Liam Moroney

Co-Founder, Storybook Marketing | Full-service demand generation agency

I lead Storybook Marketing, a consultancy that specializes in brand marketing strategy, to help companies become the brand that buyers think of, using an evidence-based approach to marketing.

We offer customized services, consulting, team workshops and training, to level up marketing programs so they are capturing market share and not just leads.

Founder

When we apply a performance marketing mindset to the top of the funnel, we can end up putting a lot of effort and expense into building an audience that often isn't big enough, and sometimes isn't even real.

In B2B tech I'm increasingly seeing this happening, especially with the new obsession to rank in AI search results. 

Where the effort is on trying to reach Goldilocks prospects who haven't been influenced by competitors yet, or even ones who haven't come to realize they need a solution yet, so we can come along and become their only solution.

While a very attractive concept, it's often an expensive effort to build an audience of unicorns. 

The research in B2B continuously shows that most buyers are experienced ones, or at least part of their buying group is. Kerry Cunningham frequently talks on the topic, and his research at 6sense continuously shows it.

Blank slate buyers who are problem aware but not solution aware are a fringe group, if they even exist at all. Most of our addressable market knows and has experience with the category, and have some form of a consideration set in mind.

The job in marketing isn't to find the undiscovered buyers, but to win the underserved ones. 

Our growth comes from people that exist in the big group in the middle, who have familiarity with the category and most of its players, have likely bought from at least one of them in the past, and don't need "educating".

They need a better alternative - and we have to show up often and relevantly to position ourselves in their consideration set.

Brand Marketer | Storybook Marketing | MarTech contributor

Brand gets underinvested in because it doesn't show up clearly enough in our attribution models, but should it?

Should attribution really be the central and core method for measuring marketing?

I'm not in any way anti-attribution, but I get incredibly frustrated at how much it's come to be how we, and especially leadership, believes that marketing works and gets measured.

What never gets measured in attribution is the underlying conditions that determine how well any of our efforts grow:

❓ How many potential buyers know we exist, and are we continuing to create awareness in new buyers over time?

❓ How effectively are we getting our brand to be thought of as an option to consider - something that becomes existential when purchase risk increases?

❓ How successfully are we being thought of by those buyers when they actually do come in market?

None of this shows up in attribution tools, and yet those conditions determine just how much of an upper limit there is in the effectiveness of our demand gen and performance marketing efforts.

Brand is very possible to measure in a growing variety of ways, and has been for a long time, but it requires leadership understanding and belief in how it works.

When we force it to show up in a measurement tool designed for something else entirely, we set it up to fail.

It's like trying to measure climate change with a thermometer - it will very easily miss the bigger and more existential trends because it's too narrow a view.

Brand is measurable. It's the leadership understanding that's lacking.

This race towards “AI visibility” is feeling like a gold rush without any guarantee of gold, but shovels of all shapes and sizes for sale. 

Everyone is obsessed with being mentioned or cited by LLMs, but it seems like those two things might not even be related - though you’d hardly know it from the confidence of those showing up as AI experts. 

Rand Fishkin has been raising some really important points and insights about how makes up the AI answer may not even necessarily be sourced from the citations. 

Rather it’s looking like citations are often post-hoc ways to support the answer and not what actually always informs it. 

Which, from a user standpoint is hardly reassuring, since AI might be using citations to make the answer look accurate as opposed to actually being accurate. 

And, from a brand point of view, this leaves a potentially massive delta between being part of the answer and beyond a supporting act to prop it up. 

We could easily be targeting metrics that don’t actually mean much, but the train is fully out of the station to try. 

And all of this is before we address whether being the true source of answer drives real brand value and exposure, or how much less value again a barnacle cited link might bring. 

Just like old-school SEO, more backlinks don’t guarantee more business, and not all search visibility is equal. 

All we know for sure is that none of us know for sure yet. 

It’s the Wild West out there - beware overconfident AI experts bringing their data and selling their shovel.

It's often said that "brand drives performance, and performance builds brand", but in many cases only the first half of that statement is true.

Which is problematic when you have a program whose budget heavily favors performance marketing.

Brand definitely should drive performance, and should make existing performance work better, since it's ideally creating more and better awareness of the solution to a broader group of people with at least some of them in-market now or very soon.

And performance marketing is a critical part of a healthy program, activating on people who are in-market and ensuring those hard-build brand memories get activated.

But, performance marketing often has little brand benefit since it's so volatile and opportunistic.

An ad trying to get you to take action on something you're not currently looking for is usually either totally ignored or very temporarily remembered. Our brains simply don't waste valuable cognitive energy and space on things that aren't relevant to us.

Much of performance marketing is about a moment-in-time ask - sometimes it's a price discount, sometimes just a request to take a demo.

There is little about creative like that that is remembered, if it's ever even paid attention to at all by people who aren't in-market.

It's not to say performance marketing isn't valuable - it's a critical part of an efficient program - but on its own it frequently doesn't have any lasting memory value at all. 

And, when you have programs where 70-80% of the budget is trying to nudge people to take action, you can end up with a program that is failing to build any real brand value, no matter how many logo impressions get served.

Marketing does all work together in a complex and integrated way, but it doesn't mean one type of creative is a good substitute for the other.

And when that nuance is missed, we can end up with a very ineffective and inefficient program even with a very healthy budget.

There is still a big brand marketing gap in the industry and the massive push to use AI isn't solving it. 

Most of what's being done to attract business with AI right now is reactive marketing - showing up in answers being asked in LLMs, and being mentioned as a solution when people are seeking one.

