Michael Greenberg: Building a Triple A1 Audience In Your Marketing Plan for Maximum Business Growth

This episode is sponsored by Contentfy, a premium video editing and content repurposing service for busy content creators, influencers, brands, podcasters, YouTubers, and marketers. Contentfy provides unlimited end-to-end editing and repurposing services to help you get your video and audio content edited and repurposed quickly, easily, and reliably. Join other busy content creators, founders, brands, and marketers who now spend even more time creating while they take care of the rest. You no longer need to worry about spending hours editing anymore. Just create content, build your audience, and grow your business. If you're a content creator looking to save time and money, or looking to outsource your content marketing team, get your first free video edited now at contentfy.co. If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks. Thanks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to build a AAA audience in your marketing plan for maximum business growth. Today we have our guest, Michael Greenberg, joining us. Michael is an entrepreneur and a advisor, as well as the founder of Gentlemen of Technology, a B2B venture creation and strategy consulting firm. He's also the chief strategist at Call for Content, a white label podcast production and services for agencies and consultants. Michael is an expert at increasing process efficiency, analysis, strategy, and building up businesses. So welcome, Michael. Super excited to have you on the Stats to Sticks show today.

Thanks, Akeel. It's great to be on.

Awesome. So we always like to start off, tell us a little bit about your personal background, roles, Past ventures and what is it that you're currently working on?

Yeah, so I really got into entrepreneurship in like high school. I come from a family, I'm a 4th and 5th entrepreneur, generation entrepreneur on each side of my family. So I grew up around a lot of people who had their own businesses. But I didn't really know what it meant to actually own a business because about half those people were retired. And the other half had their businesses by the time I was like, 10. So I didn't get to see the hard part of people getting started. Um, and I think that made it a lot easier for me when I went to decide and do it because I was banging my head against the wall all the while knowing where I ended up, um, at the end. So when I was in my sophomore year of college the first time, I ended up not going back for my junior year. because the professor I was going to do my thesis with junior and senior year got recruited back to the private sector. Um, that led me to drop out of school, went to a coding bootcamp down in Mountain View, and then joined up with a startup, raised some money, uh, did the social mobile local thing right around the same time when everyone else was. Had a horrible flop. Um, Learned a lot along the way, and then went to do some B2B growth strategy consulting on my own. And that's when I got into podcasting. I was working with a network at the time, and they wanted a national rollout strategy. They were locally focused. So I put that together. They didn't like it. About a year later, non-compete was up, and I took that strategy to market as Call for Content's Authority Marketing Package, which was really a systemized LinkedIn plus podcast with content repurposing for consultants and coaches who were already selling in the higher ticket of the B2B space. And that led to podcasting just as an industry growing over the past 5 years, led into wider services for Call for Content, us unbundling some of the services as we got better at serving them, and then my work really moving back to the B2B growth strategy, but with networks and with shows and with brands looking to enter podcasting instead. So that's what I've been doing for about the past 5 years, as well as quite a bit of white label production work for other agencies. And now I've sold off about 80% of Call for Content. Pretty much the entire book of business has been sold now. My GM got in a car accident and the end of 2020. And so that accelerated plans that we had to sell in 2021. And I've now sold off the white label business and most of the other pieces of the book of business that could be sold. So I've just got the digital presence left. And if I can't sell that, I've got plans set for it, but I'd really love to get it off my plate so I can spend a lot more time on a new community I'm launching for ClickUp power users and then just on writing And creating more content around my ideas and my thoughts so I can sort of codify my knowledge more effectively.

Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So about just selling that off, finishing that off, and now focusing on your community. Um, can you share about this thing which you speak about called the AAA model? What, you know, let's, let's talk about what is it? How does that work? And, you know, dissect it a little bit further for us.

Yeah. So the AAA model is, or the AAA1 model, as I like to call it. Uh, is something that definitely came out of me working with podcasts. And so the A1 stands for audience or audio first, and the AAA is audience, audio, and awesomeness. Uh, though you could probably replace awesomeness with authority and it would still stay pretty true. So the AAA1 model is essentially a media operations model. Developed out of content marketing. So it is operating a media brand for a business purpose. And the entire thing is structured in a way where you can define roles early on, you can define the pathway and the customer journey early on, and then you can start growing and tweaking and planning accordingly without sort of having to reinvent the wheel every time. And the big thing that I think sets it apart from some of the other models I've seen in this space is that it's hyper-focused on feedback loops. The entire model can be displayed as one giant loop, and then each individual piece, each role is its own loop as well. And so that gives it a little, I think, a little better design than a lot of the systems I see that end up growing naturally within digital media properties or within SaaS content marketing operations.

