Tom Schaeffer

Thomas Schaeffer & Co.

𝗧𝗵𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘀 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿 & 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 is a boutique agency providing ghostwriting and content strategy for executives who want to amplify their voice, sharpen their positioning, and expand their influence.

We work with leaders at pivotal moments—whether building thought leadership, leading a transition, or shaping a second act beyond corporate. Our services combine high-level ghostwriting, content systems, and selective coaching to help executives turn experience into leverage and build a presence that creates real opportunities.

Founder

Executive to Entrepreneur

𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿 is a coaching and content platform for midlife professionals ready to leave the corporate grind, clarify their next move, and build a business that fits their life. We offer 1:1 coaching, frameworks, and practical guidance for reinvention.

Float Left

Float Left Interactive was a pioneer in TV app development and the first company to build Roku apps for media brands.  For over 12 years, Float Left has enabled media brands to deliver and manage the next generation of TV experiences on every screen.

🏆 2022 Streaming Media 50
🏆 2021 Streaming Media 50
🏆 2017 Streaming Media 100
🏆 2016 CableFax -> Most Innovative People in Multiscreen
🏆 2015 Streaming Media 100

Co-Founder, CEO (acquired)

The Weiss Group, Inc.

Developed internal and external web applications in direct support of company’s marketing initiatives.

Senior Software Engineer

Teledata Inc.

Developed EPA compliance software, specifically targeted to address fuel tank leak detection.

Software Engineer

Bridgeway Benefit Technologies

Provided programmatic and logical fixes for technical problems on ISSI’s Benefit Fund Administration System.

Account Representative /  Programmer

Ghostwriter for Influential Executives and Entrepreneurs || Transforming Ideas into Influence Through High-Impact Writing || Former CEO, 2x Founder, 1x Exit

I’m a former CEO turned writer and coach. I help midlife professionals turn experience into leverage—through writing, clarity, and reinvention.

After scaling and selling a 7-figure software agency, I walked away from the startup grind to build a simpler, more intentional life.

Along the way, I discovered something powerful:
Most executives don’t need another job.
They need clarity—and a path that’s finally theirs.

Today, I work with high-achieving professionals in transition—those ready to move from corporate to consulting, from founder to writer, or from executive to entrepreneur.

Here’s how I help:

1. Executive Ghostwriting
For founders and CEOs who want thought leadership that drives inbound demand—without spending hours writing content. You bring the insight. I bring the structure, clarity, and voice that earns authority and attracts opportunity.

2. Executive to Entrepreneur Coaching
A 12-week 1:1 experience to help you reinvent your career, clarify your offer, build a simple content system, and land your first client.
It’s for professionals who are ready to turn experience into independence—building something of their own, on their own terms.

At the core of both is a simple idea:
Use your expertise to build leverage and freedom—because your next chapter should serve your life, not the other way around.

[Coaching: exectoentrepreneur.com]
[Substack: exectoentrepreneur.substack.com]
[About Me: thomasschaeffer.me]

Writer

A ghostwriting agency for founders, CEOs, and business leaders looking to build influential personal brands.

Search is evolving — and so is the way brands grow.

As founder of Digital Elevator, I lead a team that helps ambitious companies like McKesson, Waters, Cox Media, Kelly Services, Fitness Mentors, and Float Left optimize their visibility across both search engines and AI platforms.

We blend SEO, AI discoverability, content strategy, UX/UI, and PR to help brands stay visible, trusted, and ahead of the curve.

Our content approach centers on high-intent, middle- and bottom-funnel assets proven to perform best in both search and AI discovery. By aligning strategy, search intent, and user experience, we help brands attract ready-to-buy audiences, shorten sales cycles, and drive measurable ROI.

Our work is grounded in strategy, data, and technical precision, with a proven track record of helping brands grow smarter and faster through the evolving landscape of AI and search.

Core services:

- AI Discoverability
- SEO
- Content Marketing & Strategy
- UX/UI 
- PR

Daniel Lofaso

The good news: most B2B marketers have a strategy.

The bad: where to allocate resources and when.

This is some of the latest data on content marketing strategy for B2Bs for 2026.

General feedback from our team to many of our B2B clients:
1. start with your website- build out product pages for SEO and AEO, ensure a well-defined USP, and create ICP pages and/or use case pages.
2. build blog content to support the above, building internal links to reinforce rankings and influence LLMs (plus this content is good for sales enablement).
3. promote blog content via links and digital PR
4. once above is done and rolling, focus on one channel to expand into: LinkedIn thought leadership; Reddit; YouTube; etc.
5. refresh, monitor, and double down on what works

Check out full list of 39 content marketing stats for 2026. Link in comments.

