How does AI play a role for marketers in the future?

Benjamin Ard: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Alignment Advantage Podcast, brought to you by Masset. This is the sales and marketing edition. In this edition, we interview some of the greatest sales and marketing minds in all of tech. We have a huge emphasis on internal alignment and believe that can be a superpower for your business.

We hope you enjoy the interview. All right, Connor, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm super excited to hear about your story. There is no pun intended with that one, but I'm excited you have such a cool background with marketing and sales. You've built a really cool company. It's a brand new year.

This is the first interview of the year for me. I'm excited. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Conner Snyder: Yeah. Yeah. Benjamin, thanks for having me. I'm really excited too. It's, it's it's definitely gonna be an interesting year, 2023. So I think like being really intentional about what we're doing with marketing and sales activities is like a really good way to get started, you know?

I love

Benjamin Ard: it. Awesome. Well, for anyone who doesn't know who you are, I'd love you to just take a couple minutes and introduce your background, what you've done with [00:01:00] your career, and kinda a little bit about story and, and everything that's brought you up to this point in time.

Conner Snyder: Yeah. So I am the co-founder of a company called Story.

We are a content team in your pocket. So people use our app to give us raw video footage, and we have a team of, you know, a hundred plus content creators who actually go and turn that into really great engaging video. And, you know graphic media content. And one of the things that we do that's a little different than most is we, we use AI to help with idea generation.

And so, You know, chat, G p t and, and some of these other tools are all the rage right now where you can kind of free form edit which is very cool. And we use that same back backend of, of open API that GPT is powered by to basically give you a constant stream of ideas for content to create. So you just tell us the topics that you want.

And then we'll create constant hooks, outlines, outros for videos that you can record, so that you can give us raw content that's authentically you [00:02:00] and, and we can help, you know, pretty it up a little bit, but preserve that raw authenticity to. Build that relationship with your audience. So that's what we're doing over at Story.

I grew up in Utah, small town, Mapleton, and you know, had a really like idyllic childhood there. I I remember when I was in high school, it was when Facebook was like really getting online, right? And they just opened it up for, from just the college kids. Now anyone could get on. So I got on there with my friends from high school and we were always messing around on there for.

You know, ridiculous amounts of time to the point where one day my parents came into the office, they're like, Connor, you've been on Facebook for like two hours today. You need to get off there. You were never gonna make money on social media messing around on Facebook. And you know, now it's like, Hey mom, dad, look at me.

We got a company that does social media content, you know, but I, I had this like, early love of the, like, potential of social media, of the way it could, like, bring people together. And it's just been kind of like set it, it kind of set a course for my career. [00:03:00]

Benjamin Ard: Very cool. That's super cool. Yeah, Facebook is it's a fun journey.

You know, they, they definitely started a new revolution of things and I think it took a while for people to really catch on and there's amazing companies utilizing it now. And, you know, billions of people were on that platform. I don't think anyone thought about that back then, but it's definitely powerful, the ability to connect with anyone worldwide.

Conner Snyder: Yeah, we've come a long way from Farmville, you know, and it's, it, it's, it's really interesting how, you know, it, it, it, it starts out as this like, Thing for teenagers to mess around on. And then we're having, you know, federal government investigations about how it impacts elections. Like, like the fact that that happens in like a less 10 year just goes to show like the power of these platforms.

And I. Especially when you're thinking about it from like a sales and marketing lens. Like, are you there and using them in ways that's actually gonna be helping your business? Right. It's, it's not just the place for people to do, like, you know, TikTok Dances. It's a place where you, you build [00:04:00] relationships and build rapport and that there's, there's relevant sales and marketing functions that that can be applied for, you know, on social media.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah, I love that. So we talked a little bit earlier on, you know, just in us chatting before the podcast, but AI is a big deal. You guys are, are neck deep in ai. AI is a, a big area, especially when it comes to content creation. You look at how it's impacting everything. I think half of the audience is, you know, wondering what AI's gonna do.

The other half is nervous about it. And if you had a third half somehow to have that math line up, you know, you had people just genuinely curious. What do you think that people should focus on when it comes to ai? You know, especially as it pertains to sales and marketing. How do they lean into it? What should they be afraid of?

Should they not be afraid of it? But how's it gonna impact marketing and sales kind of moving forward?

Conner Snyder: Yeah. So my, mark, my background's in marketing, so I feel like I can say this marketers ruin everything. [00:05:00] Like if we find a way to spam something, we're gonna do it, right? Yeah. And so, so ai of course, as soon as, as, as it's publicly available, the first thing is the marketers run to it.

And it's like, how does this, like, let me spam somebody with a message. Yep. And You know, I, I think that there's gonna be ways that, that the platform's trying to prevent that and, and detect that, how effective those are, I think is yet to be determined. It's probably just gonna be an ever, you know, increasing arms race in terms of written content.