So can you talk a little bit more? What are those 6 kind of core lead roles and why do we need them? And then dissect how that interacts with the overall group, the growth loop.

Yeah. So before we get to the core leads, I want to dig in on the different pools of audiences available to us because the core leads, each lead sort of matches up to a different aspect of this audience flow. And when I look at audience and audience acquisition, there are only 3 pools of audience members for me. The first is what I call the global audience, and that's anyone on your social feeds. That's your followers. Those are the people who see your YouTube videos or browsing through new podcasts on Spotify, see yours and hit it. Those are the people who you probably don't know yet, who probably don't know you, and who are being fed content and finding their content exclusively through algorithmic feeds. And that last is really the key differentiator for me in defining them, because if they find their content from the algorithm, then the game you are playing is to the algorithm to gain those people and to gain their attention. And so the lead that's assigned to handle bringing in new subscribers from these global algorithmic channels is what I call a daily growth lead. Because global, with that sort of content volume, has daily changes. They need to stay on top in a different way, and their content output should be at a daily frequency, if not multiple times per day.

Right.

The next step down is the group I call the core audience, and those are really your standard subscribers. Email newsletter is going to be your most common. Podcast is probably number 2. And then I'd put text as the same category, but still not as popular. And I'd put joining like a Facebook group or another social community like a Slack or a Discord channel, uh, in a similar level there. And the content that's created for this core audience, I call these leads A1 channel leads. And the difference is that the content that these leads are making is specifically for that core audience. It's based off of the pain point research. It's no longer SEO focused. It's no longer trying to game the algorithm. The goal is top quality content for that audience and engagement and shares. That's what you're really looking for from their reactions. So at that level, to make that quality of content daily is often not the best rhythm. And I generally think of A1 channels as once or twice a week.

Okay.

Normally, When I look at sort of the long-term growth of an operation in this sort of media, you're going to end up with 2 A1 channels. And that could be a newsletter and a podcast, a YouTube channel and a podcast, some other video series and a podcast, a newsletter and a video series if you want to go really crazy and ditch the podcast entirely. I don't know why you'd ever do that, but— It's an option. And so the A1 channels, those are longer form, those are deeper, those are engagement-focused.

Got it.

Below the A1 channel is a point of dedication. And I use the word dedication instead of monetization because I think you can get to this final level of audience Without charging them, but it's much more difficult. And so the final layer of audience, the deepest, most engaged, I call the community in the AAAA1 model. And so these are people who have passed the point of monetization or dedication. If you're running a SaaS product, these are actual users. If you're running, say, a local Senior Olympics event, this is probably your volunteers.

Hmm.

The great thing about the community is that if you set it up right, you can largely have something like this self-manage internally, and they should have a place where they can identify each other. The person who leads the community is Go figure, named the community lead in this model, uh, the AAA1 model. And so their goal is more moderation and management and curation of content from the community back up into the other channels instead of the pure creation that we've seen with the other 2 leads so far.

Got it. So speaking on the creation side, you know, we're talking about content You talked about that quality. You're creating 1 to 2 pieces a week for that high quality to engage with your audience. When you're talking about that position of quality over quantity, some of the biggest problems for content efforts are building that audience, first of all, and then building that loyalty among them. What's your kind of take on building that loyal audience, generate conversions, and then hoping to resonate with the people you're targeting? And let's break that into 2 parts. One is for Like a 6-month period, maybe short-term, and then looking at a long-term period of say like a 5-year investment.

Yeah. So I think 5 years is too long a time horizon for content investment planning, simply because content format changes too quickly for you to make an accurate 5-year plan. Um, a platform shift could occur in that 5-year period that requires a total revision of strategy. Um, that being said, The same core principles will apply everywhere. And that's what I've been trying to get to with this AAA1 is the same playbook everywhere. In terms of the sort of quality versus quantity question and how you go about balancing that, I think it is a very different answer for somebody who is focused on growing their core audience, to use the language of the AAA1 model, versus somebody who is trying to grow their community.

Hmm.

And to put this in SaaS terms, since this is a SaaS show at the end of the day, if you're trying to gain paid users, the content strategy is extraordinarily different from gaining brand awareness and audience. And it is my experience that the content strategies best used for, say, lead generation and revenue growth are primarily focused on highly targeted high-quality content with a very niche audience, and then having the distribution to that audience through a combination of really long-tail SEO and niche community interaction alongside direct outreach and sales. So it's the content at the very bottom of the funnel, those comparison pieces, the case studies, those lead to money. Now, on the—

continue.

