Shama Hyder: Digital Marketing
Digital marketing keynote speaker and brand strategist Shama Hyder helps organizations build momentum, modernize marketing, and connect with today’s customer through data-driven storytelling.
Quick Facts:
- CEO of Hyder Ground.
- Founder of Zen Media, which she scaled before exiting.
- Co-founder of Roster & Co.
- Author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing and forthcoming Seven Signals.
Formats:
- Keynote speaker and marketing strategist
Audiences:
- Marketing leaders, executives, founders, and organizations seeking digital transformation, brand growth, and customer connection
Outcomes:
- Clear strategies to build momentum in modern marketing
- Practical insights into influencer marketing and digital storytelling
- Stronger alignment between brand strategy and business results
- Travels from: Miami, FL
- **US Fee range: $20,001 - $35,000
Talent Services
Keynote Topics:
Seven Signals: How to See First, Decide Fast, and Act on What Matters Most
The flagship keynote, based on Shama’s forthcoming book Seven Signals (Simon & Schuster, 2027)
Leaders everywhere are feeling the same collective panic: a competitor announces a major deal, a key customer who “loves you” does not renew, and suddenly the organization is scrambling for its next growth opportunity. Markets are moving faster than planning cycles, customer expectations faster than processes, and what created an advantage last year is table stakes today. The most dangerous response is also the most common: more activity mistaken for adaptation.
The companies winning turn that panic into focused action. They see market opportunities early, decide which ones matter for their business, and move while the window is still open. In this keynote, Shama introduces Seven Signals, a practical framework for recognizing the shifts that matter and acting before the market forces the response. Stop chasing trends. Start reading signals.
In this interactive keynote, your audience will learn the seven signal types that reveal where growth is hiding before it becomes obvious, and which ones matter most for their industry. The See/Interpret/Act framework and the go/no-go questions that show whether an opportunity is right for their organization or a waste of resources, including the company that went from spotting a disruption to launching its response in one meeting. And the three patterns that keep smart teams stuck even when the opportunity is in plain sight.
Your Team Walks Away Ready To
- Scan all seven signals to see changes they may be missing outside their usual field of view.
- Distinguish an interesting trend from a signal that matters to their specific organization, then decide whether to act, keep watching, or ignore it.
- Identify where their Change-Response Gap is widening, including places where the market has moved but their strategy, processes, or assumptions have not.
- Use the See/Interpret/Act method to turn an external shift into a clear business decision instead of another report, meeting, or abstract conversation.
- Complete a 72-hour action challenge by choosing one signal they are seeing now, defining what it could mean, and committing to one concrete test while the window is still open.
Audience Feedback
“Shama has this rare ability to make you feel both energized and clear-headed at the same time. She showed our audience how to spot timing windows that give them a massive competitive advantage. She makes the future feel actionable and the present feel calm.”
— Wesley Williams, CMO, GoHighLevel
(Perfect for leadership, growth, innovation, strategy, and transformation events, and any organization that needs to channel urgency into its next growth opportunity.)
The New Rules of Influence: How to Become Undeniable in the Age of AI
AI has made competence cheap. Anyone can now produce a polished deck, a plausible strategy, a professional-sounding post. When everyone sounds credible, the people who win are the ones buyers, boards, and talent actually trust. Influence has new rules, and most professionals are still playing by the old ones.
This keynote gives your people those rules: how to be visible for the right things, trusted before they walk into the room, and top of mind when the decision gets made. Drawing on Shama’s 500+ keynotes and her research into how influence is shifting across generations, it gives every attendee a personal playbook for building authority in a world where AI can draft anything for anyone.
In this interactive keynote, your audience will learn why influence changed: the generational transfer of power in how clients and customers buy, and why proof now beats polish with Gen Z and Alpha decision-makers. How trust compounds, as experience, expertise, authority, and a demonstrated point of view add up to being the obvious choice. And how to use AI as a cognitive partner to sharpen thinking and extend reach while sounding more like themselves, not like everyone else.
Your Team Walks Away Ready To
- Conduct a personal influence audit to see what buyers, boards, clients, and talent discover about them before they ever enter the room.
- Define the specific expertise and point of view they want to be known for, instead of trying to remain visible for everything.
- Turn their experience into credible proof through stories, results, examples, and third-party signals that make their authority easier to recognize.
