The Game with Alex Hormozi - The 5 Phases of Content Marketing | Ep 428

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

No one starts by being amazing. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about the five phases of content marketing, the objectives you're solving for each of these, and how to provide meaningful content to your audiences. Sometimes it’s about showing up no matter what, even if it means slow progress.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(1:43) - Content Marketing Phases: Create, Consistent Posting, Reliability, Regularity, Repurposing.(4:10) - Key rules: No length limit, prioritize quantity. Alex details each phase.(12:04) - Phases 3-5 focus on customer generation; 1-2 generate leads.(17:56) - Talking points depend on expertise. Make engaging, informative content.(19:04) - Core question: "Why listen? Why is it worth their time?" Honesty matters.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

There's a lot of things that are easy to measure, and we overindex how important they are just because we know how to measure them. There are other things that are intangible that are more important. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wish Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey, so I'm doing it for the rest of us.

Please share and enjoy. Six years ago, I told clients of Jim launch that they should stop making content because they were wasting their time. And I was partially right and partially wrong. I want to break down the shift that I've had in terms of content marketing and its role within a business, the five phases that you can go through in building a content marketing machine and how to focus on one of two primary objectives with content marketing. All right. And so if you don't know who I am, my name's altramozzi. I ownacquisition.com. Our portfolio of companies right now does over $150 million a year. I make these because I hope that you use this stuff, you make a bunch of money, and then

you come and join Acquisition.com so we can invest in your business. That's why I do it. And because it makes me feel good. All right. So let's rock and roll with the phases of content. So I'm going to walk through the five phases and then I'm going to talk about which of the objectives you're solving for each of these and then finally like an outscale version. All right. So phase one is you make something and you post it. That's it. That's phase one. And believe it or not, a lot of you guys haven't even done phase one, which is why I have to outline it. You just got to post something sometime somewhere. Number one. Phase one, there we go, baby. Number two is that you post something consistently.

So you find a platform that you like, ideally one that you're probably already using, and you just post again after you posted once. And you say, you know what, this was seven days apart? If I do this every seven days, I will now be consistent, which is phase two. You create a cadence or a calendar around when you post. All right, you can set a reminder your first off. For me, I just know that there's one day a week that I do all my marketing stuff, what I do, do on that day changes, but it's always marketing related. All right. And so that's what's worked for me. Maybe it'll work for you. The third phase, and this is a big expansion phase, and I'll talk about this one is when you start switching objectives, all right? But in phase three, you post reliably

and you do it on all platforms. All right, so this goes, you go zero to one, but you go zero to one on every platform, and you do it consistently. All right? That's a massive increase in the amount of volume that you are posting. But when you do that, this is when it transitions in terms of objective. objectives, and I'll get to the objectives in a second, all right? Phase four is that you go from posting just even once on every platform on a regular cadence to maximizing how much every platform can take. Some platforms can, like the short-form platforms can take sometimes five, 10 posts a day, like Twitter or TikTok or Facebook Reels at this moment, and hopefully so this video doesn't get dated, those rules change all the time. If you have a news feed style or you have an audience that

it's pushing stuff to, they tend to fatigue faster and they don't want to get over. overwhelmed with one person. And so that's usually where you get capped out at one or two times a day. And so what you have to do is look at all the platforms, figure out what the max amount is that you can publish on a platform. And then all you do is you crank the volume on all of them at the same time. That's phase four. Most people never even get to phase four, but that's phase four. And then phase five is that you go from creating for all of those to capturing and creating. And the reason that that's nuanced is that, for example, if I wanted to have a show where everybody called in and then I could repurpose all that stuff across content,

that would be deliberately creating content in a way across all those channels, right? But not only creating, but also capturing so that I could further enhance my reach and the amount of volume that I created. And the big rule with volume that I have is that there's no such thing as too long, only too boring. All right. And the second rule that I have is quality over quantity, but quality quantity wins over quality.

All right. And so the thing is, and here's the catch, is that in order to know what is quality, it usually takes reps to get good. And so the only thing that you actually have to control is volume in the beginning. And so you will probably do a lot in the beginning and it will probably suck, comma, and that's okay, because it is a requisite for getting good. No one starts by being amazing. You start by sucking and then you get better.