While it's important to make sure we place our brand where interest and traffic is happening, this doesn't solve the much harder job of proactively making the brand more familiar and considered before people are even there.

A lot of the buying searches happening in AI search are comparisons, where consideration search is anchored around the brands who are known, and where buyers are comparing them against others.

In essence, AI is mostly helping to do the digital equivalent of merchandising. 

We're putting the brand on the new shelves, and betting rather big that those new shelves are where most of the future buying will happen, which remains to be seen. 

But, just like getting on the shelf in a physical store, it still doesn't guarantee that you get bought even when it exposes you to active buyers. Plenty of brands have spent a fortune to make the shelves of Walmart, Target, etc, only to find that they need to spend even more on discounts to make up for the lack of awareness.

Most of what grows brands happens before the browsing moment, especially when the good being sold requires some consideration. 

It's not enough to occupy a shelf space - you also have to occupy a market presence and usually at a much larger ratio.

The truth about promotion is that it's not efficient. 

We have to get the creative in front of as many people as we can, the majority of whom aren't actively buying, and we have to keep pushing the message to overcome the reality that most won't get seen. 

To quote Les Binet, "If I had to choose between having a great ad with no money behind it and a good ad with a massive budget – I’d probably go for the good ad with a really big budget because media spending and share of voice really matter."

And because it's inefficient, it's often unpalatable to much of leadership, and so marketers get pushed towards things that feel much direct response - and we find ourselves in the advertising "Doom Loop" that David Tiltman and WARC have so eloquently described.

So here we are, where getting placed in an AI overview is taking up massive attention and effort in tech companies, while the underlying problem of being known and remembered is still neglected.

We might end up much better at being found when people are looking, but no better at being sought out by whose who aren't.

The Customer Journey Maestro

If you can't beat them, join them. I have resigned from my own career as a freelance writer because AI is replacing people like me, and there's no point in waiting around for the inevitable. Now I'm focused on learning how business people can leverage AI. I don't yet have a service to offer around this, but I'm happy to discuss the practical applications of AI anytime.

B2B Strategy Advisor and Consultant

I specialize in building and executing content marketing strategies for companies seeking sustained revenue growth. My process is to create a customized messaging framework (aka, “brand story”), develop a content strategy and calendar, and execute the content strategy by building a content team and/or writing brand content.

Fractional Content Director

I love to write and create content of all kinds. My broad and deep experience across sales, marketing, and customer success gives me a unique perspective and the ability to write compelling content for just about any industry. My approach is to get the inside truth from the people behind each story, and I don’t believe in taking shortcuts. I write and publish for your customers, to engage them, educate them, and compel them to take action. The SEO stuff comes along for the ride. Let’s talk about your freelance writing/content needs.

Freelance Writer

I help B2B companies build and execute modern marketing strategies focused on customers.

B2B Marketing Advisor

Hire me on a full-time or part-time basis to up-level your go-to-market strategy. And it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Go-to-Market Strategy Advisor

Your customers have their own Journey that may not match your Funnel or Flywheel. If you want to understand their journey and be there when they need you, that takes work. Designing a customer experience that builds trust, now that's another level entirely. I'm here to help - on your journey.

Customer Journey Guide

On-demand expertise in marketing strategy, demand generation, content marketing, social media marketing, product and customer marketing, sales and marketing alignment, and customer success.

Fractional CMO/VP Marketing

CMO for Hire

Are you in transition? Starting from scratch or making a pivot to a new revenue growth strategy? My Virtual CMO services provide proven expertise to help you jumpstart sales, marketing, and customer experience prior to hiring executives and staffing departments. It's a low-cost, low-risk way to get the strategic advice you need.

Virtual CMO

Riptide Business Press

Ed Marsh and I have written a book, titled Common Sense Revenue Growth, that helps CEOs understand the digital and consumer disruption facing them today and develop plans to grow in spite of those challenges. Buy the book at www.commonsenserevenuegrowth.com.

Author, Podcaster and Consultant

Kuno Creative

Co-owned one of the first and most successful inbound marketing agencies, Kuno Creative. Grew the agency from a handful of talented marketers and designers to a 50+ person agency with clients ranging from national healthcare and technology companies to international consortiums and manufacturing giants. Specialized in marketing technology and sales enablement - helping companies fix leaky funnels and sales pipelines via strategy, marketing automation and optimized CRM utilization. Please visit Kuno's website, www.kunocreative.com for more information, or follow me on LinkedIn.

EVP and Co-Owner

Awakening Technology Company

Developed corporate websites from scratch using HTML/CSS, then created a proprietary CMS for creating client sites backed by a SQL database using ASP.net and later, Ruby on Rails.

Web Developer

Zydeco Energy

Independent oil and gas exploration company in Houston, TX. No longer in business.

Executive Vice President and CTO

INEXS

Exploration Geophysicist

Raytheon - GeoQuest

Product Marketing Specialist

Shell

Research professional working in electron microscopy for Shell Research and in geophysical interpretation research for Shell Exploration and Production.

Research Geoscientist

B2B Marketing Strategy Advisor With Company, Agency, and Freelance Chops

I retired in 2017 from a 40-year career, mostly in sales and marketing, for a variety of energy, manufacturing, and software companies. My penultimate position was co-owner of Kuno Creative, a digital marketing agency and one of HubSpot's first agency partners. My contributions continue as I seek to help other agency owners, professionals, and free-wheelers navigate their way through gnarly challenges in business and life.

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