In, in terms of like marketers, I think it, it, if for at least the moment, It puts more of a premium on video, right? Like it, it's this kind of an, this economic economics thing of supply and demand. If, as the supply of endless AI generated content increases, the demand for it will decrease. Like, it's gonna be harder for people to find your message because it's, it's gonna be a garbage dump of generated content.

So video content all of a sudden has a premium, especially this kind of like, Two human beings talking video because it's harder to fake, [00:06:00] it's harder to just auto generate and, and until the AI gets to the point where it can be doing that effectively, I think that that's gonna be a place where people that are trying to build a real personal relationship online are gonna have to focus more of their attention.

That's certainly what, what what we're doing. I think like one of the ways to think about ai, if there's people that are kind of unfamiliar with it, is, is actually look at data. So like, you know, a sales guy that's been using like ZoomInfo or any of these other big data providers, you're gonna be familiar with that.

There's a couple of big data companies that like have a monopoly on the data world. There's four or five big ones, and then companies will go and get maybe a little bit more niche data, supplement it on these big pools of data, and they'll kind of build like an app on top of this experience, right. I think ai, you're gonna see something very similar.

I think you're gonna have open AI's language model, you're gonna have Google's language model. You're gonna have. All Amazon's language model, you're gonna have all these natural language learning [00:07:00] models that people are going to use and they're going to build software on top of them. And some people like us, we're taking our own sets of data that are scripts and best practices for content creation, layering it on top of the language models and creating a more curated curated experience inside of our app.

Right? And so, I think that, that as, as we look to the future of ai, I think you're gonna see a lot more of these AI companies popping up in the same way we see data companies pop up and they're gonna specialize in certain aspects of automatic content creation. What the impact of that is to the marketer, you know, as a marketer, like our marketing team.

Starts with, with like, you know, after we've nailed down our audience and our message and, and the job to be done. You know, we don't really believe in personas. We kind of like, we're, we're, we're not trying to do demographics. You know, our, our customers are males between 25 and 35. Our thing is what's the job to be done?

What are they trying to accomplish? And we market around that. And then, [00:08:00] We're, once we have all that stuff identified, we're trying to figure out how do we automate some of the communication and tools that we hit those people with, because our marketing team is a bootstrapped, smaller company, is just a handful of people.

So we've gotta make sure they're focused on the activities that cannot be automated, that cannot be you know, easily process down and, and can be really the most high value, high impact things that support the sales team. And so we we think the AI not only is gonna be big in terms of new companies that are coming out into the scene, but they have a essential role in the operations of sales and marketing.

Yeah,

Benjamin Ard: I love that. That makes a lot of sense. And I think you hit on the point, and I love that point where the main thing with AI is there are going to be people that take advantage of it. They're gonna use it as spam. They're going to create blog posts upon blog posts upon blog posts. They're gonna try to exploit it for seo, for their email [00:09:00] marketing, for their social media content.

And that won't stand out. It's just not going to be appealing. It's not gonna provide value. It won't be the human side of things. The really, the content that people can actually connect with, but the people that are gonna win on the AI side of things, that they're gonna use it. To enhance their abilities to create human generated content, things that are personable, things of that nature.

And I love what you guys are doing. Let's use AI to come up with even more subjects, find things that I can talk about that actually matter to people that are important, and I can go after those subjects, you know, as opposed to AI is going to replace the human side of business. It's just helping you along, helping you understand what you can talk about and, and how to be more personable.

So I think that's cool. I think that there's, there's gonna be clearer winners and clear losers. I'm in the camp that the losers are gonna be the people that just let AI write everything for them. [00:10:00]And I think they need to use it to be more personable, to connect and, and use that free time to actually connect with their audiences and, and the people they're really trying to connect with.

Conner Snyder: Absolutely. Absolutely. If you, if you, you know, it, it's, it's the whole garbage in, garbage out idea, right? If you've got so much of what makes AI effective is making sure you're asking it for the right things. And I think that, The people that are good at asking the right questions and being really intentional about what is the end result that we need, are gonna be the people that use AI effectively.

And the ones that are, are, are not concerned with the why. They're not the people that are asking questions. They're not thinking on that strategy level. They're, they're waiting to get orders taken. I think they're the ones that AI is gonna kind of. It'd be a faster way to do what they're already doing.

And I think if there's anyone that's stressed about it, you gotta make sure you understand the strategic vision that the leadership team has so that you can find ways to support that versus fight against it. Yeah. Well,

Benjamin Ard: and if your content strategy was always. [00:11:00] Let's go write a blog post and we'll hire an intern and they're just gonna go scour the internet for all the other articles and they're gonna grab pieces and bits of it, and they're just gonna regurgitate what's already out there.

