TL;DR Content does one of two jobs, and most programmes fail because nobody named the job before building.
- Content does one of two jobs: nurture, which reassures buyers who arrived from elsewhere, or lead generation, which produces customers on its own and costs like a paid channel. Name the job before building.
- Five maturity phases stop you paying for a level you have not reached. Phases one and two are nurture; phases three to five are lead generation.
- Choose channels where your buyers already spend time first, then weigh which platforms large language models cite as a bonus on top.
- Build one deep, long-form anchor asset, video first, and remix its essence natively for each channel.
- Expect nine to eighteen months before a new owned channel produces results, and budget for that wait.
Most content programmes I see produce a lot and achieve little. The usual pattern is a team posting to five channels with nothing to show for it beyond a follower count. The cause is usually that nobody decided which job the content is doing before the programme was built.
HubSpot and Alex Hormozi arrive at the same operating model from different starting points. HubSpot surveyed 300 marketers on building a multi-channel content engine. Alex Hormozi has laid out the five phases a content programme moves through as it matures. The language and examples differ, and the model is the same. The sections below set out that shared model in a form a small team can operate.
Deciding the job first
Content does one of two jobs, and the two jobs differ a great deal in what they cost to do well.
The first job is nurture. Someone arrives from somewhere else (an outbound email, a referral, a paid ad, a mention) and before they buy they run a quick check. They look at your site and your social feeds to confirm that the business is legitimate and still trading. They read a few things, decide you know your subject, and move on. The bar is having posted something good recently.
The second job is lead generation: content that produces new customers on its own, the way paid advertising does. It has ongoing costs of its own, and you only build it if you are prepared to fund it as you would a paid channel.
Where customers already come from outbound, referrals or ads, nurture is the only job content has. Those channels supply the customers. Teams build the lead-generation version anyway, pay its cost, and then judge the result by a standard the programme was never meant to meet. If your customers arrive from elsewhere and content only has to reassure them, keep the content budget small and spend on the channels that bring those customers.
Everything from here on is for teams that want content to generate leads on its own.
Working out which phase you are in
Hormozi's phases are useful because each has a cost, and the phase you are in sets the budget.
- Post something. Make one piece of content and publish it somewhere.
- Post consistently. Hold a steady cadence on one platform you already use. A fixed slot in the week helps: the same day every week is reserved for content, and only the piece you make in it changes.
- Post reliably across platforms. Volume rises sharply at this phase. It is also the first phase where the content is expected to produce leads on its own; the nurture job needs nothing beyond phase two.
- Max out each platform. Find the ceiling on every channel and push all of them at once. Short-form feeds will absorb five to ten posts a day; newsfeed and inbox audiences fatigue fast and cap at one or two. Most teams never arrive here, and it takes around six months even when it is funded.
- Capture and create. Produce deliberately across channels while also capturing raw material, such as a recurring show or a live call-in that generates footage you can repurpose everywhere.
Naming the phase keeps the cost in line with the goal. Paying phase-four production costs for a phase-two goal is how content budgets get wasted.
Picking channels where your buyers already are
Where your audience spends its time decides the channel mix. Which channels large language models cite is a secondary consideration, because content published for humans on those platforms is also shown when an AI answers a buyer's question.
The mix is one anchor channel done well, plus two or three supporting channels. Two to four channels is the range for a smaller business; pushing every platform at once is a phase-four exercise.
Start by asking your audience where they spend time, which apps and sites they use, and who they learn from. A large company can run a formal survey. A small company can email or call ten customers about their media habits. Any company can do this, whatever its size.
The choice follows from the answer. If your buyers are salespeople who spend their days driving or at the gym, a podcast is a strong anchor, with LinkedIn alongside it for social selling. For a lot of B2B, YouTube is the anchor on discoverability alone.
Building one anchor asset and remixing it
This is the most important mechanism in the model. Producing original content separately for a newsletter, LinkedIn, YouTube and a podcast is unaffordable, and teams that try it stop.
The affordable route is one long-form anchor asset, recorded once, with each channel getting its own version of the material. HubSpot calls this remixing. HubSpot and Hormozi describe the same idea.
Start with video, because it is the hardest format to produce and the one whose views continue longest after publication. A recorded conversation gives you a transcript, so text follows from video with little extra work; a written post has to be recorded before it can be used as video. Put the effort where the difficulty and the payoff are.
Start with one 30-to-45-minute recorded conversation. From that single session you can produce:
- The primary anchor edit for YouTube
- A blog post built from the transcript and optimised for search
- A practical tool or offer drawn from the ideas in the episode
- LinkedIn clips and graphics cut down from the footage
- Newsletter and social posts pulled from transcript excerpts
One conversation supplies a full campaign. It works only if each version is rewritten for its platform. Copy-pasting the same block everywhere fails, because every channel has its own unwritten rules and its audience can feel when you have ignored them.
Narrowing the subject and showing the evidence
Content gets read and shared when its subject is narrow and its claims come with evidence.
Narrow the subject until you are the expert in it. Define the problem you solve as tightly as you can, so that in that small area you are clearly the authority. Do not line up against the biggest generalist voices in your category. Choose a subject narrow enough that you are competing with a handful of people, then extend it as your record grows.
Back every claim with evidence. Showing the method together with proof that you have applied it many times is harder to argue with than opinion. Make clear early why the reader should listen and why the next ten minutes are worth their time. Do that before you ask for anything. Put one call to action in, and spend the rest of the time giving something away.
AI is an assistant here: it reformats and iterates a piece until it is right, and it does better when you give it your best-performing examples for each channel. The tool saves time; whether the output is worth publishing is still your judgement. Scoping AI to one job at a time is covered in our AI implementation lessons, and the marketing skills pack packages 22 marketing skills for Claude, including the ones we built for our own work.
Knowing the economics and the horizon
Two figures matter here: the cost of the engine and the time before it produces results.
On cost, an organic engine at full volume, putting out roughly 160 pieces a week across every platform, can cost in the region of 70,000 dollars a month. Buying the equivalent reach in paid impressions would cost something like 2 million dollars a month. The gap is close to thirty-fold as stated. However, the engine still has to be funded like a paid channel, and the quality of the content decides how much of the gap you capture.
On time, HubSpot forecasts around nine months before a new owned channel shows meaningful results. Hormozi made content for roughly eighteen months before it produced deal flow. Treat a new content engine as long-term brand-building and demand generation with a nine-to-eighteen-month horizon, and revisit the channel mix each quarter, weighing each channel on how well it fits your buyers ahead of raw audience size.
The model is: name the job, work out which phase you are in, anchor on the channels your buyers already use, build one deep asset and remix it for each channel, keep the subject narrow and the claims evidenced, and fund it for nine to eighteen months.
If you want to talk through where content fits in the wider go-to-market plan for your category, get in touch.