And then eventually you suck so little, you're actually good. All right. So those are the five phases. I'll say them again real quick and then I'll get into the objectives. All right, phase one is that you actually post something. That's it. The silent majority, you are no longer silent. That is you. Number two is you post stuff consistently. Charlie Munger said that if you were

consistent, it's one of those things that's very difficult to be a failure at. If you're actually just consistent at anything you do, it's difficult to fail in life. Interesting thought. Number three, all of a sudden you go to all platforms and you post at least once on those platforms a week, right? If you use that cadence, just once a week on every single platform you post. And if you have a specific avatar that's just not on a platform, then you can exclude those. But most people, most platforms have your avatar on it. Phase four, is that you maximize and phase five is that you create and innovate across all platforms. Those are the five phases.

Now, if you're a small business owner, that costs time and that costs money, so what do you do? All right. So there's two distinct objectives. So when I'm talked to our portfolio companies, I actually have had this conversation with probably half of our portfolio companies in the last three months. And it's what is the role of organic marketing play in the business from a concept of acquiring customers? That's why we do this stuff, right?

We do this to acquire customers. all right and so if you have other ways of getting customers which for most of you would be manual outbound affiliates or paid ads right those are probably the other three ways and besides referrals are the other three ways that you're getting new customers and if those are the primary channels you do not want to take your eye off the ball on that because that's what put foods on the table that's what's paying the bills that being said if that is how you acquire customers the purpose or the objective of having the organic content is lead nurture not lead generation all right so what happens is is someone comes in through an affiliate, someone comes in through a paid ad, someone comes in through

manual app on because you had an SDR call them or they got a cold email. What do they do? They look at your social profile. They look at your website and they say, is this person legit? The only litmus test you have to pass there is that you've posted something recently that's not shit. That's really it. They have to consume, they'll probably consume two, three, four pieces of content and say, this guy or this gal knows what they're talking about. And this is recent enough that I know they're still in business. This is a legitimate business. That's all we're trying to accomplish here is providing some value in advance so that they think, huh, the likelihood that if I pay this person, I would get more of this type of content or more of this value is high.

It's all we're doing. Increased in the perceived likelihood of achievement that if they buy from you, they will get what they want. That is the purpose. It's to help the sales team out, is to give them assets. And if you do start to have content that starts performing better than others, that gives you two things. One is it gives the sales guys content that they can proactively feed to the prospects.

And so what you should build is have your sales guys build a master Excel sheet of your best content of all time because there is some content that you've made knowingly or unknowingly that convinces more people to buy it from you. And so you have it as your all-time greatest hits. And then between calls or before calls, your salesperson can say, hey, if you got some questions, a lot of people love this video that we talk about our insurance setup. Or a lot of people love this video where we talk about how we fix toilets, whatever it is, right? And you have the two biggest or best pieces of content. Now, on that content sheet, you'll have one of the. FAQs, what are the types of questions that people ask on sales calls, which gives you great fodder for the types of content you'll make in the future. And again, you do it for one

for the sales team and two for marketing. And so you do it for the sales team because as soon as they have that question, they can send that as a reply between call one and call two to close a prospect when they're not sure. Or if they have the question that they found out before the call, they can send it to them beforehand, increase the likelihood they close. All right? So that's the first thing that you, that first tangential benefit besides nurture that making this content helps you with. The second one is that it gives you. gives you the hooks and it gives you the hard-hitting messaging and content that is actually converting. It's actually gaining people's attention.

They're disproportionately saving it, disproportionately sharing it, disproportionately commenting on it. And so what that does is it gives you an idea of what you can start leading with on your paid side. So when you run paid ads, you can look at your organic content and be like, dude, this hook, I don't know what it is, people went nuts for this, right? Or on your cold emails, the first or second line of the benefits that you tie in, if for some reason this headline or this hook worked well, you weave it into every one of your cold emails and you can split test it and say, wow, this beat our control. And so think of the content you're making as just low risk ways of testing hooks and headlines to get people to buy from you. All right, that's what it is.