AI might do a better job, I if that was really your content strategy. But when you want unique actual human thought that provides, you know, whether it's a unique analogy, a unique perspective, a different take on it, AI's not gonna provide that for you. And I think that that's kind of the unique element here, and that's where you're gonna see content.

There'll be this giant divide. Is it regurgitated or is it original? And I think AI is gonna make that gap even bigger for the people that just aren't willing to put in the effort to have original thought.

Conner Snyder: I think you just described it super well, AI's like the world's best intern, so like it's true intern level blog post strategy.

That's That's what you're gonna get with it.

Benjamin Ard: Exactly. And it's gonna take you 10 seconds to put in a prompt for it, and otherwise you're good to go. Yep. So I'd love to talk to [00:12:00] you, you know, as a co-founder of a business, you know, you have a lot of hands-on with your marketing team. You're very involved with your sales team.

I'd love to jump over to how have you structured your internal teams inside of your business, and how do they work together? You know, obviously there's a huge emphasis with our podcast about internal alignment, sales and marketing. I personally believe it's a huge superpower for businesses. If those two groups are really aligned, they're good friends with each other, they're not fighting, they have the same goals.

Things look really, really good for those businesses. What have you done at Story to really align those teams and how you've structured them?

Conner Snyder: Yeah, it, it's funny, so I'm a marketer. My, my co-founder is a marketer and we're, we're building a marketing tech company. So like, we're, we, we all believe in marketing over here.

And, and when we first started out, you know, we were doing the marketing, but it, it was me doing the sales. You know, I was jumping on sales calls and we were all referral based. Like many businesses start [00:13:00] out. And as we've grown, what's been interesting is like, You know when you're in a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?

So like when you're a marketer, everything looks like a marketing problem. And so I absolutely 100% recognize times in our business where we spent more time focused on marketing activities and we should have been focused more on sales activities. And I think that if you are a, a, a business leader, you've gotta understand.

When you should be doing one of those two things. I think one of the mistakes that we made really early on was we focused more on like, how do we make the perfect funnel versus how do we develop the right business relationships? Right? Because it, it's really easy to get sucked into the Grant Cardone, Russell Brunson.

You know, Frank Kern email chain and feel like the only way our business is gonna 10 x is if we have this perfect marketing funnel set up. And that's not to say that those strategies don't work or there's not a place for 'em, but if you try to say that those things are more important than someone that's gonna build a relationship with someone, [00:14:00] have that personal connected follow up, explain to them the use case of your product specifically inside of their business.

Like, it, it, it just doesn't replicate that. And so you've gotta understand what, what are, what are each of those teams doing, and what is their focus to actually produce the results that produce the results you want for your business? And so for us, marketing is all about. How do we make sure that we're known?

How do we get out of obscurity? That's where we're at as our business. You know, most people haven't heard about story. How do we make sure that people that need story hear about story? And then how do we educate them about the product? How do we teach them about the use cases? How do we, how do we qualify?

A lead so that this person is someone that is worth that personal, individualized follow up and attention, right? That that salesperson's time has gotta be focused on people that are likely to convert. And if his job is to go and source and, and, and work through every single lead all of the time without any sort of qualification from the marketing team, well he's gonna get [00:15:00] bogged down in, in work that is not.

Producing the results that he wants for his commission and that that we want as a business. And so we've gotta figure out how do we make sure that the marketing team is focused on those activities that optimize that salesperson's time?

Benjamin Ard: Yeah, I love that. That makes perfect sense. So when you look at goals between the two departments, How are those structured for the two teams?

I'm, I'm assuming sales is very heavy on the revenue side of things. How is marketing aligned to that as well so that they have the same goals and are working towards the same business objectives?

Conner Snyder: I think it froze for a second. Nope,

Benjamin Ard: I think I got you back. Yep, we're back. Okay. So I can just repeat the question real quick. So, how do you align your goals with marketing and sales? So they're working towards the same objectives, the same business objectives, while at the same time [00:16:00] recognizing that they're both doing different jobs and, and they have different responsibilities.

Conner Snyder: That's a great question. You know, when, when I'm sitting in the co-founders seat, I. You know, as when you're an executive in the company, you're looking and saying, okay, what, what are our fundamental goals as a company that we're trying to accomplish? Because those inform what each department's doing.

And so our company first starts with our purpose, which is to help people share their authentic message. And then we say, okay, over the next three to five years, what is our mission? What is the thing we're trying to accomplish in the long term? And you know, and then for us it's, it's hitting certain revenue goals and user goal goals.

And then outside of the mission, what are the things over the next year, That we would need to accomplish in order for us to be on track for that mission. And so we come up with a prioritized list of signs of success that we believe after a year if we accomplished, we'd be closer to our mission. And from that, we then start making goals.

