I’ve written 11 books, and among those hundreds of thousands of words, there is just one chapter devoted entirely to one person. That would be Chapter 4 of Belonging to the Brand, which features Dana Malstaff, the most visionary person I have ever known on the topic of brand community.

Dana Malstaff

Dana’s success has been revolutionary, building a tribe that exceeded 80,000 members and a steady revenue stream from her devoted Boss Mom community fans. Her innovations around automation, leadership, and reward systems would be the envy of any entrepreneur.

And, in the 300th episode of The Marketing Companion, Dana describes why she “burned it to the ground.”

On the surface, Dana had built an entrepreneurial dream, making seven figures with no sales or marketing team, no advertising, no “branded content” plan. How would it make sense to abandon such a remarkable achievement?

But when you listen to this captivating episode, you’ll learn why, once more, Dana is pushing boundaries and showing us the true future of the brand community.

The brand community is an important part of the future of marketing. You won’t want to miss the wisdom and insight from this show! Just click here:

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 300

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There is a quote in my new book that is gripping and profound, but I’m not sure I fully understood it until this week. This quote is from Boss Mom CEO Dana Malstaff: “It’s easier to start a movement than build a business.”

Dana is a visionary business leader, and when she speaks, I listen.

But what does this quote really mean? What does a movement have to do with business and customers? It seemed a little woo-woo to me. Are you going to walk into your supervisor’s office and tell her that you’re starting a movement this week?

As I was helping a client with an exhausting sales problem, the truth finally sunk in. I understood how a “movement” can connect to business success, and I wanted to pass this insight along to you, too. Here’s what happened …

The spark of an idea

I love doing my one-hour coaching calls. Anybody, anywhere can sign up, and I get to meet the most fascinating people from all over the world!

A recent call was with an artist who specializes in a practice of music therapy. He teaches people how to play musical instruments in a way that helps them calm down and heal — certainly something needed in the world today. I liked his idea, but he struggled to keep his business going.

He had some limited success using Facebook ads to drive sales of his classes, and he had read every book and blog post he could find on sales funnels and lead generation.

But after many years of endless ad cycles and experiments, he barely made ends meet and was exhausted. He had read my book Belonging to the Brand about the link between business and community and wondered if community-based marketing could be his answer.

As we talked about a possible business strategy, the meaning of Dana’s quote finally lit up for me.

Start a movement or build a treadmill?

I think the missing link between sales funnels and community is the emotional bond.

A lead magnet can attract clicks and maybe people who like free stuff, but it’s a treadmill that never ends. Keep advertising, keep promoting, and keep them clicking. Even with the help of automation, this focus on filling a pipeline with strangers can wear you down, and my friend was feeling it!

But what if you had a community where people feel something as well as buy something? They’re part of a community because they love you and believe in your mission. That is how you start a movement: enabling people to achieve something, to build something, to change something. And Dana’s right. That’s also a sustainable business strategy with a lot less wear and tear.

Building momentum for a community requires time and patience. And my friend did not have time or patience. Every time I urged him to create content with consistency and build an audience that leads to community, he reverted to his addiction to sales funnels. It’s fast. It can create leads tomorrow. He was tethered to the treadmill and was afraid to jump off.

But as we talked through his alternatives, he began to see that he had to change or the sales funnel exhaustion would never be over.

Start a movement, start a business

I don’t think a community is necessarily the right strategy for every person or business, but it was for this man. He truly could change lives, and the people in his circle loved him and wanted to follow him. But he couldn’t see this as the start of a movement. He saw his followers as sales leads.

Dana Malstaff

I explained to him that if he had a community of hundreds, or even thousands, of people who believed in him, the treadmill could be over. His community would sign up for his classes, workshops, and events because they believed in the movement — music for healing, music for peace.

Eventually, their bond would not just be to him. It would be to each other as friendships and collaborations bloomed. They would belong to the brand. I’m happy to report he is exploring this new path.

Dana’s Boss Mom community now has 80,000 members, generating about a million a year in revenue. She has no sales team, no sales funnel, no ad budget, no lead magnet. She created a self-sustaining community, a movement of people who want to grow as mothers and entrepreneurs.

When I interviewed her for my book, I kept asking her for the monetization strategy and the measures of ROI. Over and over again she insisted that her only focus was the movement — creating successful mom entrepreneurs. If you have a movement, the business will take care of itself.

That seems so much more fulfilling than the sales funnel, right? Organic growth and customer advocacy instead of SEO and ad cycles. The movement nurtures and heals. The movement drives the business. The movement IS the business.

This is why I made the bold claim in my book that community is the last great marketing strategy. Content, ads, and SEO will always have a place, but these ideas are becoming dramatically less important in a streaming, AI-driven world.

But we have always needed community, and we always will.  Have you thought about enrolling people in your movement instead of moving them through your sales funnel?

