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.

Choicely

Leading marketing activities for Choicely.

Choicely is a no-code app development platform for sports, entertainment and media. We help businesses to better engage and monetize their customer bases through advanced digital tools.

Growth Marketing Manager

The Infancy (band)

Songwriter, producer and guitarist for the band.

Amateur Songwriter & Producer

Advance B2B | Growth Marketing Agency

Managing customer collaboration, along with practical work such as paid advertising and marketing automation development.

I also did a brief stint as a Growth Marketing Competence Lead (05-10/’21), that I decided to let go of.

Growth Marketing Strategist

The F Company

Managing client projects and our marketing communications. My work included paid advertising, marketing automation, digital marketing strategy, content strategy.

Neste

The role included responsibility for B2B Marketing in the Finnish market, and the rollout of Marketing Automation.

B2B Marketing Manager

Hands-on digital marketing, mostly for client projects: Paid advertising, Content marketing, Digital Marketing Strategy, Marketing automation...

Growth Marketing Expert

Home

Stay-at-home dad

Provad Oy

Became a manager in a 2-person marketing team.

🔸During this time Provad had become one of the best-known companies in its field, through our consistent and targeted sales and marketing efforts - we also multiplied our website visits per month by 6X
🔸Improving the content marketing and lead generation process I had established, developed lead nurturing flows
🔸Taking part in many developments projects: sales and marketing processes, branding, productization, recruit marketing. We did these together with sales, management and my marketing teammate Elina.

During my time at Provad we grew the company rapidly: from 2.2M€ in revenue and 12 employees (in 2014) to 3,5M€ and 29 employees (in 2017).

Provad was acquired by Visma in early 2019 and became Visma AI Works. Late 2022 the company was acquired again and became twoday AI Works.

Marketing Manager

In charge of Provad's with a strong focus on digital.

🔸Converting the first enterprise customers through inbound leads together with the sales team
🔸Kicking off a consistent content marketing process, growing Provad’s brand awareness and leads through organic social and search traffic
🔸Implementing a new website and Hubspot together with agency partners

Sales and Marketing Coordinator

M-Brain Finland

I worked in media monitoring and assisted in marketing and communications projects.

🔸Marketing content production: blogs, social media
🔸Analyzing and suggesting improvements for the website, social media and measuring efforts (Thesis: Measuring Twitter marketing)
🔸Exceeding target rate of 10 written summaries of articles per hour (media monitoring production for large organizations)

Content Specialist

Liiga on aina liigaa blog

"Can you really do sports betting without just losing all your money?" I had been fascinated by this question for a long while. So I ended up trying it out, by starting to bet on the Finnish ice hockey league SM-Liiga. I searched around the web for professional sports betting methods, analyzed the teams before the start of the season, did some serious Excel work and followed the league closely throughout the season.

To keep myself accountable, and to document and share the learnings, I wrote blogs on my journey, published all my bets before I made them, and share them on Twitter.

I wasn't after followers or readers that much, but I ended up getting 5000 visitors already during the first 3 months of the blog, and 600'ish highly relevant Twitter followers. My blog was followed and recommended by professional sports bettors, and I also had discussions of becoming a professional sports betting analyst/tipster for a major Finnish sports web media.

Oh, and I ended up making a return to player (RTP) of 101%, which means I made a 1% profit on my bets - didn't lose any money over this endeavour - mission accomplished.

Amateur Sports Bettor & Blogger

Growth Marketing at Choicely

Hello, I'm Mikko Latva-Koivisto, Growth Marketing Manager for Choicely.

We build high quality mobile apps using our No Code App Builder for customers in 40+ countries. Our core target audiences include Media, Sports and Entertainment businesses where digital teams want to engage and monetize their audiences with interactive tools and content.

---

I help tech companies & digital businesses grow with digital marketing, and using a test-measure-learn iteration process.

On a personal level, I value honesty, empathy and creating a trusting environment. Learning and winning as a team motivate me the most.

I have expertise of a wide range of digital marketing tactics. My strongest suits are growth marketing strategy, paid acquisition in social media, direct response copywriting and marketing automation. I also have a good understanding of content strategy, SEO, and sales and marketing alignment.

I'm interested in digital businesses, tech companies and consultancies that enrich their customers' lives. So far, I have worked with B2B tech companies and SaaS companies the most:

🔸Helping Provad collect and convert enterprise customers from inbound leads. We built the brand into a household name in the field and grew the business from 2.2M€ to 3.5M€ in 3 years.

🔸Helping Praecom get leads, meetings and customers, with The F Company & Praecom team

🔸Helping several B2B companies kick off their growth marketing, helped B2B tech and SaaS companies enter new markets (UK, US), improved their onboarding and self-service, and found effective digital advertising channels, messaging and targeting through an experiment-driven approach, during my time at The F Company & Advance B2B marketing agencies

🔸 Establishing systematic & data-driven B2B marketing processes at Choicely: managing our website re-do project, creating content across channels, executing paid social & collaborating on paid search with our partner, executing joint campaigns & efforts with sales

————————

You can reach me at mikkolk@gmail.com

taplio

The Battle

Liam Moroney

Mikko Latva-Koivisto

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreLiam Moroney's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Liam Moroney

Mikko Latva-Koivisto

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Liam Moroney's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreLiam Moroney's LinkedIn Performance