Quarter to quarter. We start [00:17:00] saying, okay, if we want to get there in a year, what are the activities we need do over the next 90 days? And when we're in the leadership seat, that's looking at sales and saying, okay, sales needs to get to this X revenue number. Okay. If sales needs to get to that revenue number, then how many leads do they need to get so that they have people they can talk to?

Because leads turn into appointments, and then appointments turn into, you know, demos and then demos turn into sales, and, and when you have that pipeline consistent, Then, then you can, you can kind of map that out exactly what marketing needs to provide in order to sell, to hit their goals. And so I think for us, we're still getting more, more, we're trying to really get better data on that entire pipeline flow.

That's where we're at. How do we make sure every step of that flow is clearly understood. By our business development team so that we know what we can expect from them. And in the meantime, marketing, it's how do we maximize the amount of leads that we're getting? And so for us in this kind of [00:18:00] growth stage, we don't know what the optimal number is.

What we're trying to figure out is how do we track those numbers throughout the whole process? And then let's start, let's start, you know, making goals to increase those things.

Benjamin Ard: I love that. Very cool. And then how do you focus on communication between the two departments? You know, obviously in some businesses there can be silos that get set up, but how do you bring down those silos?

How do you have the two different departments really work together and communicate on a regular basis? I. Yeah.

Conner Snyder: So for us it's, it's making sure that we've got a, a strong leadership team that's all bought in on that main vision, right? Like, I think sometimes what happens with siloing is people get really focused on, on like making their department look good and like, like hitting a certain goal or a metric at all costs.

And sometimes those goals and metrics might not be aligned with what the overall goal of the company is. And so I think my, my job as a leader is to go to, You know, our director of business development you know, go to our marketing team and be like, [00:19:00] look it, this is the, the goal that we have this quarter.

What are the activities you're doing to reach there? On the sales team and what are the activities you're doing on the marketing team and what are the activities, activities you're doing to help each other get to those goals? You know, like as a leader, my job is to facilitate communication like fundamentally.

And if, if, if there is a breakdown in communication between sales and marketing, I believe it's typically because we don't have alignment on the end goal. If, if we're aligned on what the end goal is, then everything else kind of falls into place. The priorities get clear. The stuff where people get more territorial or like, or, or defensive about how they're spending their efforts starts to fall by the wayside because you have to make sure you have the whole context of the business, right?

Like if, if I have a really great Facebook campaign, for example, and that Facebook campaign, Is got a really great low cost per conversion. The marketing team might be like, we're kicking butt, we need a great marketing campaign. And then you go talk to the sales guy and the sales guy's like, yeah, [00:20:00] I'm getting hundreds of garbage leads that don't answer.

Don't pick up the phone, don't want an appointment with me. And so at that point, you've gotta bring the marketing guy and the sales guy and be like, look, the end goal for the business is to reach this number. If, if the sales team is not getting the results out of your marketing campaign, it doesn't matter what you know, your ads manager says, because the business result is not being driven.

So what do we need to adjust in that to to make that happen? It's very easy for us to optimize around metrics that are only important to our individual teams. And as leaders, we have to go in and help the teams elevate their perspective on how their activities actually impact the entire business.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah, I love that.

And as you know, a fellow marketer, one thing that I noticed in my career is anytime you would have marketing independently, you know, you, going back to your Facebook campaign example, anytime they would create this campaign, they'd love it. They'd start generating these leads, they'd hand them off, and then sales would ask the question, okay, where did this come [00:21:00] from?

And you knew immediately there is a communication breakdown, right? You should have let them know in advance, they should have all the information so that they can have a unique conversation as to what that person was actually interested about. And I think those are really good opportunities, cuz sometimes it is, Hey, these are great leads on the marketing side, but on the sales, they're not great leads.

And the gap is the communication because the salesperson doesn't just understand. Where they came from because the marketing side didn't educate them and inform them in advance, then the salesperson has to treat it like anything else. And there's no other way to know that unless marketing is willing to kind of hand off and exchange that information.

So

Conner Snyder: yeah, I love that the sales guy's like the, sorry to cut you off. You're good. The sales guy's, like if, if the sales guy's like. Like, what am I doing on this call? Like, what's the point of this call? Marketing failed. Yeah, like all of that failed because there should be, there should be not only clear communication, but like established systems and [00:22:00] centralized information about who people are and why they have any sort of relationship up with us.

Did they just sign up for our weekly trend report? Did they say they wanted a demo? Did they get a free video edit from us? Like all of those things are different intention signals, and the sales guy needs to know that entire journey and that. All of that information so that he can really customize the call, right?

If, if he's supposed to build that professional level of trust and rapport with this person, he's gotta know the entire context of what they're looking for. So I couldn't agree anymore. It's like communication, communication, communication. Absolutely.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah. I love it. That's awesome. Okay, shifting gears just a little bit you know, we're five days into 2023 for anyone inside of tech in business.