- Build a 30-day influence plan identifying where to show up, who needs to hear from them, what to share, and how to remain top of mind without constantly self-promoting.
- Use AI as a cognitive partner to sharpen ideas, extend their reach, and multiply useful output while preserving the judgment, voice, and perspective that make them distinctive.
Audience Feedback
“Shama covered great tips and advice on how to build your brand in a digital age. She gave our team members practical examples, tools, and techniques they can put into action right now. Shama spoke from an authentic place that really resonated with our team members. Her delivery, message, and tips were highly praised across our organization through the executive level as well as across our business partner groups.”
— Amy Lashlee, Toyota North America
(Perfect for leadership development programs, sales kickoffs, professional services firms, and women’s leadership events.)
AI in Action: Practical AI for Smarter Work, Better Customers, and Real Growth
Most organizations are using AI to do yesterday’s work faster. Your team has dabbled with ChatGPT, summarized a meeting, or drafted an email or two. Efficiency matters, but it is the smallest prize on the table. The larger opportunity is using AI to redesign how people work, how processes run, and how customers experience the business — where the real returns live.
Based on Shama’s Applied AI Playbook, this keynote gives your audience a proven framework for turning AI from buzzword to bottom line. A clear system your team can start running Monday morning, without a seven-figure budget or an army of data scientists.
In this interactive keynote, your audience will learn the 3-P Model of People, Process, and Personalization, the three categories where AI creates measurable ROI. The AI Evolution from assistant to partner to operator, the shift that separates companies seeing real returns from teams stuck using AI for one-off tasks. And how to run their first 90-day applied AI test, from picking the strongest starting point to scaling what works, so they move from “interested in AI” to measurable results within a single quarter.
Your Team Walks Away Ready To
- Elevate their team’s performance using AI, starting with the areas that matter most.
- Increase ROI from AI by knowing when and how to use it, and where it actually pays off.
- Pinpoint their highest-impact first project using a simple diagnostic exercise.
- Categorize every AI opportunity across people, process, and personalization so nothing gets lost in the noise.
- Apply lessons from real examples: the distributor whose AI chatbot now handles 80% of service tickets, the manufacturer who freed $1.2M in working capital, the outdoor retailer who lifted email conversion 183%.
Audience Feedback
“Shama Hyder spoke at our 2024 Women in Industry Conference on the topic of AI. Her session was engaging, interactive and had lots of tangible takeaways for our attendees. She is wonderful to work with and rated very highly on our post-event survey. If you are looking for a speaker who will make AI learning fun and approachable, book Shama today!”
— AnnaMarie Kendall, Marketing and Communication Manager, MHEDA
(Perfect for organizations that are done talking about AI and ready to implement it. Ideal for leadership teams, annual kickoffs, and conferences where attendees need to leave with a playbook they can execute this quarter.)
The Customer Has Already Changed: How to Win When AI Resets Expectations
Your customer has already changed. The only question is how long it takes your organization to catch up.
AI has reset what companies can deliver, and in doing so it has reset what customers expect: instant responses, personalized experiences, and the feeling that they matter to you. The same technology that made this possible has also made it easier than ever for businesses to feel impersonal and disconnected. Human behavior reveals which of these shifts will endure, and the brands capturing market share right now are the ones reading those shifts early and closing the gap between what customers already expect and what the organization delivers.
The advantage is no longer only about who has the best product. It’s about who can deliver personalized experiences at scale, create processes that free teams to build real relationships, and develop people who turn customers into raving fans.
In this interactive keynote, your audience will learn, using the 3-P framework of Personalization, Process, and People, where the customer experience is quietly losing ground and how to spot it before customers say so. How to use AI to personalize at scale without the experience feeling automated. Which processes to redesign so the technology absorbs the busywork and the team gets its time back for customers. And how to develop people who stay top of mind and turn satisfied customers into active referral sources.
Your Team Walks Away Ready To
- Audit the customer journey and identify where the experience currently feels slow, generic, fragmented, or transactional.
- Organize customer-experience opportunities across Personalization, Process, and People, then pinpoint the highest-impact place to begin.
- Use AI to personalize interactions at scale without making the customer experience feel automated, impersonal, or disconnected.
- Redesign processes so AI removes friction and repetitive work while creating more capacity for meaningful human interaction.
- Apply lessons from real examples, including the distributor whose AI chatbot now handles 80% of service tickets and the retailer whose personalized emails lifted conversion by 183%, to design a customer-experience test they can run this quarter.
