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.

dbt Labs

Community Engagement

ActiveCampaign

Currently designing a course for active Campaign, on the 
heels of the "I Hate Marketing Automation" manifesto. 

Having worked in Martech for 15+ years, I've seen the power of automation.  
But I've also experienced its underbelly, as a.. well... human.  

We've all been on the receiving end of 
unsolicited, 
unwanted, 
untimely, and 
unforgivingly persistent advances 
from brands that swear they are exactly 
what we need in our life, right at this moment.

Automation technology isn't the problem.

How we use it, is.


I'm working with Casey Hill and Adam Tuttle at ActiveCampaign, 
on the"Bingeworthy Emails" workshop for B2B Marketers.  

This is the future of B2B Email Marketing.

We can do better. 

Let's.

Brand Ambassador

MarTech

Contributing Writer

Demand Wars

Demand Wars is Survivor meets Hunger Games, for B2B Marketers.
B2B Marketing is Broken. 
Welcome to the Rebel Alliance. 
24 ruthless marketers.
4 fierce tribes.
Only ONE ultimate demand warrior.  

You decide their fate. 

Binge the series here: 
https://www.TACKnetwork.com/demand-wars

Director of Content & Community

Hello, Audience.

Content strategy consulting for B2B SaaS brands.

B2B Marketing content contributor for online publications, including:
- AudiencePlus
- MarTech.org.

Author: Before the Funnel newsletter
Host: Demand Wars Show, Season 1 
Host: Binge Podcast, Season 1

Thought leadership featured on:
- Notorious Thought Leader
- Account Based Beverages
- Marketers Talk Marketing
- 2 Pizza Marketers
- The Hype Within
- GTM News
- B2B Nation

Proficient with AI content tools, including:
- MidJourney
- Riverside
- Descript
- Capsule
- Canva
- Opus

TestBox

Led marketing strategy centered around demand creation + demand capture. 
- Rapidly stablished relationships with the top influencers in Customer Support.
- Created 12 episodes and 70 social videos for a new show, 
- resulting in a Top 5% podcast in the world, in month one.
- Achieved 5x user growth and 90% lead acquisition cost reduction.

VP of Marketing

Bevy

Led the Demand Gen Function at Bevy. Including:
-  Growth Marketing, 
- Field Marketing, 
- Partner Marketing, 
- Marketing Operations, and 
- Community Marketing of CMX, 
(the world’s leading community for Community Professionals.)

Senior Director of Demand Generation

Revenue Collective

Led the Revenue Collective of Color community in the Revenue Collective community (now called Pavilion.) Grew membership, increased engagement, and introduced new community programming.

Community Lead, Revenue Collective of Color (Volunteer)

metadata.io

Drove multiple projects across Demand Gen, Sales Engineering & Customer Success. 

- Sales Engineering: Led over four dozen sales calls
- Customer Success: Led several customer churn reversal sessions. 
- Marketing: Built  blueprint for Demand Gen course for LinkedIn Learning.

Director of Demand Generation

Oh Happy Day Marketing

Clients include The Walt Disney Company, Melissa & Doug, Bark Technologies, and multiple public and private schools.

Managed a team of go-getter marketers, using marketing automation, inbound marketing, and demand gen campaigns to drive results for small and mid-sized businesses.

Led planning and execution of a virtual online conference (virtual summit), using Account-Based Marketing to land 40 world-class thought-leaders, (40% conversion on outbound multi-channel campaigns), and half a dozen high-level corporate sponsors. 

The conference attracted 3,000 qualified leads and converted 5% to customers.

Built a training business teaching aspiring authors to write, publish, and market fiction successfully.  Created over two dozen courses, and sold to over 7,000 customers (10% average conversion rate from online sales letters.)

Built a high-ticket services business that helped dozens of small businesses leverage authority marketing as a thought leadership strategy, in the form of publishing bestselling nonfiction books.

Built dozens of profitable marketing funnels, using lead magnets, landing pages, drip campaigns, sales copywriting, and marketing automation.

Head of Content at Hello, Audience.

As a demand gen marketer turned community and content strategist, Bolaji builds high-impact owned media channels that drive real business outcomes—through community, video podcasting, and first-party content.

With hands-on expertise in tools like Common Room, Descript, Riverside, MidJourney and Opus Clip, Bolaji has launched and scaled content ecosystems that not only grow brand affinity but directly influence pipeline and product adoption.

Bolaji thrives at the intersection of community-led growth, media brand building, and strategic storytelling—especially in B2B SaaS environments where trust, education, and differentiation matter more than ever.

He's passionate about helping brands move beyond transactional marketing, to create audience-first experiences that turn users into champions.


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💬 Media projects include:

- Data Career Transformations: The most unlikely success stories in Data.

- The View on Data: 5 dynamic women share unfiltered insights from inside the data industry.

- The Data Analyst Show: Pull back the curtain on the lives of data analysts.

- Demand Wars: B2B Marketing meets Survivor + Hunger Games.

- Bingeworthy Emails: A mini-course on building addictive email nurture sequences.

- Before The Funnel: How to create content for the 95% of ideal buyers not yet in a buying cycle.

In his spare time, Bolaji coaches youth soccer, writes children's books, and reads too much science fiction.

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