Sorry.

No, continue.

On the flip side, if you want to gain audience, if you want to build a following and get subscriber base up, total opposite play. If the goal is core audience and not community, then you need Quantity, and quantity is significantly more important than quality. I've actually got up on my board, on my whiteboard that's just off screen here, a little formula that I'm working on for an article, and it says win digital media equals, in parentheses, category times volume times consistency times quality. Close parentheses, and then an exponent, like a power function of visibility. Because if you have zero visibility, none of this matters if nobody finds it. But if you have horrible content that's just the absolute worst, you're also going to get no one. If you have mediocre content quality, But you're putting out just boatloads of it, then I think you're Inc.com. They do pretty well. And when we look at consistency, that becomes the key factor, that becomes the differentiator. So I guess to answer the question, if you're pre-revenue and you're not trying to make revenue and you're like a B2C play or you're a low-cost B2B play, And you're building that initial traction and excitement, then you just want to publish as much as possible. But once you're actually trying to make money, you're going to make a lot more money off of a few pieces of very narrow, very, very narrow content that handles the specific buying issues at the end of the customer's evaluation process. In B2B at least.

Got it. Got it. So if you're kind of high target, bigger market, you probably create a lot more content, at least at the beginning. If you're trying to be more of an authority or authority more for like higher-end customers, then you probably want to, you know, a high-end quality piece of content.

Yeah. And I'd say becoming an authority, that's a whole thing in itself. That's a whole different bag of worms.

Let's talk about that. So, you know, in the Authority Marketing Playbook, you mentioned there's 3 types of authorities. What are those 3 and what's the difference between how they influence prospects and customers?

Yeah. So the 3 types of authorities are pretty simple. You've met all of them. I have no doubt. We've got the best in class, and that's somebody who's just the best at what they do and everybody knows it. That's why they're an authority. Their content is normally for people who are already experts to some extent in it. And so if you look at like the Grow and Convert guys, They write amazing content. And if you're not already in content, you're not going to know what they're talking about. Like they're, they're deep into the subject already and they're referencing things. Then you've got the simplifier. And I think of Neil Patel as like the perfect example of a simplifier. He's at best mediocre advice. Normally it's a few years out of date by the time it gets published. I don't think he's a great marketer. But I know that he explains complex concepts really simply and it works for some people. And that's more than enough because if people understand what you're saying, then they will listen. And if other people are saying it and your audience doesn't understand them, then they're just shouting into a void.

And so there's nothing wrong with that, right? I mean, you're, you're simplifying to reach a bigger audience, right? So I think You know, people who need that kind of distilled content, probably, you know, it helps them build that base. And that's why he's the size he is, right?

Oh yeah. I mean, I'm a big simplifier. Like if you look at most of my podcast stuff, I'm not doing anything new. I don't do anything fancy with anything I do. I just sort of put it in order. Um, and I think that's, that's a big part. Simplifiers probably go farther than the other 2. Because the simplifier has a much more readily available audience. The third group are the innovators, and an innovator is somebody who is actually doing new things. They're the rarest of the 3. My guess is there may be only 10 or 20% of all authorities. Most people who decide to call themselves an authority or an expert or anything like that, they make that choice and they're a best-in-class or a simplifier. And if you can't peg somebody into one of these holes, they're probably not qualified. Hmm.

So it's usually one of those 3. Interesting. Um, so you mentioned kind of the authority plays already being used in education, like advanced degrees, exiting a company, successful public projects. Uh, and in content, you mentioned, you know, newsletters and podcasts and books as kind of your top, uh, of the, the A kind of model. What would be, you know, your one advice for, say, SaaS founders in specific in order to help them build authority for their business at any stage?

Get on Twitter and put out 8 tweets a day.

Really?

That's—

yeah, that's it. You're Twitter over LinkedIn?

Oh, 100% for this. As a SaaS founder, your audience is on Twitter. Like, if you're selling B2B, LinkedIn is great for sales. It's great for networking. I love LinkedIn. It was my first platform. Twitter is where VCs hang out. Twitter is where the money's at. Twitter is where you can meet up with a VP at one of the 10 companies on your enterprise account list and actually get a sale moving because they're not going to respond to you on LinkedIn.

Right. So 8 tweets a day, how— I mean, what are you writing? How do you come up? So that's the volume game you're talking about now. I mean, are you just talking random shit? Because that's what I look— when I look on Twitter, people are talking, you know, jokes and, and, you know, it seems so personal. There's nothing, you know, promoting themselves. I mean, some people do it, but I don't think it really resonates anyways. And it's a lot of opinion-based, so I think, uh, people kind of shy from that as well.

