1.2M Followers in 6 Months… My Content Marketing Strategy REVEALED

60 years ago, I told clients of GYMLaunch that they should stop making content because they were wasting their time. I was partially right and partially wrong. And in this video, 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 in building a content marketing machine, and how to focus on one of two primary objectives with content marketing. And so if you don't know who I am, my name is Al Tremozzi. I own Acquisition.com. Portfolio of Companies right now does over $150 million a year. I make these videos 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. Let's rock and roll with the phases of content. 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 out-scale version. All right. Phase one is you make something and you post it. That's it. You just got to post something sometime, somewhere. And believe it or not, a lot of you guys haven't even done phase one, which is why I have to outline it. Number two is that you post something consistently. You create a cadence or a calendar around when you post. 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. For me, I just know that there's one day a week that I do all my marketing stuff. What I do on that day changes, but it's always marketing related. But that's what's worked for me. Maybe it'll work for you. The third phase, you post. You post reliably and you do it on all platforms. That's a massive increase in the amount of volume that you are posting. This is when it transitions in terms of objectives. And I'll get to the objectives in a second. 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. The short form platforms can take sometimes five, ten posts a day, like Twitter or TikTok, Facebook Reels at this moment. Rules change all the time. If you have a newsfeed style or you have an audience that it's pushing stuff to, they tend to fatigue faster and they don't want to get overwhelmed with one person. 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. And then phase five, you go from creating for all of those to capturing and creating. For example, if I wanted to have a show where everybody called in and I could repurpose all that stuff across content, that would be me deliberately creating content in a way across all those channels. 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. The second rule that I have is quality over quantity, but quality quantity wins over quality. In order to know what is quality, it usually takes reps to get good. 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. You start by sucking and then you get better and then eventually you suck so little you're actually good. 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 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. Those are the five phases. If you're a small business owner, that costs time and that costs money. So what do you do? Because I actually have had this conversation with probably half of our portfolio companies in the last three months. 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. If you have other ways of getting customers, which for most of you would be manual outbound, affiliates, or paid ads besides referrals, and if those are the primary channels, you do not want to take your eye off the ball on that. That's what's paying the bills. That being said, the purpose or the objective of having the organic content is lead nurture, not lead generation. So what happens is someone comes in through an affiliate, someone comes in through a paid ad, someone comes in through manual outbound 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'll probably consume two, three, four pieces of content and say, this guy or this gal knows what they're talking about. This is recent enough that I know that they're still in business. This is a legitimate business. That's all we're trying to accomplish here. 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 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 from you. 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. 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 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. But that's the first tangential benefit besides nurture that making this content helps you with. The second one is that it gives you an idea of what you can start leading with on your paid side. They're disproportionately saving it, disproportionately sharing it. When you run paid ads, you can look at your organic content like, dude, I don't know what it is. People went nuts for this. 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. Phase one and phase two, 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. If you want to know what it looks like to actually use content marketing as a way to generate leads. Phase three, such as you're posting once a week or on some cadence on all platforms. The purpose of phase three is learning what packaging looks like on each of the platforms. If you've ever seen that meme that had like Tinder, LinkedIn, Facebook and like Instagram platforms are all a little bit different. Same person, just packaged a little differently. This tweet here, then getting put into a TikTok, then also getting put into a YouTube short and then also getting put into a reel. It's the same concept, the same subject matter, but we package it a little bit differently. Phase four is you then say, great, I feel like we finally get each of these platforms. And this fucking takes time. 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. Maxing out the platforms, which is phase four. Number five is actively creating. So candidly, right now, I'm barely scratching phase five. 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. At Mosey Nation, that's what we're doing, right? With three, four, five, 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. They pay you in impressions for providing value to their audience. More followers, more likes, all that stuff. 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. For example, if you're a business doing $3 million or more and you're an internet business, go to acquisition.com. It can fill out the stuff for minority investment. That's what we do. 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 want to be one of those guys who's just pitching all the time. A lot of people oversell the small amount of demand they have so they can never grow the audience. The more you give, the more you grow. The more you take, the more you shrink. When you do it that way, you never go hungry because you always have more people knocking on your door than you have seating in your house. From a cost perspective, there's time cost, there's long-term cost, and there's money cost. If you start doing content as your way of getting customers, expect it to take a long time. 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. 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. A quote from Neil Strauss. 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 for me, is that most vendors are data-driven. And what I mean by that is they get obsessed with clicks and views and impressions and subscribers. That's good to a degree. It's okay to be satisfied with a smaller audience that's just the type of person that you're actually looking to attract. It's hard to make the shift. And it's really hard to ram it down their throats because most clients that pay them only care about those things because they don't know what else to measure. Just because it's easy to quantify doesn't mean it's important. 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, you 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. 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. That's to put out roughly 160 pieces of content a week. You're like, oh my God. I'm like, I know it's a lot. That's because we're trying to promote. We're using this instead of using paid ads. 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. 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. Most people talk about stuff that they don't have the right to talk about. Just because you call yourself an expert doesn't make it true. 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. You might not be the best business person in the world. I'm not. 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 if you've ever struggled to give away your services for free, it's because the biggest cost isn't your price. 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. Why should this person listen to me? And why is this worth their time? 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 tell their friends. I'm not Andy Vercella. I'm not Gary Vee. I'm not Ed Milet. I'm not all closing in on a billion dollars plus. I'm not Grant Cardone. Well, don't try and compete with them. 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. 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, 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 fixed 500 toilets this way. 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. And then you're talking about expanding an enterprise. And then lo and behold, you're a business expert, but it takes time. If you're a small business owner, you can do the first two phases. Just post about stuff. Make sure it's valuable. 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. You're going to probably have to have vendors. You're probably over time, once you learn from your vendors, you're going to bring employees in-house and you're going to teach it to them. And then you start scaling the volume up internally. And then phase five, 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.