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.

💥 Messaging that does justice to your solution.
🔥 Copy that resonates with your ideal buyer.

Sounds simple, right? 

And yet, in B2B tech, so many things get in the way:

❌ Agencies turn your website into a billboard — stroking boardroom egos but causing web visitors to bounce.

❌ Product marketers get too close to the product — forgetting to connect the dots for your ideal buyer.

❌ Too many cooks in the kitchen — causing your copy to get more cliche with every iteration.

And let's not forget:

❌ Everybody’s sycophantic ChatGPT is adding their two cents.

Well, I can help.

My process doesn’t just involve deep discovery, VoC research, and messaging strategy. 

I make the experience painless (and peaceful!) for your team. 

We’ll establish which stakeholders are involved and how they’ll contribute. So from Day 1, everyone knows what to expect and who's got the final say.

How do I do that?

➡️ Live or async Figma walkthroughs
➡️ Friendly but firm management of stakeholder feedback
➡️ Constructive handoff to design with creative direction

Here’s what clients say ⤵️

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“She had this way of making people feel heard, managing different opinions and keeping everything moving forward at the same time. … She wireframed the pages so we could see exactly how the copy would actually work on a website in reality. And that's something that really saved us a lot of time when it came to design. She would record these short videos explaining … how the research shaped the structure. And those videos would make it really easy for everyone across the company, across different time zones to get aligned with what was happening.” — Christopher Garrett, Chief Revenue Officer, Hushmail 

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Vesna is strategic, mindful of nuance, a keen observer and a very good synthesizer of the most relevant pieces of information that matter to the reader. She is very knowledgeable of what makes websites great vs meh. … In the age where AI is actively displacing writing talent, Vesna’s expertise in crafting the right story and delivering the right message that matters is so refreshing (and renders AI helpless).” — Nadia Davis, VP of Marketing, CaliberMind

As for results? 📈

“ Within about three weeks of launching our new website, we've seen, depending on how you measure it, a 20 to 35% increase in our sales revenue.” — Christopher Garrett, Chief Revenue Officer, Hushmail


Whether your goal is more demo requests, more free trial starts, or more plan signups, I’ll work with you to boost conversions with better, bolder, buyer-aligned B2B copy. 🎯

Vesna M. – B2B Copywriter

Wanna know what my favorite tool is?

It's Gong.

🗣️ "But wait. You're a solo conversion copywriter & messaging strategist. Why would you need Gong?"

You're right. Gong is not part of MY stack.

But when I find out it's part of my client's stack, I get up from my office chair and do the "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" dance (when no one's watching, of course).

I still remember the first time I got access to a client's Gong to watch product demos and sales call recordings to my heart's content. I was like a kid in a candy shop. 🍬🍭

I never needed to bother my client or ask them how to find what I'm looking for. It was intuitive. I could filter by AE and all kinds of other parameters to curate the types of recordings I needed to review for MY purposes.

Plus, AI summaries and key insights were already there. I could judge very quickly if the call was relevant for me to watch. 

(And yes, if you must know, I did bust out the popcorn once or twice. I like to, shall we say, immerse myself. 🍿)

I always get a-ha moments. And they're always immensely valuable as part of my website messaging strategy and copywriting process: 

➡️ I get to hear what in-market buyers are thinking out loud
➡️ Buyers don't have the curse of knowledge that existing customers do
➡️ I can identify any weird gaps between what your website says and what your AEs are saying about your product
➡️ I can see, firsthand, what sales verbiage resonates and what doesn't (honestly, you AEs, you impress me to no end)
➡️ I hear your prospects crack the occasional joke, and as you know, humor is how they cope with the familiar frustrations of the status quo

This is gold you will never get from surveys or product reviews.

It's also wild how only 8-12 calls can surface key patterns worth digging into. 

That's when I'll schedule a chat with someone like your principal sales engineer who understands both your ICP and your product like the back of their hand. This often leads to further messaging-related a-ha moments easily missed (or simply forgotten) by busy, overburdened marketers.

So Gong, as a non-paying (vicarious?) customer, thank you. You make my job easier. For everyone involved. 💜

Vesna Miro

🟣 Buyer-aligned website copy for sales-led B2B Tech & SaaS // 🟠 Home - product - landing - pricing & demo pages that resonate with jaded buyers // 🥇 Copyhackers Certified SaaS Copywriter

GIF of a music video clip from the Will Smith song "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" showing the famous dance

POV: Your AI gives you "perfect" copy. 

✅ Syntax is tight
✅ Cognitive load is light
✅ Audience focus is right

But something ... "Je ne sais quoi" ... feels off. 🤔

So you step back and ask yourself, "But what is this copy actually saying?"

And then it hits you: the whole thing is contrived.

The "assembly" of components is perfect enough to create the illusion of substance. 

But when you examine closely, when you disassemble the components, there are assumptions that just don't belong there.

Good thing you know:
➡️ The subject matter
➡️ The business
➡️ The market
➡️ The product
➡️ The customer
...

Get my point?

Most website revamps start in Figma.

New layout.
New visuals.
New words.

It feels productive.

But if you don’t revisit the foundation first, you’re just rearranging furniture.

Here are the 5Cs I look at to audit current messaging, buyer alignment, and conversion gaps:

1️⃣ Company

• What are we (the company) saying right now? On the homepage. Across product pages. Ads. Sales decks. Demos. Social. Etc.
• Is there alignment? Is Marketing telling one story while Sales is telling another?
• What has changed in the product, the ICP, or the strategy that the website hasn’t caught up to yet?
• Where are the disconnects? Where is there a mismatch?


2️⃣ Customers

• What are our best customers saying about our solution? What are our in-market buyers saying? Across sales call recordings, customer interviews, case studies, win-loss notes, reviews?
• How does it compare to the messages we have been putting out there? Does our website align with how buyers actually buy?


3️⃣ Competitors

• How are competitors and competing alternatives positioned?
• What are they all saying? What are they *not* saying? Is there an opportunity in the gap?
• Which of our differences can we highlight while also checking all the other boxes?
• What do we do that is unique in our customers’ eyes that they don’t get from a competitor?


4️⃣ Conversion Clues

• Now we dig into more granular detail like website visitor behavior
• What clues can we dig up in our web analytics tools (GA4, heatmapping, etc.)
• What are our most visited pages? Which pages have the highest bounce? How long do people stay, how far do they scroll? 
• What about engagement data across the rest of the marketing funnel?


5️⃣ Continuous Learning

• Before we go live (and after), how will we validate our webpage so we know it has the best chance of resonating? (Wynter message testing, Lyssna 5-second tests, etc.)?
• Do we have the traffic and budget to do a proper A/B test?
• How will we continually challenge our assumptions, keep learning from buyer behavior, and iterate so our website keeps working harder over time?


This work is foundational. Without it, you will always end up with just another new website that isn’t hitting the mark. 

If you’ve been there before and are finally ready to do it right this time, you know where to find me. 😉


\\\\

Hi, I’m Vesna, and I help sales-led B2B SaaS companies get higher-quality leads with better, bolder, buyer-aligned website messaging. If you need equal parts strategy and execution, let’s connect.✌

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Liam Moroney

Vesna M. – B2B Copywriter

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The Battle

Liam Moroney

Vesna M. – B2B Copywriter

Followers

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Engagements

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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

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