And so big picture, phase one, phase two, posting shit and posting shit regularly, all you have to do, objective is lead nurture. The tangential benefit one is that it helps the sales guys close because it covers FAAQs and gives them fodder to feed people between calls. And number two, it gives you better insight into paid ads, affiliates, or outbound that you're doing so that you can get more from your existing efforts. That is for phase one and phase two of a content marketing machine that you're building. And if you're in one of those camps, you don't need to do anything else. That's it. That's all you got to do. Make stuff, make it regularly. That is all. Have a nice day. Do that. If you want to know what it looks like to actually use content marketing as a way to generate leads,

Now, I'm new to this game, and so I'm just going to give you my insights to this. There are guys who are way better than this at me. But this is me just observing and documenting what I'm learning along the way to hopefully help you guys out. So phase three, which is you then go to all platforms, which is you're posting once a week or on some cadence on all platforms, which means you basically have to learn the platforms because platforms are all a little bit different, right? If you've ever seen that meme that had like Tinder, LinkedIn, Facebook, and like Instagram, and it had like your profile in all four of those, same person, just packaged a little differently. And so you can have the same content.

And I'll give you an example of like this tweet here, then getting put into a TikTok, right, then also getting put into a YouTube short, and then also getting put into a reel, right? It's the same concept, the same subject matter, but we package it a little bit differently. You can notice the headlines and the text are a little bit different. You can notice one of them's text, the other one's video. But the same subject matter. Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon. It's called $100 million offers that over 8,000 five-star reviews and it has almost a perfect score. You can get it for 99 cents on

Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over 1,000 hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest gift to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars so that later on in your business career, I can potentially partner with you. So that's my give. Go check it out, Amazon and back to the show. The purpose of phase three is learning what packaging looks like on each of the platforms. All right. Phase four is you then say, great, I feel like we finally get each of these platforms. And this fucking takes time.

All right, it takes probably six months. And this is if you have means to pay for this stuff. And I'll get into the cost in a second. I'll get into the cost in one moment. But I just want to finish this out. So you have maxing out the platforms, which is phase four. And then number five is actively creating. So candidly, right now I'm barely scratching phase five.

Right now, we're actually just dialing on phase four, which is maximizing across all platforms. We're not really there yet. We're maxed out on probably half the platforms, but we know we need to do some work on maximizing some of them. And that's what we're working on actively here at, I was going to say, at Mozy Nation. So at Mozy Nation, that's what we're done, right? Now, the difference between phase one and two and phase three, four, five is the objective. If you're doing phase three, four, five, the objective is to generate new customers from content, right?

and it's different than phase one and phase two, where the only reason you can do that is just to have lead nurture, just to give you guys some sales stuff, just to give you guys some fodder and just test some hooks. With 3,4,5, you're actually making good enough content that the platforms are serving its new audiences because they are able to grow the amount of time people spend on the platform because your stuff is good.

And so the platforms pay you by paying you in attention. They pay you in eyeballs, they pay you in impressions for providing value to their audience. All right? And so then that brings more. people into your world, more followers, more likes, all that stuff. Now, you still have to have a way to convert those people into customers. And so the way to do that is just having call to actions. It's simply just saying like, for example, if you're a business doing $3 million or more and

you're in an inner business, go to acquisition.com. It can fill out the stuff for minority investment. That's what we do, right? So you can just put that into your content and then the rest of your time, you're just providing value. You don't need to get fancy with it. You don't even have to do it all the time. If you do it occasionally, because you don't want to be one of those guys who are just pitching all the time, and you want to make sure that we're depositing far more than we're ever extracting, right? And so making sure that you maintain that balance is one of the hard parts of marketing. And I think a lot of people oversell the small amount of demand they have so they can never grow the audience. And so if you look at it like a sliding stale between give and take,

the more you give, the more you grow, the more you take, the more you shrink. Right. And so if you give, you multiply. If you take, you shrink back. And so you want to be overind this way and then just occasionally throw the takes in so that you can always be underselling the amount of demand you have so that if there's a pyramid of demand like this, you're just selling this many and then all of these people, you slam the door on them and you say, hey, we'll be back in a month, make sure you take action next time. And when you do it that way, you always, you never go hungry because you always have more people knocking on your door than you have seating in your house, right? That's the idea. All right. Now, from a cost perspective, there's time cost,

there's long-term cost and there's money costs. So I'll go through all three from using it as lead generation. From a long-term perspective, because I'll start there, if you start doing content as your way of getting customers expected to take a long time. One of the things that I started making content for Acquisition.com about 18 months before we really started seeing any kind of deal flow or growth across the platforms. And candidly, I'd experience on video and I had a track record and still took time. And so I'm just saying that like set expectations appropriately.