CEO @ Digital Elevator- AI Search & SEO for ambitious brands

There comes a time when we have to start questioning the legitimacy of all these LLM studies.

My experience with LLMs does not mirror this study, albeit my experience and reflection are anecdotal.

Still, as someone who uses and focuses on LLM visibility for clients, I have more exposure to this than about 99% of people.

Not once have I ever seen LinkedIn, Medium, or Facebook cited.

The biggest question for me, however, is how MoldStud.com (5th from bottom) made this list. It looks like a legit business, but its placement on this list completely illegitimizes the study altogether. 

My issue here is that honest people will spend their resources on LinkedIn, Medium, or Instagram, thinking it's going to get them business from LLMs. It's not.

Publishing studies on your own internal data has become the "sexy new LLM strategy," but most of these studies are starting to suck.

Anyhow, if you read through my rant, thanks for bearing with me. I'm off to write a guest listicle for MoldStud.com.

Where do B2B companies plan on investing in content marketing in 2026?

According to the latest research, it's no surprise to see AI tools at the top of the list. 

AI visibility tracking, AI writing, AI compliance, AI chat, AI CRMs... the list goes on and on.

What is also interesting is the area of lowest content marketing budget allocation: human resources.

Presumably, most B2B companies are looking to leverage AI to get more done. 

Check out the latest in content marketing stats from our post. Link in comments.

AI results will soon include ads.

Google will be rolling this out "soon." Link in comments.

Interesting research about why agencies get fired. 

Clients want results fast, and shipping a 3-month strategy document is often something that doesn't align with what CMOs need in terms of outcomes.

On the other hand, strategy IS the reason you hire an agency. If you had a good strategy, you wouldn't need an agency; you'd be better off hiring freelancers.

Having recently spoken to several mid-market companies looking to leave their current agencies, who are actually performing really well, the primary reason was STRATEGY. 

A key question we ask prospects in the discover phase is "where is your time best suited?" That often helps with the "what can we take off your plate?" question and results in great collaboration.  

https://lnkd.in/dEVVRJAi

Agencies are getting fired.

We surveyed B2B SaaS mid-market marketing leaders about where they're cutting budgets.

The #1 answer wasn't paid ads. Wasn't tools. Wasn't events.

It was agencies.

Here's what they told us:

"Agencies have no concept of what it is to actually run a business."
"They assume we have endless time to implement new ideas."
"I need execution, not strategy. I have plenty of strategy."

58% of these leaders are under extreme or high pressure to show short-term pipeline.

They don't have 90 days for a "discovery phase." They don't want another brand positioning deck. They don't need a 50-slide audit.

They need someone to do the work.

Yet most agencies still sell like it's 2015:

❌ Weeks 1-4: Discovery 
❌ Weeks 5-8: Strategy development
❌ Weeks 9-12: The "Playbook" presentation 
❌ Week 13+: "Now you execute it"

Meanwhile, the CMO needed results in Week 2.

Here's the truth agencies refuse to hear:

Mid-market companies don't hire you because you're smart. They hire you because they're underwater.

When you show up with strategy theater instead of execution, you're solving a problem they don't have.

The agencies that survive won't be the ones with the best decks.

They'll be the ones who show up Day 1 and ask: "What can I take off your plate today?"

If you want to have access to the same set of data, you can subscribe to Wynter's ICP Pulse: https://lnkd.in/ggh7yHPf

(Data from Wynter's Dec 2025 survey of mid-market B2B SaaS marketing leaders)

Correlation evidence across Google AIO, ChatGPT, and Perplexity indicates the strongest visibility and click-throughs for Google AIO.

When combining visibility metrics against competitors across the three LLMs, our visibility is subpar, around 20%. Perplexity alone, poor, 13%. ChatGPT alone, abysmal, 9%.

However, Google AIO visibility is quite good at 41% (given not all competitors are exactly apples-to-apples).

Cross-referencing this data across the keywords we rank for in AI Overviews via Ahrefs, there is a very strong indication that Google AIO is actually the most important LLM to focus on. 

Google's recent partnership announcement with Apple as the primary AI tech reinforces that, and while we don't get referral traffic data from Google AI in analytics like we do from other LLMs, this correlational data suggests that the focus for more brand visibilty, at least for our site and the client's site's we've been seeing the same thing with, is that Google AIO is the primary channel to focus on in terms of visibility.

Also, this is indicative that what works for one LLM does not necessarily work for the others, as was the case for generallly good SEO across Google that also fared well on Bing.

Anybody else seeing the same thing?