I think those are really important. If you don't have an opinion, I'm not going to read your content. And either is anyone else. I am deeply contrarian. We could spend the rest of this interview talking about how much I dislike a bunch of really popular marketers online and why I think they give horrible advice. Um, I know the guys who run their agencies and I know the guys who write their books. So it's not like I'm giving anything away when I say a bunch of people had their books ghostwritten. But at the end of the day, that doesn't really do much for me because I'm going to be doing business with those people in the future.

Yeah.

That being said, I do call them out in interviews and I do call them out on Twitter when I see somebody running a tweet bot and everyone thinks that like, oh, this guy's just super engaged with his community. No, when he's asking you what's your favorite sandwich after you send him a message that's totally different and he's just trying to get to know his fan base. It's because he's already got his bot set up to respond with, what's your favorite sandwich? Because that's a generic enough question and it's weird enough, he could be sending that to everyone for real.

Mm-hmm.

And that stuff really annoys me just as somebody operating on Twitter, because it seems— it looks authentic, but it is obviously inauthentic to somebody in the marketing industry.

Right. So you're, you're kind of all for, you know, speaking your mind, whatever it is that comes to mind, just tweet, kind of put things out there and see how it, uh, you know, gets conversations going, right? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. I mean, my gen— I've got a general rule that if it's not gonna kill me, if it's not gonna— if there's no serious risk of harm, then you should do it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Even if you're— yeah, I guess there's a lot of politics in there as well. So I think that's kind of another thing that—

Oh, I don't do politics. I don't do politics and I don't do shame.

Hmm. Yeah, I guess those are good rules. If you're going to tweet on Twitter, just don't talk politics or shame. And I think you should be fine.

Like, I got nothing in either category.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because I'm complimenting a marketer when I'm insulting them, right? Like, it's great marketing.

Yeah, it's feedback, right? Maybe it's real feedback that, you know, they need to hear. Yeah. Um, you know, are you— you sold your— you're in the process of completely selling your, your companies. Are you, you know, also looking to, to buy online businesses? What makes you want to buy an online business right now? And what would you look— what would make you want to overpay for it, if that makes sense?

Nothing. Literally, like, I just don't overpay for properties. And I lose deals all the time because of that. That's probably my biggest failing as an acquisition viewpoint is I'm cheap and I want a deal. And I want a deal because I'm the person who's right to take over this property, not because I'm the one who's going to give you the money for it. And I think that puts, that puts me in a really advantageous category for certain classes of deals. But like right now, I will lose every SaaS deal I go up on.

And it's just getting overpriced these days, right? What are you, what are you looking for? I guess, what is it that makes you want to buy it? What would make you interested? That one you mentioned, you know, you being able to take over it. Anything else that you're really liking?

Yeah, I like B2B. That's big for me. I like knowledge services. So I like community businesses. I like courses with subscriptions attached to them. For me particularly, I actually have a 40-point scorecard that I use to grade potential investments and acquisitions. And if it doesn't score above a 130, it's not going to get any sort of offer. And then depending on the score from that point upwards, it's out of a 200-point score. The higher the score, the more cash I'm willing to offer for the property versus other financing options. And then it goes all the way up to— yeah.

It's important. You got to take the emotion out of the decision, right? We have the same thing. We have a scorecard. We just made it out of 100 to make it easy. And then we have a range of valuations based on that. So we, you know, anything above 80, we'll consider. That's kind of our sweet spot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Otherwise, so that's, that's pretty similar. I think I'm just willing to toss out a lot more lowballs than you guys are probably, where I'll come in and be like, yeah, I'll give you 10% with 90% financing. If you guys want to get this deal done, let's do it. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, certain buyers, certain sellers would probably be open to that.

For me, I think the biggest thing I look for is, can I add value to this property quickly? And if I can't add value to the property, I'm not interested in it because I need to be able to tap into unrealized gains that are unique to my skill sets and assets and resources. I need strategic acquisitions, I guess, is the way I look at it.

Of course. Of course. Yeah. The value-add is important. Um, speaking of, you know, technology or trends, if you had to bet all your net worth for say the next, 5 years on one thing today, what technology or one trend would, would it be and why?