Like I know Evan Carmichael talks about, he showed his YouTube subscriber growth over a decade, right? And so if you think about this as a long-term play, I still believe that fame is the most efficient business model. All right, it's one of the best ways to arbitrage making money, but it takes time and no one's willing to wait, which then gives you a competitive advantage because patience is one of the ultimate advantages, is that you're just willing to do things for an unreasonably long period of time without thinking you're smarter than you really are, which is a quote from Neil Strauss. All right. Now, one was the long-term time costs.

The second is the short-term time cost. What's the microcost? So if you're doing phase three, four, five, even at phase three, it's going to be pretty much beyond your capacity to actually create, capture, edit, and distribute across all platforms, you're not going to be able to do it on your own. And so you need some degree of leverage. That leverage is going to come in the form of labor. You're going to have to pay people to help you out. In the beginning, the more costly way of doing it, but faster is to have vendors. So to have people who are specialists on each of these platforms, because what they're going to do is get you up to speed five. times faster. They're going to already know all the mistakes that people normally make. Now, one thing they have to look out for for vendors, and this is especially important, you know, for me is that most vendors are data driven. And what I mean by that is they get obsessed with virality. They get obsessed with clicks and views and impressions and subscribers, right? And that's good to a degree. But what happens is they'll try to start putting you in this box of like, this is the stuff that's working great. The thing is, sure, you might be getting lots of views and lots of subscribers, but are they the types of subscribers you want?

right because if you're doing you know food eating contest but you're a plumber is that really what you're looking for probably not and so i think it's okay to be satisfied with a smaller audience that's just the type of person that you're actually looking to attract and so if you can if it's hard i'm just like it's hard to make this shift and it's really hard to ram it down their throats because most clients that they that pay them only care about those things because they don't know what else to measure and that's the problem is that it's so easy to quantify and just because it's easy to quantify doesn't mean it's important So think about that.

There's a lot of things that are easy to measure, and we overindex how important they are just because we know how to measure them. There are other things that are intangible that are more important. All right. So the values that you have, the messages that you want to get out there, who you're trying to reach will be more important than the quantitative metrics. Are those good litmus tests in terms of if nothing you ever have hits? Yeah, you should probably pay attention to that.

But if only one specific type of thing hits and it's not core to who you are or the message you want to put out, you've got to be able to resist that temptation because otherwise you're going to build this audience. doing stuff you don't want to do, attracting people you don't want to be with. So that's the second cost, which is like the time slash money cost, all right? And so for context, which is I'll just transition fully into money, for us to put out the stuff that we put out right now across all platforms, for Layla and I cost about $70,000 a month.

All right. So if you're curious, you're like, how much does that, like the real cost is about $70,000 a month? And that's to put out roughly 160 pieces of content a week. You're like, oh my God, I know, it's a lot. And that's because we're trying to promote, right? We're using this instead of using paid ads. And so if you think about this from an impression to impression standpoint, for us, we get about $2 million a month in what would be equivalent ad spend.

So if I were to just pay for the impressions, it would cost me about $2 million a month to get the impressions that right now cost me about $70,000 a month. All right. And so I have a lot of cost savings doing it organically. The lever on that, though, is how good you are. And that's tough. And it probably sounds weird for me to even say this. So take it the way that you probably or hopefully know that I mean it,

which is most people talk about stuff that they don't have the right to talk about. They are not experts in a field. And just because you call yourself an expert doesn't make it true. All right. And so the question is, how narrowly can I define the problem that I solve so that in that tiny world, in that pond, I am king? Right? Because you might not be the best business person in the world. I'm not, right?

But the question is, of all the sources of information that are both entertaining and educational is the stuff that you put out there good enough that people are like, I will pay attention to this person because here's a thought to stay with. If you've ever struggled to give away your services for free, you're like, hey man, I've got video services. I'll record some stuff for you. And someone's like, no, I'm good. It's because the biggest cost isn't your price.

The biggest cost is other stuff that goes to the thing that you sell, which is also an opportunity because if you find out what the biggest friction points are into selling the services or products that you have, you'll be able to solve them. And then price becomes not an issue because you've solved these other pain points. And so to the same degree, the biggest cost of your free content

when you're like, my free content's better than his. Well, the thing is, is it might not be because if people aren't willing to pay for it with their attention, then it has other costs, which is it's not worth their attention. And that's hard to take, but it just means that you have the opportunity to get better.

