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Neal Schaffer

Fractional CMO and Author of Digital Threads
PDCA Social

Neal Schaffer works on the part of marketing that most budgets underfund: the trust that gets built long before anyone fills out a form.

As Fractional CMO at PDCA Social, he builds digital marketing programs for organizations that need to grow without outspending their competitors. He is the author of six books including Digital Threads (2024), a playbook for weaving search, email, and social media into one connected strategy, and the second edition of Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth (2026). His 2020 book The Age of Influence made the case that influencer marketing is really about mobilizing the people already closest to a brand, starting with its own customers and employees.

Neal teaches social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension and Rutgers Business School, hosts the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast, and speaks at conferences worldwide. He is based in Southern California.

He comes to senior living as an outsider in one sense and not at all in another. He has never worked for an operator, which is why SMASH invited him. He has also been on the other side of the decision twice, once when his father chose a community on word of mouth alone, and again when his family chose one for his mother. Both experiences shape how he thinks about where trust actually gets built.

2026 Sessions

Trust Before the Tour: Building Trust as a Revenue Strategy

<p>Sponsored By:<br><img src=https://naccme.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/SMASH+2026/SM_logolockup_sirv… alt="Upload Image" width="200" /></p>
Most senior living marketing spend fires at the bottom of the funnel: the inquiry, the tour, the follow-up. By then, families have already decided who they trust. That decision gets built upstream, in conversations, reviews, and stories that most operators never manage. <br><br>

This session brings an outside-industry view of how trust actually gets built, and how it now gets discovered. We will map the voices shaping a family's choice before a tour is ever booked: residents and families telling real stories, the staff and executives who become the human face of a community, and the trusted local voices most operators have never treated as marketing. You will see how businesses outside senior living have built this into a repeatable system, and why those same signals are increasingly what AI reads when a family asks it which community to trust. <br><br>

Take home: <br>

- A map of the trusted voices already shaping your reputation, and which ones you are leaving unmanaged. <br>

- A practical way to source real resident, family, and staff stories that your team can actually run. <br>

- The upstream trust signals worth measuring, and why they now double as your AI discoverability.

Presenter

Tuesday, October 06 2:15–3:00 PM
Room Marquis 1-3
Marketing Strategy and Management
Faculty

Neal Schaffer

Fractional CMO and Author of Digital Threads
PDCA Social

Neal Schaffer works on the part of marketing that most budgets underfund: the trust that gets built long before anyone fills out a form.

As Fractional CMO at PDCA Social, he builds digital marketing programs for organizations that need to grow without outspending their competitors. He is the author of six books including Digital Threads (2024), a playbook for weaving search, email, and social media into one connected strategy, and the second edition of Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth (2026). His 2020 book The Age of Influence made the case that influencer marketing is really about mobilizing the people already closest to a brand, starting with its own customers and employees.

Neal teaches social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension and Rutgers Business School, hosts the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast, and speaks at conferences worldwide. He is based in Southern California.

He comes to senior living as an outsider in one sense and not at all in another. He has never worked for an operator, which is why SMASH invited him. He has also been on the other side of the decision twice, once when his father chose a community on word of mouth alone, and again when his family chose one for his mother. Both experiences shape how he thinks about where trust actually gets built.
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