You know, Salesforce announced layoffs, Amazon, and a whole bunch of groups. What are you changing inside of Story to really focus on the economic needs of 2023? What do you think people are gonna do, especially on the marketing and sales [00:23:00] side? How can people really prepare themselves for this upcoming year and make sure that they're thriving?

And I'd love to hear some, some examples of, of what you guys are doing and how you've kind of prepared for it.

Conner Snyder: Yeah, great question. So, you know, number one for us is you gotta make sure that like profitability is the number one goal, right? You, you see, especially, you know, here in Utah, all along the valley, there's a lot of companies that have had layoffs and layoffs happen when.

You've got VC backed companies where profitability has kind of been a secondary metric and it's been like focused on users. Focused on users. Well, all of a sudden, when the cost of capital increases, the conversation changes very quickly. Right. And so I think for us, for us, you know, profitability and cash flow are like the number one things, right?

And, and we're lucky that we're bootstrapped and, and we kind of controlled our own destiny a little bit there. It has its own share of problems for sure, don't get me wrong. But, but, but, but You know it, it's in 2023. We all have to be really. Mindful of how we're spending those [00:24:00] dollars. And so for us, one of the things that we're doing is we actually have a person on, on our team whose entire job is automations.

And, and they're not a developer because we've got, you know, our development team that works on the app. But this automations person, all they do is build automations for each of our departments to automate different parts of their workflows and maintain those automations. And what's really great about this is it enables.

Higher degrees, especially when we have such a, we're a remote company, so everything's remote for us. We have to replace communication with like really, really high volumes of automated communication and signals and process. And when individual team members are responsible for those things, oftentimes it doesn't get done.

And what ends up happening is your team members are coming to you saying, Hey, our, we're strapped, like our team can't handle anymore. Customers coming in or clientele doing this, or, you know, we're capped on our bandwidth. And so what we, as, as leadership are trying to do is figure out how do we bring in automation to assist [00:25:00] you with as much of your process as you can.

So instead of our account manager servicing 10 clients, you can serve 30 or 40. Right? And so like, how do we find ways that we can increase efficiency so we're not increasing headcount? Is, is one of the areas that we're, we're really. Trying to be effective with our dollars in 2023. The other thing is we're also being really, really focused on like marketing events that are going to produce results for us.

You know, so we come out of our annual planning, looking through all of our sales activities for the year, and looking at where the places that we're finding our conversions from. And for us, events as where we get our most conversions. Like that's where we get a ton of sales for, for these influencer type deals that we were looking for.

And. For us, we're, we're gonna do more events because of that, right? We know that's worthwhile dollars versus maybe a billboard or investing in a social media campaign. It's a paid social campaign. We're gonna go and, and do some events and sponsor events. And so I think like every business is gonna be a little bit different, but I think that those activities that are [00:26:00] harder to attribute sales to are gonna fall to the wayside.

And as marketers, you know, we hate that because we understand the value of branding. We understand the, the value of a relationship with our audience. And so I think for us, the other thing we have to do is we have to figure out ways to communicate the value of those things better. To business leaders, you know, like what is, what is the ways that that audience relationship is valuable?

And one example that, you know, I tell the other business owners is like, look, if you're going and doing paid ads on Facebook or Instagram or paid search with Google, you are paying a fee to essentially access their email list, right? You, they've got their user list and you're paying a fee to go hit those people up.

Versus building organic content is like building your own. Email list, right? You can build organic content a lot cheaper than you can, than paying for a bunch of ads. And those ads are essentially rented attention from Facebook or Googles or Instagrams, ORs email [00:27:00] lists. And so I think the other thing is how do you invest in building an owned audience?

Own email lists, own followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, so that when you want bring your message to your audience, you're not having to their attention from somebody else. You already have it because you have a relationship with them. So I, that's another focus us is continuing to build out that organic.

Like awareness and organic strategies so that we don't have to go rent and pay to play when we need to get our, our message and products out to the people that are interested in them.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah, I love that. So I, yeah, right in the middle of that I was thinking, okay, cool. How do you really weigh out brand versus demand?

You know, especially with this, you know, new emphasis on profitability. And I think you hit it perfectly. I think some businesses they've looked at brand is just this pie in the sky. This is where marketing has fun. There's no real like ROI to this, all those activities, but I think you nailed it perfectly.

It's the opportunity for marketing to go out [00:28:00] and build their own audience. That's the point of a brand. Right. If you go and you capture mindshare and things like that, your call to action may not be see a demonstration with us or buy from us, but it will be, let's build a relationship. Come join a, a subscription, come follow us, come do whatever this really top of the funnel, call to action, but just become friends.