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

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

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post Is it easier to build a business or start a movement? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Too short for a blog post, too cool to ignore, here are ten short observations on the marketing world worthy of your attention. Starting with … my first revenue from ChatGPT!

1. Revenue from ChatGPT

I just earned my first revenue from ChatGPT when a new client found me by searching for “top 10 marketing experts.” I tried this myself, and the list would shuffle on each query, but I was usually in the top ten. Also, I had friends try this in Europe, and the same names came up, all of them Americans by the way.

Why is this first revenue from ChatGPT significant?

1. Not only was this the first revenue from ChatGPT, but this might also be the first business that came to me via a search engine other than Google! It makes you reconsider the role of SEO in the ChatGPT world.
2. Microsoft is investing $10 billion in OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Microsoft owns Bing. Remember Bing?
3. Google has its own AI — perhaps the most powerful in the world — waiting in the wings. When will they unleash it on the world?

By the way, I assure you that I am NOT one of the top ten marketing experts in the world. Just in my own circle of friends, I can easily name ten people smarter than me. However, I have an effective personal brand, and that is everything in this world.

2. Building on that idea …

ChatGPT and other AI bots present an existential threat to many creators. I have shouted from the rooftops for years that working on your personal brand and the meaningful, emotional connection with your audience is the ONLY thing that can save you.

Here’s another lesson in personal branding.

One of the things I teach about in my Personal Branding Master Class is the importance of paying attention to qualitative data as a measure of your progress.

How do you know you are becoming “known?” This is an essential question, and the answer is not always found in a quantitative measure like revenue.

Keep a sharp eye on qualitative measures of success like:

• People finding you and asking questions
• Invitations to be a guest on a podcast or video
• Kind words about your content in a social media post or tweet
• Higher levels of engagement and social shares of your content

These are all signs you are becoming “known.” As long as this is happening, keep going!

It’s the same for me. I watch for qualitative signs of success. This week, I was mentioned in an article on The Drum alongside luminaries like Scott Galloway and Martin Lindstrom. I was asked to be on a Pew Research Futurist Panel with several Internet Hall of Fame pioneers. Could that have happened five years ago? No. These are important signposts of progress and leading indicators of future commercial success.

The personal branding journey is never over for any of us.

3. Evil uses of ChatGPT

A common “black hat” SEO technique was to scrape excellent content from other websites and re-publish without permission to drive ad sales on a crappy site. As Google improved, it detected these frauds and penalized the culprits.

I recently discovered a tricky new use of AI. The bots scrape original content and then use ChatGPT to re-write the copy just enough to make it seem like it’s original! Here’s a screenshot of my original post:

And here’s the AI-modified version:

The AI re-write is not very good, but it doesn’t have to be. It only has to be Google-sufficient to build authority and attract eyeballs to this site. The only way I discovered this is because my friend John Espirian was mentioned in the article and he got an alert that his name was being used in an article.

Where corruption can occur, corruption will occur!

4. The story of my life

5. My go-to application

When people ask about the best apps I use on my job, I have a boring answer: Excel spreadsheets and WordPress!

However, I am also a huge fan of SEMrush. I am NOT a paid “influencer” for the platform, but I just honestly love it because it saves me time and money. Three ways I use it nearly every day:

1. Detailed competitive research for my clients
2. Reports on content and keywords that inspire content plans
3. Analysis of my website performance with detailed action plans. Years ago, I used to pay $500/month to a person just for this one report!

6. But I LIKE my dance moves …

This week I had a great conversation with Dana Malstaff. Dana is a true business visionary and I devoted an entire chapter to her in my book Belonging to the Brand.

She was talking to me about where she publishes content and in regard to TikTok said, “I want to be known for my brains, not my dance moves.”

Now Dana knows there are deep layers to TikTok and it is an important social media channel. But she is just one person creating content for her entrepreneurial business and she knows that WHERE you show up and HOW you show up are important.

Similarly, my Marketing Companion co-host Jay Acunzo announced this week that he is leaving Instagram. I hate that because Jay is an entertaining storyteller, but he explained it is taking too much time and distracting from his core business.

To have an effective online presence, you have to be great, and you can’t be great in five places. Be intentional about where you spend your time.

7. An important lesson in one photo

Carrying the “where you show up” discussion even further, this ad should inspire discussions on several levels.

I think this is amazing. Sir Elton is creating relevance within a new generation.

8. What happened to voice marketing?

A few years ago, many were claiming that voice-activated bots were the next big commerce platform, emphasizing the importance of Amazon’s Alexa and Echo.

This is one of the big mysteries of the marketing universe: Why Alexa and other voice assistants never rose above the level of voice-activated clock radios. I mean, Siri still spells everything wrong, and I haven’t used Alexa in two years. I recently just remembered that I had one.

Amazon just announced a 10,000-person layoff, and apparently, this has hit the Alexa team heavily. News accounts reported that Alexa has little developer activity or commerce usage any more.