#AEO #GEO #AIvisibility

"Contextual Variance" will become more important than keyword position.

As AI becomes more personalized, search results will vary wildly based on the user's specific persona (e.g., a "budget-conscious traveler" vs. a "luxury seeker") and query (e.g. "long weekend trip ideas within a 3-hour flight with hiking and good weather forecasted for February 1st.")

Chasing "more visibility for select prompts" has become an exhausting educational process agencies are now trying to reframe as LLMs shift more towards "Personal Intelligence."

With Google's access to personal data (Gmail, Docs, Drive), the brands that are recommended are the ones that are uniquely themselves. 

Your shift moves away from ranking for "things to do near Shenandoah National Park," to publishing content around "family-friendly day trips that are dog-friendly and include gluten-free dining options."

Gemini will now look at your flight info, your interests found in your emails, and your Drive documents to craft personalized answers. 

Your Next Move:
Researching actual FAQs (through your sales calls, via social forums, People Also Ask, traditional SEO tools) and creating content accordingly is something brands big and small can do to be part of the conversation.

Marketers: pay for consulting and do it in-house, or pay for strategy and execution?

This "build vs buy" conversation is an important consideration. Here are my recommendations as someone who talks to marketing directors every day.

Strategy is only as effective as the execution. 

If you have an in-house team that is...
1. Capable- project lead, developer(s), writer(s), graphic designer(s)
2. Available- has the ability to churn out recommendations regularly
3. Understand data- conversion tracking, analytics, the ability to look at both, and make actionable decisions

...then consulting can work really well. It's usually a fixed project fee, and you are not wed long-term to an agency.

Strategy & execution work best when:
1. You don't have an in-house team of project leads, etc (see above)
2. The in-house teams' time is better served elsewhere (i.e. not making changes in WordPress for 20/hrs a month)
3. You want performance from veteran strategists, writers, developers, and designers
4. You want discussions around actionable business recommendations
5. You want the promotional element (link building, AEO, social, etc) built in

Both have pros and cons related to output, expertise, accountability, and, of course, pricing.

But the above is generally the conversation and the consideration I provide to people who are weighing these options at our agency.

Anything you would add to either list?

Do your 2026 investment priorities align with other B2B marketers?

AI is (non-surprisingly) where most B2Bs are investing in 2026, with AI-powered applications taking the cake.

Brands continue to see value in AI content creation tools; hopefully, quality output can match scale.

AI video tools came in at a surpising 63%, indicating a resource allocation shift that is perhaps on the heels of easier editing and production capabilities.

For context, human resources made the cut, so they can help manage the AI tools they are purchasing.  

Good to see human investment is still on the radar for some brands; let's not let the robots control the robots just yet.

To see the rest of the stats on our 39 content marketing stats of 2026, find the link in the comments.

This is spot on, and I think it represents what the SEO/AEO community is *trying* tp communicate to clients and prospects.

Every week, I have a call with a marketing team asking me to "promise visibility increases from their LLM rankings so they can report back to their C-suite."

There are 100 reasons why this request is not grounded in how things work, but this thread explains the primary one: LLMs are personalized.

Gaming the algo like the old days of SEO is no longer the play.

Brand building is:
- service content for your ICPs
- use case content for your ICPs
- off-page ownership of all business listings and mentions
- public relations
- mentions in listicles and roundups related to your brand (credible ones)
- vs, comparison, features content
- social presence

LLM tracking is a vanity metric. 

Use your LLM tracking tool instead to understand the citations in which brands like yours are mentioned and create content accordingly.

Author of Product-Led SEO | Strategic SEO/AEO & Growth Advisor/Consultant | Angel Investor| Newsletter Productledseo.com| Please add a note to connection requests.

Every CMO I meet is obsessing over LLM rankings.
But they aren't seeing what is coming around the corner: personalized context is about to make all of that irrelevant.

In September, I called it an apocalypse in my newsletter, but now I am even more convinced that this will be catastrophic, having seen glimpses of it in my own chats. 
https://lnkd.in/dedg4-ps

Your ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini  will know your industry, your role, your past conversations, your preferences. When you ask for marketing advice, it won't give you the same answer it gives everyone else.

It'll factor in that you're B2B SaaS, that you've mentioned budget constraints before, that you prefer data-driven approaches.

Universal LLM rankings become meaningless when every response is contextually unique.

The brands winning in this reality won't be the ones gaming today's AI outputs. Instead, they'll be the ones building genuine authority with their ICPs that AI models trust across contexts.

TL;DR  tracking your "position" in a system designed to give everyone different answers is the new vanity metric.

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Daniel Lofaso

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