How much do the pros (like Alex Hormozi) spend on their content marketing strategies
I’m always curious how much successful creators are spending on content and media production. It doesn’t mean I can, will, or even need to spend the same amount.
But it paints a picture to see what it takes. What do I have to do to post Instagram Reels three times a day? And YouTube 3-5x per week? And a podcast twice a week? Then a bunch of Stories or Tweets. And a well thought out blog post?
WHAT?! How does someone do this consistently without burning out?
Why analyze Alex Hormozi’s content strategy?
Garyvee and those folks are too big. Sure it’d be nice to have a D Rock filming ALL your content for you. But what’s the strategy for a few notches down and around that?
Well Alex Hormozi, the $100m+ entrepreneur, made a video revealing how he grew 1.2m followers in 6 months. There’s a few minutes in that video where you get a glimpse into how he thinks about investing in content. He reveals a few key numbers I’ll share in this post. I highly recommend watching the whole video after you read this.
The first reason I’m using Alex Hormozi as a case study for the ‘pros’ is because he has already revealed these numbers publicly.
Second, you wouldn’t believe how many requests I get for making clips where Alex is a reference for the style they enjoy. I’m sure Garyvee, Grant Cardone, and others were doing this before him. But this style has taken over Reels, TikTok, and Shorts.
And the main reason is because Alex Hormozi started making videos with a webcam in his closet for a long time. The production quality wasn’t anything fancy at all. Mostly talking head with a quick title intro in the beginning. But the content was good.
Then we see him grow his YouTube from a few thousand to half a million subscribers in what feels like the blink of an eye. With no upload schedule. And nothing to sell you.
So how’d he do it? Well first of all, what he’s actually saying is packed with quality stories and struggles. He has enough business experience and storytelling skills to where he can shoot his video in close to one take. Or can give enough density of value per minute in his videos.
With how busy Alex Hormozi is, I knew he wasn’t editing these himself. It wouldn’t make sense unless he actually enjoyed it. If you count the cuts, effects, animations, graphics, and so on in his recent videos, you’ll see what I mean.
Alex Hormozi’s content marketing strategy:
There’s actually a combination of two of Alex’s videos where he shares this information. First one is How to Grow an Audience if You Have 0 Followers. His second one is 1.2M Followers in 6 Months… My Content Marketing Strategy REVEALED. Let’s run through a few bullets:
- July of 2017 – Started a podcast talking about how to run gyms better
- September of 2022 – Hit top ten on podcast charts
- Published 1-3 podcasts per week for 6 years
- Around episode 150, interests started to evolve. He started to talk about marketing and business more.
- At about 400 episodes, begins to hit the top charts and get noticed.
- Said it took 18 months on most of his platforms before he started seeing any notable progress
Phase 1 and 2 of this content marketing strategy are really about getting going. “Post something, somewhere, at some frequency.” But Phase 3 is where it gets interesting:
- Post once a week on all platforms
- Learn what the packaging looks like on each of the platforms
- Time: at least 6 months if you have a team
- Phases 4 and 5 are essentially maximizing output and dialing up volume
How much does it cost for Alex Hormozi’s content marketing strategy?
At the time of making his video, Alex shared that he pays a team to make 80 pieces of content per week. Important to note that he mentions how 160 pieces of content is split between him and his wife, Leila’s platforms.
So let’s just say per person, that’s 80 pieces of content each week across all platforms.
The price he shared at the time of video for both him and Leila is $70,000 / month. So about $35,000 per person per month. And he mentions how the amount of impressions that $70k gets him would take $2 million / month in paid advertising to achieve the same thing.
For the fun of math, let’s divide TOTAL MONEY ON CONTENT SPENT by TOTAL PIECES OF CONTENT. That would be $70,000 / 160 pieces of content, which equals an average of $437.50 per piece of content.
Just like a movie on Netflix, there’s not just one editor working on the whole film. There’s assistant editors, finishing editors, and so on.
There’s a brilliant interview that’s out with Alex Hormozi’s creative director, Caleb Ralston. And it takes you a little bit deeper behind the scenes. How he assembles a team of editors and creatives to produce this type of output on a monthly basis.
What about support for the rest of us?
It’s important to note that you can actually do a lot of this yourself. It realistically just takes more time, error, learning, sacrificing other things, etc. You may not need additional support if you can find a workflow that aligns with your goals.
But if you choose to hire someone to post 3x per day, every day, good to know what the cost for that can be. You can start to scale up or down.
Since most of us aren’t dropping $35,000 per month for 80 pieces of content, Alex recommends partnering up with vendors to start.
Unless you’re doing it all yourself, I’ve realized I WILL need labor to some degree if I want to grow.
Because I can only create so much while running other parts of the business. And even if you create your own stuff full time, there’s a physical limit you’ll reach inevitably when trying to match high production quality.
Partnering with freelancers can allow you to start offloading maybe 3-15 pieces of content per week. You may have to sacrifice things like speed of delivery or complexity of edits IF your budget is super low.
A $5 video is different than a $437 video.
But at least you can begin to calculate a process and system that you can develop for your own content strategy. And once you have funds to invest into content marketing, you can scale up the quantity AND quality of your content.
Looking to partner with an editor that’s in your corner? Drop a message here to chat about your project. Clips, podcasts, YouTube videos, and more.