And so the biggest picture and the underlying question that I always try and answer is, why should this person listen to me and why is this worth their time? And if you can answer those questions in the content that you're making in a tangible way that their life is going to get better as a result, they'll come back and they'll tell their friends. Right. And that's the idea. And that's how, you know, slow growth, you know, or linear growth throughout content actually works. Right.

And so if you're like, how can I provide value to somebody? Because I'm not, I'm not, I'm not Andy V. I'm not at my lead. I'm not all closing in on a billion dollars plus. I'm not Grand Cardone. Right. If you have that, well, don't try and compete with them. Because they've already answered the first watch is why you should listen to them? Because they're all billionaires, right? Or close to it. And so, you're not going to compete there. But if you're like, hey, I'm the fastest toilet fixer in this side of Tuscaloosa, you might only be competing against three guys. And if you're only competing against three guys, you can beat them, right? Look at those guys, but I'm going to beat that guy. Right? And then all you do is just slowly, you expand your pond,

because what happens is first you're fixing toilets, and then you're talking about how you can expand a plumbing business. And then you're talking about how you can expand a local business. And then you're talking about marketing on whatever specific method you use to grow your thing, right? And then you're talking about expanding an enterprise to national levels. And then lo and behold, you're a business expert, but it takes time. And so I think that it's much better. I don't like to fake it until you make it until you make it. I like to, I like to, well, when you fake it to you make, you're lying to yourself, right? You're lying to others and you're ultimately allowing to you. And I don't think that's a good way to live, at least for me. And so I would rather have it be the opposite, which is prove it so you don't

lose it. It's close. Maybe we'll make that a thing. Prove it so you lose it. All right. And so the idea is like, use the evidence, not the hullabaloo, not the chest beating, not a hyper, but a true expert. Because if you have evidence, you are beyond reproach. If someone looks at you and says like, hey, man, your content's crap, you can be like, I mean, that's okay. I probably need to learn how to deliver it better.

But like, this is how I grew the business. Or like, this is how you fix toilets. I'll try and be more entertaining next time, but this is how you fix them. And you have evidence that you fix 500 toilets this way. So like, you won't feel the pain of people calling you a fraud because you know it's not true. So if I look at you and say, hey, this guy is purple hair, right? You're not going to be offended by that because you know it's not true. But if someone says, hey, this guy's a scam, it only hurts you if you believe them.

It's only in the elements around the edges where there are truth that are embedded in the insults that we get hurt. And so in order to play the game for the long run, I believe in having the foundation of truth, which is evidence, which is what have I actually done? And so I think if you focus on the doing, you focus on stacking up an insurmountable amount of evidence to prove the point that you are good at this thing, then you can make the frameworks, you can teach the stuff and you can have the intestinal fortitude to go through the harder times because you know who you are, not because of what you're talking about in the future, but because what you've done in the past. And I think that big picture, if you want to use phases of content marketing to market your business, bring the wagon back around. If you're a small business owner, you can do the first two phases, just post about stuff, make sure it's valuable. you don't need to put a ton of time into it, just enough that you're present

and that people don't think you're scam, right? Just to make sure that you are a legitimate-looking business that looks like its doors, say, open on it. That's all we're trying to accomplish and help the sales guys out. If you want to make content marketing your actual lead generation machine, then you need to invest in it the same way you invest in it

for paid marketing, which is you're probably probably probably over time you learn from your vendors, you're going to bring employees in-house and you're going to teach it to them, right? And you do the vendors first, you can learn the hacks, and then you can teach it to your internal team and you can do it a little bit of a cost-safe.

You pay the vendors for speed, you pay the employees for time and control. That's the trade-off, right? So you bring it in-house, and then you start scaling the volume up internally. And then phase five is when you go max out mode, right? You start cranking out on everything and then you start creating stuff specifically. But when you're doing that at that phase, you probably don't need to worry about this video. All right. So, Moses Nation, love you guys, keep being awesome.

Hopefully I answer some of the content questions you guys have been asking. And so when you ask, I try to do my very best to answer them. Keep being awesome. I'll see you guys.