Like, let's, let's hang out occasionally and let's do that proactively so I don't have to pay. All of this money at the bottom of the funnel to get in front of you. I, you know, I want your phone number. I don't want to call, you know, the operator and have to get that and pay for those fees in between. And so I think that's a great way of distinguishing between brand and demand and the value of brand as opposed to just, Hey, let's just nuke those paid ads over and over and over again.

It's how these people see us everywhere on the internet, even though we haven't nurtured them down a funnel. It's just see a [00:29:00] demo. I think it's a great great way to kind of call that out.

Conner Snyder: Yeah, there's so many businesses I see that like they, they look at like Apple or Coca-Cola and they're like, we gotta get brand awareness.

And they try to replicate those strategies where it's like, you're not Coca-Cola, you're not Apple. Your business isn't even in the same life cycle as those companies. And so for you to take the same approach doesn't make sense. You know, I, I think that, you know with Instagram they were, they changed, they've changed so much of their algorithm to reflect TikTok, where there's a lot more recommendation content.

Right. You know, there was a big controversy earlier this year that, I don't know, maybe you were tuned into, but maybe not everyone in your audience was where Kylie Jenner posted something on her story that was like, make Instagram, Instagram again. I just wanna see cute pictures of my friends. And it like lit Instagram up on fire to the point where the head of Instagram actually made a post about it.

Cuz when she did this to Snapchat, their stock fell 15%. So he's like, we're gonna make it, we're gonna respond to this. And he basically said, If you go look at all the user data of what we see, our users are [00:30:00] wanting to see content based off of the off the stuff they're interested in, and they're watching way more video.

And so the takeaway for us as marketers is people want to see content. They're interested in based off topic, not just of social network connections like Facebook, where it's just my friends and they're going to, the platforms are gonna focus on recommending content to people, which is a marketer's dream.

Yeah. Because now it's like, instead of me having to pay. If I make good content, they're just gonna show it to them for free. Yeah. And so the, the, the opportunity that we have is, is so big where we can be creating really great, authentic, raw content and get that stuff seen by our ideal audiences. And. A lot of people I think are gonna make the mistake during this, this economic, you know, tough times that we're having where they're going to cut back on marketing spend because they don't know better.

Versus focusing on, like you just said, owning that list and owning that relationship because if they have that, [00:31:00] Now they're saving money because now they don't have to go spend a hundred, a thousand, $10,000 to get their message in front of people. They own the attention of those people already cuz they've invested in their relationship, you know?

Yeah. And, and I think whether it's marketing or sales, it has to start from that perspective. What are the relationships that we're building with our customers and potential customers so that they trust us? Yep.

Benjamin Ard: And then hopefully people in 2023 don't abuse that. You know, you've spent all this time and effort, you've built this list, you've built this relationship.

Don't just destroy that relationship by saying bye bye bye all the time in 2023. Cuz you need to hit sales. It has to be organic. You know, people want to go through things when they have time and when it's really a need for their business. But if you don't abuse that, you know, your brand share and, and your mind share and how much people trust you goes way up over time.

So that makes a lot of sense. Oh.

Conner Snyder: How do you, I mean, like you thinking with like your marketing hat a little bit. Cause I think that the sales guys are always gonna be like, just go, like, [00:32:00] send the email, send the email. Like how do you communicate that to, to your sales, you know, your sales counterparts of like how of protecting that relationship so you're not burning your lists.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah, I mean if you look at it, you know a terrible analogy cuz I just came up with it on the spot. Like you, you look at the quality of the leads, right? If you owned a car dealership, right? And you had someone walk in the door and he said, Hey, I'm in the market for a truck. You know, they walk into the Ford store, something like that.

That's a salesperson's dream. Great. Let's go look at the F one 50 s, two 50 s, three 50 s, whatever you need, let's go and you're gonna walk out of there with a truck that day. But whereas if I ran a bunch of advertisements and said, Hey, 50% off of trucks. Some dude's gonna pull up in a Corolla and be like, Hey, I saw your ad.

I, I've never driven a truck before. Like, I've got 10 square feet of storage behind me. But like, which, which person do you really want in your funnel? You know, and you want to build that trust. And I think something that we also forget sometimes when we're heavy focused [00:33:00] on revenue is we're not just looking for contracts, right?

We're not just looking for initial payments. We're looking for customers. And we want those customers to be with us for a very long time, and we can provide value as marketers in that relationship before they buy through the purchase. And then beyond like one of those values could be, well, I like the product, but I love the company.

Like that's a great relationship where even if your product fails sometimes, and it always will. It's never gonna be perfect. Someone's gonna have an innovative feature if they love the company because you haven't abused our relationship. I respect you. I trust you. You have my best interests at heart. I can feel that through the content you're providing.