Audience Feedback
“A 10 out of a 10. Shama was incredible to work with! Her commitment to our event, streamlining her presentation to ensure it was appropriate for our audience and providing fresh and innovative ideas to our group was so impactful! She had such insightful and practical takeaways. We couldn’t have asked for more.”
— Carol Ann Seney, Director, Events, Business Advisory Services for Marriott | U.S. + Canada
(Perfect for customer experience, marketing, sales, retail, service, and industry conferences, and any team whose customers’ expectations are rising faster than their processes.)
Hosting:
Emcee & Executive Panel Moderator
Beyond keynotes, Shama serves as a conference emcee and executive panel moderator for single-day and multi-day programs, including Faena Rose and the Microsoft Partner Summit. She threads a program’s themes together between sessions, keeps energy high across long days, and brings the same command of AI, customer, and growth topics to unscripted panels and fireside chats that she brings to the keynote stage. Available for 1- to 3-day engagements, in person or virtual.
Talent Short Bio
Shama Hyder is an entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker focused on emerging technology, market shifts, and business growth. As CEO of Hyder Ground, she builds and backs businesses by examining how new technologies change what people do.
Her forthcoming book, Seven Signals, explores Strategic Urgency: recognizing shifts early, understanding their implications, and acting while opportunities remain open.
Shama founded Zen Media with $1,500 and grew it into a multimillion-dollar B2B consultancy before exiting. She is the bestselling author of The Zen of Social Media Marketing and co-founded Roster & Co. with former TikTok marketing leader Nick Tran to help organizations turn AI into growth.
Named to the 2026 TIME100 Creators list in the Leaders category, Shama is also a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. She has delivered more than 500 keynotes across 26 countries, bringing entrepreneurial experience to discussions about strategy, AI, and changing customer behavior.
Videos
Interest to Book? Send us your enquiry
Guests consistently rate Shama’s keynote talks as a standout highlight—often the best or most informative session of the entire event. Reviewers praise her for delivering high-energy, clear, strategically focused presentations that feel genuinely tailored to the specific audience. Organizers also emphasize her professionalism and ease to work with, noting a collaborative “team player” attitude, strong preparation, and engaging delivery (smart, clearly spoken, and even funny).
Strengths: highly impactful, audience-tailored content; energizing yet practical takeaways; top conference ratings; polished, professional, and easy to collaborate with.
Weaknesses: no notable negatives mentioned in these reviews.
Talent FAQ's
Do speakers charge a flat fee or by the hour?
Speaker fees can vary depending on factors such as expertise, demand, and event specifics. While some speakers may charge a flat fee for their services, others may have hourly rates. It’s best to discuss fee structures directly with the speaker or their representative to understand the pricing model.
What is the typical duration of a keynote speech and what is included?
Keynote speeches typically range from 30 to 90 minutes, with the duration determined by the speaker’s expertise, the event’s agenda, and audience preferences. Keynote speeches often include a combination of inspirational stories, practical insights, and actionable advice tailored to the event’s theme or objectives.
Does the scale of the event and audience size affect a speaker’s fee?
The scale of the event and audience size can indeed impact a speaker’s fee. Larger events with a broader reach or higher attendance may command higher fees due to increased exposure and demand. Conversely, smaller events or niche audiences may offer opportunities for more flexible pricing arrangements.
Travel expenses and other costs
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Deposits and securing a booking
Many speakers require a deposit to secure a booking, with the remaining balance due closer to the event date. Deposits are often non-refundable and serve as a commitment from both parties. It’s advisable to discuss deposit requirements and payment terms with the speaker or their representative when finalizing the booking.
Additional tips and takeaways
- Virtual speaking appearances are a cost-effective alternative to high speaking fees, often 10-50% cheaper than in-person rates.
- There is typically no difference in fee for a 15-minute speech versus a 60-minute speech.
- Some motivational speakers are open to discounting their fee if hired for more than one event by the same organization.
- When browsing speakers, consider their location to keep travel costs down.
- Personal connections to your organization or event location can increase your chances of securing a renowned speaker.
- Be upfront about your needs and expectations to ensure a successful partnership.
- Speaker bureaus like Speakers Inc help guide you through the booking process to negotiate the best deal with favorable terms.
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Fee Range Information
All talent fees exclude travel and accommodation where required.