Using Authority Marketing To Lead Your Business

Heather Armel | July 2, 2019 at 10:21 AM

High Value Content To High Value Leads

Most business owners face the same issue - they need to generate more leads. To generate great leads you need great content, and that's the key to success in authority marketing. Nailing down your target client and targeting them with content can be a game-changer for business owners who are struggling with growth.

Recently our CEO, Stacy Jones, had an insightful conversation about authority marketing with an expert in the field of B2B marketing and growth strategy. In this blog post, Hollywood Branded explores the benefits of authority marketing to generate leads in your business with the founder of Gentlemen of Technology, Michael Greenberg.

A Little More About Michael

Michael is the founder of Gentleman Of Technology LLC, a B2B venture creation and growth consulting firm. It specializes in B2B SaaS and service businesses, as well as personal advisory services for serial entrepreneurs.

He also founded Call For Content in 2017, which was his first independent venture. Call For Content is a full-service podcasting agency for content marketing, audience growth, and monetization strategies. Michael is a confident and knowledgeable speaker in podcasting, B2B marketing, and growth strategy as well as many other topics in technology, ethics, philosophy, futurology, leadership, personal improvement, and cooking.

Interview Transcript Highlights

Question: I am super thrilled and happy to have you here. I love chatting about podcasting because I like podcasting a lot. I never knew I would like doing this so much! Can we start off talking a little bit about your background and what got you to where you are today?

Answer: Yeah, I guess it's a standard story from the startup world, but it's an odd story everywhere else. I dropped out of school when I was 20 and went to a coding boot camp. I started working for a startup based originally in San Francisco and then moved with them down south to South Carolina and then over to Chattanooga, Tennessee. I came on with them to build out products and then found out that I really love the sales, marketing and operations parts more.

When I left that company, I started consulting and founded Gentleman of Technology. That's when I started doing growth strategy consulting and I was working with, primarily, startups or other small SaaS businesses, as well as professional services and digital marketing agencies.

What ended up happening was I kept seeing the same things. I saw that agencies had really steady revenue and, if you built them the way I thought was the right way from the start, then you could build something that didn't take a lot of time to manage, scaled really well and gave that consistent revenue. So I founded Call for Content, which started as a B2B content marketing agency.

That was about two years ago when we started, and about nine months ago we launched the white label podcasting. After seeing the reception from that offering, we decided to go all in on podcasting, took our B2B content marketing strategies and said, "Okay, we're only using the ones that include podcasts now," and so that is the authority marketing that we offer today, and then we also offer that white label podcasting services, and we're getting out to roll... We're getting ready to roll out a whole new set of offerings specifically for podcasters for marketing and monetization.

Question: I love that! I want to dive into more about podcasting because I really enjoy it. But first, can you talk a little about authority marketing and what it means?

Answer: Authority marketing, as we look at it at Call for Content, is a content marketing strategy designed for high ticket B2B lead generation - primarily for expert-run businesses. I use that term instead of professional services because you really need to know what you're talking about for authority marketing to work. It's not one of those strategies where you're going to put up this thousand-word blog post every week following this list of keywords and you're going to see traffic. That's not what this is.

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Authority marketing is about positioning with content and using that to assist in sales and lead generation efforts, but the first part is in positioning, and we use podcasts to do it. We start the client with a podcast and use that podcast to gather some of the case studies from past clients they've worked with. We use that podcast to introduce them to some new partners and to get in front of high priority, high value leads.

Question: I've heard you mention a "Retargeting Pixel" before. What are you using that for when you are working with your podcasts and looking for your audience? How are you doing that?

Answer: Yes, so that's some new stuff. That's recently been coming out. You're getting your pixels through attribution. We need to be able to measure podcast ads, and from that you've got companies like Podsights. It's my preferred vendor now, and I believe Megaphone and other enterprise systems have this attribution built in as well. As soon as you have attribution, you have the opportunity to re-target. Those go hand in hand.

We also push most of our traffic through the Web. I'm not generally pushing you straight to subscribe to my podcast, I'm pushing you to subscribe to my newsletter to learn about the podcast and associated events and other content.

The reason I do that is because then I have a much more valuable measurement. Once I have an email, I know exactly who you are and, if I know who you are, then I have a better idea of the real value and the real use in my audience, and so a large part of what we do is pushing traffic through Web at some point for re-targeting, though now we're starting to get this attribution, and we're able to do more of it actually through the podcast platforms.

Question: When you're working with clients and you're helping them create a podcast, that's ground zero, right? That's what you're starting with ultimately before you're building all the other ways that you can have and build authority from that.

Answer: We actually start with research, so you're not going to make it to working with us if you haven't either spoken with your customers and done real customer research and audience research, or you're going to pay us to do that as our first engagement, as our first month. Most people don't really know that well who they're trying to target so, first, we find that out. Then we ask ourselves, "Will a podcast work for this audience?" and that yes-no is going to determine the way in which we use the podcast going forward.

One of the big things that we know, for example, is if the audience is 50-plus-year-old executives, they're not going to listen to a podcast. So we're not going to do a solo show because then we know, if most of the audience will not be listening, the best focus is to be outwards with the podcast on those partnerships and the lead gen or interviewing subject matter experts and having those conversations to create more in-depth sections that might be outside of our client's core competency, so borrowing some of their authority by bringing in those other people.

Question: I assume you advertise, too?

Answer: Yeah. We generally focus on two channels for promoting a show, paid and podcast placements, actually placing the host of the show on other podcasts, because there's no better way to find podcast listeners than having them listen to you on a podcast. Appearing on podcasts is great without having one, but having one to bring your audience to is even better.

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Then, on the paid side, the format we use really depends on budget and audience. Outside of that, if paid doesn't work, then we'll fall back to other partnerships or do some outreach to influencers around the episodes. But that's not something we specialize in, so that's something that we generally have to work with a third party on if it's not right in our wheelhouse of client base.

Question: What else do our listeners need to know about authority marketing and how to make it work for them?

Answer: You want to be as specific as possible, and the way I like to talk about this is a floodlight versus a laser. If you're a digital marketing agency, that's a floodlight. That's a very broad positioning. Let's say you're an entertainment focused digital marketing agency, now you're getting a spotlight. You're starting to focus in, but if you're an entertainment marketing agency who specializes in influencer partnerships and branded content - like you - then you've got a laser. People know exactly what you do. They know exactly what to work with you for.

I was thinking about this in terms of building agencies the other day for a piece of content I'm working on, and I realized that agencies, and I'm guessing this will hold true for all the other kinds of businesses I look at, gain traction faster when they have that laser positioning in particular for marketing. Because it's easier to get into the budget and, once you're in, you can expand. But you've got to get into those budgets of clients first and having that fit.

Having the laser means you have a narrow market, too, and a narrow market means you can speak to them easier, but for authority marketing, that's so important because the wider net you cast, the closer to a floodlight you are than a laser. The more content, the longer it takes, the slower everything goes when it comes to authority because it's really a pretty quick process to become an authority as is. For example, a podcaster and in podcast marketing, but if I wanted to become an authority in digital marketing or even just content marketing, that would take me another four or five years, maybe longer, of just building up that base. The more narrow you start, the easier it is to build authority, and the faster you see results.

Check Out The Podcast!

Michael had so many great insights on authority marketing, you don't want to miss out on the full conversation! Check out the entire conversation below.