They're gonna stick with you for very like long amounts of time. The turn rate's gonna drop drastically. So I look at it again, the the holistic business approach. We're not just out there for leads or sales. [00:34:00] We're out there for genuinely helping businesses that want to be with us for years. And I think that's kind of the difference when you're looking at those two systems.

Conner Snyder: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Like, like marketing is a, as a is a function of retention is so essential and it, I think it's one of those places that people overlook. They get so focused on the inbound and rather like so much easier to like, you know, keep the customer you have rather than go and find a new one.

And, and sometimes we neglect and take for granted those people and really they, they're the most deserving of, of a lot of our attention. Yeah. Plus the

Benjamin Ard: number one channel. I don't know if you did the study but I do know at a previous business we kind of verified this data. We went and talked to all sorts of customers and right after they purchased and said, how did you find out about us?

Like, what was the determining factor? The vast majority, like the number one by tens of percents of how they heard about us and why they bought was word of mouth. And so your number one channel as a business is having good relationships with [00:35:00] customers. That's when they refer you. Your product could be great, but if they don't like the company, they're still not gonna refer you.

You could even have a subpar product and if they really like the company, they'll actually refer you, and that's the biggest marketing channel that you have. So keeping the life cycle really in mind. Your paid ads are doing a great job, I promise. Like they're great and all that stuff. I've never seen a business where word of mouth has not been the number one channel for that business by far.

Even if it's not in their UTMs, cuz that's never gonna be tracked on like a Google ut M parameter. But if you genuinely get in front of that person, how did you hear about us? Oh, I talked to another business owner who really enjoys their experience with you. So I started looking into you. And that's when I clicked your ad.

You know, I would've never clicked on it had I not actually started looking into it because we went out and had lunch or I went to a convention and this person said, Hey, go check out that booth, or whatever it is. And I think that that's really important as well. If you're looking at getting new business and it's [00:36:00] really just, you know, the long term, short term.

Going back to the AI side of things, AI content is never gonna build your relationships that get you word of mouth referrals, genuine good interaction, doing what's best for the customer. That's gonna grow your business and it's gonna grow it very, very fast if you do it really well.

Conner Snyder: Hmm. Couldn't agree more.

Couldn't agree more. So

Benjamin Ard: one quick question before we call it Good. Because this time is just blown by, and I don't want this to be too long. There are a lot of people right now in the job market. You know, unfortunately there have been a ton of layoffs and it's super sad cuz these people are super talented, you know, and it's, you know, especially when it happens in the holidays, things like that.

That's brutal. What would be your recommendation, you know, as a business owner, as someone in charge of hiring and bringing on new talent for your business? If you were to see an interview and talk to marketing and sales individuals who are looking for jobs, what would put per the certain [00:37:00] people ahead of other people, what can people do to really stand out in what may be a little bit of an oversaturated market on the marketing sales site?

How can they talk about themselves? What's an experience or what can they do during this time? To go make themselves stand out to, you know, a a co-founder of a business. Like, what would you look at and say, okay, that's really, really cool.

Conner Snyder: Great question. So I I actually was at a company and I got laid off.

I mean, it's like six years ago. Totally sudden, no warning every sign that the company was doing well, and you know, when you get laid off as a marketer, you feel that stress, right? And especially if you, if it's a company that doesn't believe in marketing or is, is, is, is, you know, super focused at like, use marketing as an expense, not an investment, then it can feel like, oh man, like this is gonna be like a fight uphill.

So, so one of the things that I had a mentor say a long time ago, I was, I was not doing anything entrepreneurial at the time. I, I guess I was doing a little bit of consulting, but I [00:38:00] didn't see myself as an entrepreneur. It was just like someone needed help, right. He, he got on stage and said, as a marketer, you've gotta understand what your impact is to the business and what you're doing and how it impacts the business.

And I think that you're a looking for a job, being able to tell that story in your interviews of, of the things that you do that help that business grow and making sure that that. All of your talents and skills that you have, whether it's graphic design or copywriting or, or you know, ad buying or social media management, being able to take those things and correlate those to a business result, I think is, is be something that businesses will really value.

I know were not, they were. Great social media management, but they understood the correlation of those things to driving business results. That person would really stand out to me. And so I think when you're, when you're looking, do that. The other thing too is, is for, for me personally, I, I really value our core values in people.

Like, I, like for us, we hire and fire according to our core values. And I think some of our core [00:39:00] values are things that any business would, would find value in. Like one of them is curiosity. Like ask great questions that, that show that you're curious to learn more about the business and how it functions.

They want someone that, I want someone that like cares enough that they want to like, proactively learn and, and you can't just like always. Tell who is going to be proactive or not. And so doing things that can signal your curiosity, I think are good in interviews. I think the other thing too is demonstrating things like drive, you know, showing up and knowing the company that you're interviewing with beforehand, being able to speak to what their products are like, those things not, are not things that everyone does, and even if the interviewer's gonna come and ask you questions about it, it's different if you volunteer that information yourself because you're showing that you.