There is SO MUCH progress on AI and audio applications. How did this fail so badly? Is this a case of bad timing? Bad marketing? Or was Alexa just a bad idea? Would love to hear your views on that.

9. Keeping in touch with all of you!

Last month I opened up my calendar for any blog reader who wanted to talk to me. For two days, I met amazing people in back-to-back 20-minute meetings. It was SO MUCH fun!

If I had to point to one theme of these discussions, it would be “relevance.” How do we stay relevant amid this hurricane of change? Keeping up with this crazy rate of change is on a lot of minds.

I loved spending time with so many interesting people from around the world, and I will probably open up my calendar again in the summer. In the meantime, anybody can sign up for an hour to talk to me about their business problems. I’m always accessible to you.

10. An insight on viral

I’ve been blogging every week since 2009 and had my most significant “viral hit” last month. Although I first posted this article on my blog, for some reason, it really took off on when I posted it on Medium. The article:

20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT you never knew were possible

Here is the lesson. This work was created by a collaboration of friends from my RISE community, not an AI bot. I am certain this post would never have achieved its viral status if I had written it alone or composed it with ChatGPT prompts.

Humans for the win!

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

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

Illustration generated by MidJourney

The post I just earned my first revenue from ChatGPT and other observations appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I recently interviewed my friend Dana Malstaff for a new book project and she provided some extraordinary advice about entrepreneurship and leadership.

Dana is the powerhouse founder of BossMom. She has this energized, confident, visionary drive toward the future of marketing and community that inspires me every time I talk to her. I wanted to know … how did she get to that place? What drives this vision?

She told me a story about how, when she was little, she loved to help her stepfather on his business ventures. She got to see first-hand how entrepreneurship works.

As she started to take on more tasks for the business, she asked for direction on what she needed to do to succeed. Her step-father said:

“I’ll tell you what I don’t want when I see it.”

I thought this was an exceptional piece of leadership advice. It’s so empowering. He’s saying, “Find your own path. I trust you.” And yet, he also leaves open the opportunity to mentor her when problems arise.

Anyway, I thought this was cool and I wanted to pass it along since it might have a positive impact on you, too. Dana Malstaff is a brilliant leader. I want to be like her when I grow up.

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

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. Discover his $RISE create community.

Illustration courtesy BossMom

The post An important insight on leadership from Dana Malstaff appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Photo credit: Alex Ledesma

Jeremy emphasized that to a large extent, customer experience will define eCommerce. This connection between experience and customer loyalty was a major topic throughout the retreat. He predicted a bolder integration between major banks and commercial services and social media.

And now, some exclusive Uprising insight

Click on this link to listen to Episode 172

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

• Try this! “Alexa, play the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.”
• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe in iTunes
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It’s hard to ignore — 630 million business professionals are active on LinkedIn. They have twice the buying power of a normal web user. If you’re in business, you need to be exploring advertising on LinkedIn. Brooke and I have both had tremendous success with this marketing platform and to help you get started, LinkedIn is offering Marketing Companion listeners $100 in free ad credit. That can go a LONG WAY! Take advantage of this opportunity today by visiting linkedin.com/companion

The post The Uprising brought together 30 marketing thought leaders. Here’s what happened next. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

By Mark Schaefer

There’s no more relevant or interesting topic these days than the moving target of monetization in the online world. The model has changed drastically over the years but Dana Malstaff has found a method to do it right.

Dana is the leader of a 37,000-member BossMom Facebook Group that has provided a steady and growing income to her family. She does it by protecting her group members, by making them feel like they are accepted and they belong — never by advertising or selling directly.

Dana has discovered how to monetize a Facebook Group in a way that has created a thriving little empire that includes a conference, consulting services, and her latest book Climb Your Own Ladder.

Dana’s approach is an excellent example of the human-centered marketing I propose in Marketing Rebellion and the source of a rich conversation between myself and Brooke Sellas on the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.

And then, a rant!

On the new Marketing Companion show I also go on a rant. Social media marketing has become a legion of followers who flock to the latest trend until they ruin it, in this case video storytelling.

There are 65 years of content uploaded on to YouTube every day. So why exactly are you posting more videos? Don’t follow the crowd because a guru tells you to do it. Great marketing isn’t about conformity, it’s about non-conformity. You’ll want to pay attention to this section of the show.

Here are some additional thoughts on why the future of social media marketing is NOT in video.

The new episode also explores the new surveillance economy and how social media might be used to track welfare fraud.

And finally, while most people show courage in their lives by coming out of the closet, we have some fun with Brooke as she goes into one.

There’s lots of fun and insight ahead on the 150th episode of The Marketing Companion:

Click on this link to listen to Episode 158

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

• Try this! “Alexa, play the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.”
• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe in iTunes
• Listen to us on iHeart Radio
• Find us on Google Play
• Find the podcast on Stitcher
• Complete Marketing Companion Episode Guide

The post How to monetize a Facebook Group appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.