though we are like a year ahead, and we wrote some good content, is it doable within a year or so of blogging or how?
Mark Schaefer: Yes, absolutely it is. And let me tell you a story that really shows how it works. So when I wrote Known, I kind of went a little crazy. I interviewed 97 people who are known in their field all around the world. There were people from education, finance, art, music, construction, and I interviewed them. How did you do this? What was the process? What I found is that all of them did the same four things to get known, no exceptions, so kind of provides this clarity.
I mean, when I was starting out, it's like, what do I do? Should it be on Facebook? Should it be Linkedin? Shall I create videos? How do I do this? And I stumbled around and stumbled around. And it ends up, I did the same four things, too. I didn't really think about it that way, but that's how it worked. Now, here's the other thing, for these people who became known on average, it took them 27 months for their brand to really take off. So kind of like bubble, bubble, bubble, and all of a sudden, boom, it started a war.
Now, five months, six months after my book came out, people were telling me: “Oh, my gosh, Mark, your book changed my life. I followed the book exactly, and you would not believe what's happening in my life right now”. One lady even said six months after I wrote this book: “I just made a million dollars off your book”, and I'm thinking: “oh, I made four dollars off of you”. So here's what I was thinking, how is this possible? All these smart, amazing people, on average, it took them twenty-seven months. How is it possible for these people to have so much success in five or six months?
And here's what somebody told me, well, Mark, the reason is the people you interviewed didn't have your book. They didn't know how to do it. They fumbled around just like you. You know what? I was the same way. It took me probably three years for my brand and I fell into it. You know, it was like trial and error. And eventually, I figured out, here's how I do it. So known is sort of like a shortcut, it's like you don't have to fumble around, here's exactly how you do it. And by the way, there are lots of exercises in the book so that everybody can figure it out. Everybody's different, so here's how you figure it out, your unique way to become known. It doesn't have to take two years, it depends on a lot of different things: how hard you work, did you pick the right scene? I mean, there's a lot of variables, but the process on how to do it is pretty clear. And being consistent is a big part of it, by the way.
Karine Abbou: Tell us about the four things very quickly, just for the audience to leave with more assurance and motivation.
Mark Schaefer: Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, really, I just want to emphasize again, and there are lots of inspiring stories in this book with people who, like, started with nothing.
Karine Abbou: LikeMichael Centineo, I made a case study about him.
Mark Schaefer: And by the way, in the first chapter of the book, I was one of those people. You know, I tell a story at the beginning of the book, a story I've never told to anyone before, about how I started really working on this. I was at the lowest point in my life. And the reason I told that story was I didn't want people to think that I'm on top of a mountain. Oh, look at me. This is how you do it. I wanted to say, look where you are right now, wherever you are right now, I was below that. It was sort of a literary way to put my arm around the person and say, let's go, we can do this right. And there are lots of examples in the book, there was a guy in England, and he became an amazing authority around nutrition and fitness. He was basically homeless and now he's a millionaire.
You've got to be clear about what you want to be known for. There are exercises to help you get clear about that, so that’s your story.
Then you have to think about, well, where should I tell this story? Is there a place I can tell this story that's maybe different from how other people do it? All right.
Now, how do I tell the story? And really, there are only four choices. It's got to be written, audio, video, or visual. That's it. It's not overwhelming. It's not complicated. You don't have to sort through Facebook or anything or YouTube. Basically, you just make a choice.
And then the final thing we sort of hinted at earlier is how do you build an audience that helps make your dreams come true. That is different from a social media audience, this is about an actionable audience, people who actually hire you or buy something from you. It's not just the social media guys, the media audience. It takes a little bit more effort and strategy.
So those are the four things.
Karine Abbou: That’s amazing. We kind of went off on all the subject matter topics I wanted to talk to you about. Would you come back another time maybe to discuss this deeper?
Mark Schaefer: Absolutely, we're just getting started :).
Karine Abbou: I like that!!
Mark Schaefer: This is the most fun time ever to be in marketing, you know because there's just so much going on. It's a difficult time to be in marketing, but, you know, it's really a lot of fun and it's an exciting time, too. So I'd be happy to come back any time and continue our conversation.
Karine Abbou: You're amazing. Thank you. Just to conclude everything, thank you very much. Reading your three books, especially the last one, showed how marketing is also behind any personal success, not only in business, and that's tremendous. It makes everything credible and everything doable. And that's why I think it's a book of hope.
Mark Schaefer: Yes. Well, thank you so much, and thank you very much for your support. Everyone can find me at Businessgrow.com. We talked about my blog, my podcast, my books, and everything, everything's right there.