And, and that also stands out to me too. And, you know, the other, the other thing I would, I would say too is just, just trust in your skillset a little bit. You know, as a marketer [00:40:00] you're marketing yourself, right? And so, like whatever you do for marketing, whether it's copywriting, whether it's it's graphic design, the things that you do, Post 'em on LinkedIn, put 'em on Instagram, put 'em on Facebook, make sure you've got a portfolio like, like marketers.

We have so many things that we can show to show what our skillsets are. And so really putting those in front of people to get a taste of those things I think is another way that you can really stand out because you'd be surprised how many people are looking for marketing roles that aren't showing a portfolio or communicating some of those things that, that they do.

Yeah, I

Benjamin Ard: love that. Yeah. And on that last point, I mean, right now people get it and people understand, are willing and wanting to help in a simple LinkedIn post that you are looking and just sharing what you've done. Well, I've never seen so many viral posts in my life on LinkedIn. And they're all people looking for jobs cuz people genuinely like are good people.

And if you're suffering and don't have a job and you post about it, your [00:41:00] network cares and they're gonna help you try to find something and you're gonna have a lot of leads and things like that. But making sure as that gets exposure, like you just said, you're sharing what you actually know how to do.

You know, if someone's never seen it before, but they're like, oh cool. Like, man, you get it. R o i, you're next to it. I need something. Let's, let's talk, let me reach out and actually have an interview. And then one thing from a, a previous podcast that you hit on that I love the curiosity in asking questions.

The best salespeople are the best at asking questions, and one of the quickest way in an interview for a new sales role to prove that you're really good at sales is asking a million questions to actually get to insights. That shows you know how to do that in the real world and it applies to you. And that's like the first most transferable way.

If you just sit there and answer questions, it shows that that may be how you approach a sales call, which is not the most effective way you need to have the other person speaking. Most of the time I would have a personal challenge of, Hey, this person's interviewing me, [00:42:00] they're gonna speak 80% of the time just like I should do on any kind of a sales call as well.

So I think the curiosity point is really, really important. Yeah.

Conner Snyder: No, I, I couldn't agree more. It's like, it's a fundamental skill for sure, for for sure for sales, but for any position, you know? Yeah. It's hard, hard to find too. I'll tell you, it's crazy how many times I've done interviews. I'm like, they didn't, they just sat there.

That was weird. You know, like asking questions really goes a long way.

Benjamin Ard: Yeah. Well, and something that I saw, I only saw this once in my career, but this was a very forward thinking mar sales leader, and they brought me in as a marketer and they said, Hey, I want you in. My sales interviews and they actually, from day one wanted this rapport and this relationship with these individuals.

So they brought in a, a marketing leader to say, Hey, how, how, how do you work with marketing? What's your favorite thing? What's your least favorite thing? And can we get along that way? The day they get hired, they've already built a relationship and they're ahead of the game. And I, I thought that was really clever and, and really fun as well for sales leaders [00:43:00] and marketing leaders.

Bring in the other purple cuz it doesn't happen that often, but it really should.

Conner Snyder: Super smart. Yeah, I love that. Very

Benjamin Ard: cool. Well Connor, this has been amazing and probably way too long cuz I was really fascinated with everything you had to say. But first of all, thank you for taking the time. Second of all, I'd love for people to be able to find out about story.

What's the best place for them to find out about your company and reach out if they need any help on that front.

Conner Snyder: Yeah, so you can find us at Storyy.co. Its story with two Ys story, S T O R Y Y. And we actually have a free video edit for anyone that downloads our app. So you can download our app, access all of our AI prompts for free, send us raw content, we'll turn that into an edited piece of content for you.

And so you can kind of try out and see how it works. One of the things we're doing for people here in our, in, in Utah, we're partnering up with Silicon Slopes and we're actually doing free video edits for anyone that's, that's lost their job and wants like, kind of a video resume that kind of show off their [00:44:00] skills.

So if you're in that job market and kind of facing that you can reach out to us and we're, we're happy to set that up. Silicon Slope will be doing some stuff to promote it pretty soon here. But yeah, we, we, we you can reach us there and, and we. Both, everyone that's looking for a job and also anyone that's looking to build that organic relationship with their audience online.

I love that.

Benjamin Ard: a super cool initiative. I'm excited to to see more about that. So hats off to you guys for doing what's right. Awesome. All right, well thanks for the time and again, I appreciate all of it. It was great having you on.

Conner Snyder: Dude, Benjamin. Great spending time with you man. Thanks for having me on.

You bet.

Benjamin Ard: I hope you enjoyed the interview. If you'd like to see the video recording of this podcast, go to get massett.com. Have a great day.