So I actually have done this. Uh, it's part of the reason I'm trying to finish cashing out of Call for Content. I'm going all in on the creator economy. Every business I start is touching this concept, um, in one way or another. And so the click down, that's me as a creator. That's me running a ClickUp power users group and creating content about it. I'm getting started on a digital talent management agency for creators in business niches because most of them are already C-levels making boatloads of cash. The boatloads more they could make with monetizing through sponsorship and partnerships would be great to a lot of them, but they're too busy and they're not going to go set up an operation to monetize their audience in most cases. And then I'm working on a few other projects with some buddies in the background, all centered around similar things. Maybe build a factory for making creators in Africa, teach them all no-code and the AAA1 model, and then see how many startups we can get going in a year.

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I'm all in. Also, you can IPO people now. That's, that's a great idea. Like, I can go find hotshot entrepreneurs who are just getting started in their journey, and then go get them their first $10 million off of future earnings. That would be great.

Love it. Kind of shifting gears, Michael, towards the rapid-fire questions. Um, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known and would tell your, maybe say, 20-year-old self or someone just starting off their, their entrepreneurial journey?

Make more content and make it in public.

Love that. Yeah, don't be afraid to start early. Yeah, I wish I started early. I know I did. I did start when I was in my kind of mid-20s, and then yeah, I wasn't consistent. I think that's the issue, right? Once you're consistent as well, that's what the value is.

Publishing it. Like, I wrote a ton of stuff that I just gave to clients or that I just gave to friends, and that's a bad way to do it. You got to be shouting.

Love it. What are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to, to continue to grow your kind of business model? What keeps you up at night?

So I think the biggest pain for me right now is there's no really easy way to sell off pieces of a business. And so I've been, as I've been sort of selling piecemeal the assets that make up Call for Content, getting rid of this final digital asset without a book of business attached to it, even though it does generate income, is a real pain. And I think if I had spent a little more time building audience, and building call-for-content audience as a brand before going to sale, I could have made that a much faster process because then I could have sold it to a fan of the brand.

Hmm.

Makes sense.

Who or what would you say are the best 3 resources? I mean, books or maybe people you follow that you've been— you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years?

Most instrumental, I'd have to say Kai Davis wrote about consulting and freelancing a lot, maybe 6 years, 7 years ago now. And I used like his stuff almost like just lifted his templates exactly to get my consulting going. And he, he led somebody else's freelancing, like consulting program before that. So he had really good stuff. Grow and Convert. Those are the guys I look to for content most commonly. They understand B2B content and content marketing in a way I think is rarely seen in the industry.

Mm-hmm.

And then, you know, I think I'm gonna go with Nicholas Cole on this one for number 3. So I'm in a couple of his courses now. And he's a nice guy and he's a really good writer and he's a pretty good teacher and he's getting much better at being a teacher. And I'm seeing that evolution happen like week over week. So I know he's going to be great at teaching people and I know he's got a solid set of principles for writing online, which—

Cool.

His is not the like content marketing stuff. His is the Like be a writer online stuff. And so it's, it's good, I think, to learn both if you really want to get into content. And I think you have to learn written content if you want to get really good at content. Uh, you have to know how to write and structure things.

Yeah, we'll add those, uh, to our show notes for people to check those guys out. Uh, Michael, what does success mean to you today? It could be either personally, financially, business, life. No, no right answer.

So I have almost no regrets. Like, I can count on one hand the number of regrets I've got. If I wake up the next day and I've got the same number as yesterday, then I'm doing pretty darn good.

Okay, so living with no regrets is, is your kind of daily mission?

Yeah, well, just not making new ones. So if I wake up and I regret not doing something yesterday, I'm gonna do it today. Hmm. But on the flip side, I never regret not doing something on my to-do list.

Hmm, that's a good point.

I actually use my to-do list as a to-don't. Like, if it's on there, it's dead.

Hmm. Oh, like, so you put a to-do list of things you don't do, so you have a to-don't list.

Oh, no, no, it is literally a to-do list. But if it— if something is so unimportant that it makes it out of my memory and all the way onto my to-do list, it has fallen off the importance map of Michael entirely and will no longer be done.

Got it. Cool. This has been great, Michael. I appreciate you jumping on SAS District Show today. If you guys enjoyed the show, obviously leave us a five-star review on iTunes. Michael, where can our audience or founders get in touch with you to learn more about you and maybe how they can also you know jump in and build their own authority or content?

Gent of tech, gent of tech everywhere: internet, Twitter, LinkedIn. If I'm there, that's my handle. And it's also my website.

Cool. gentoftech.com, guys. Check them out. Say hi to Michael. And thank you so much for joining again, Michael. Appreciate you.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Cheers. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, Get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again and see you on the next one.