How Is AI Changing B2B Marketing?

Ricky Baizas (00:02) So it's never a fixed one where the story comes first or the platforms comes first. It's really the resources come first, right? Let's be realistic. How much budget do we have? How much time does the creative department, the content team have together with, and that really determines everything. And somehow you come up with something. Ben Ard (00:48) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Ricky. Ricky, welcome to the show. Ricky Baizas (00:53) Hi, Benjamin. Thank you for having me. It's an honor and a privilege and a pleasure, of course. Ben Ard (00:54) Hey Ricky. Yeah. I'm so excited. This is going to be a great time. But before we dive into the subject, Ricky, let's get to know your background. How did you find marketing and storytelling and all that kind of fun stuff? Ricky Baizas (01:07) Sure, you know what happened, Benjamin? I took up film. I went to film school in university and this was around the time when Tarantino exploded. So every teenager wanted to be a filmmaker. So I jumped into filmmaking. However, I was already a working actor during that time. I was coming out in stage plays, in TV and film. So I really wanted to be an actor, but film was sort of like a commercial compromise where, hey, if the acting doesn't work out, I can be a commercial director or film director, right? However, when I got into film school, what I really picked up was the editing trade, the video editing. And I was able to pay my way through, you have to buy film stock and all of that. So I used that as like my job. And then I picked up the trade. I didn't know that that was gonna come in very handy 20, 25 years later where video as the medium for advertising and marketing exploded. So that's how I really got into it. So as an actor and then as a film student, the storytelling part, crafting stories, and then the trade part of it, the technical part of it. And then I was like, of course, how am I gonna pay the bills doing that? So I was like, marketing, of course, is the manifestation of that. But it really was film school. Back then, it wasn't called content yet. That's why the point there is, you know, kids who are in college now or in school now, your job hasn't been invented yet. Because when I was in film school, digital marketing as a profession or as a vocation hasn't been invented yet. So even more now. whatever you were taking up, the job or the function hasn't been invented. Ben Ard (02:50) I love that. That's an amazing background. I love your story. Ricky Baizas (02:51) Yeah. But you know, however, before that, so I'm in a very interesting spot because I still remember mass media, right? Commercials and so on and so forth. Magazines, print ads, radio commercials and so on. I didn't know as a marketing professional now that I've always loved it. I remember commercials. I remember all these campaigns and so on and so forth. So you gotta have like an innate... like love for it, like a DNA for it. So that's how it's easy for me and I'm very fortunate that I actually get to do this for a job and for a living. Ben Ard (03:26) I love that. That's so cool. And one of the reasons I'm guessing you love everything and with your background really kind of tying this into the subject for the day, we're to talk about storytelling and to kick that off. I feel like you have this skill just from the short time I've known you to find a story in everything that you're seeing. How do you do that? How can we find the story in everything we're doing, including the marketing for our companies? Ricky Baizas (03:53) You know, that's a great question. the thing is, and I learned this from one of my mentors, Pete Blackshaw. He was our head of digital for Nestle back in the day. You know, he said, before you can become an expert in a platform, whether it met us, Snapchat, Reddit, whatever it is, you have to be a super user. You actually have to post a lot of content and know the ins and outs of what not the hashtag, whatever features. And it's the same for storytelling or finding a story in something. You need to have read a lot. You need to read a lot. And I'm not just talking about reading whatever you like. You know, there's different forms, right? There's the essay, there's the short story, there's the novel, there's the novella, there's the documentary and all that. You've got to have a love for that and you need to consume a lot of it. so that you can see the trends and patterns and the recurring mythologies of the human condition. And once you have that archive or library or repository, it's easy to see, like, yeah, that reminds me of this. That reminds me of that. that was a campaign that so-and-so branded, but they remixed it into something else. You need to be a super consumer before you can find the trends and the patterns and find a story in every. Ben Ard (05:13) Yeah, I love that. That's so cool. So when you do find the story, you found something, you feel like it's actually something worth sharing. How do you go about crafting the story in a way that it can match, you know, some of these shorter formats and like all of the different formats of the different, you know, mediums that we're actually going to publish this on, especially when you're a business and people don't really give you a ton of time. How are you finding effective ways of telling those stories? Ricky Baizas (05:40) So this is the other part of the storytelling where I was saying you need to read a lot. The other side of it is you need to have written a lot or you need to write a lot. And really part of writing is you gotta know the language and grammar of your target audience. They have words that they use and words that they don't use. They have sentences that they use. They have slang words or inside words that they use. It has to sound like somebody that you want to target, it has to sound like them so that they can relate to it. Where you're like, my God, that's totally me. That's where the wordsmithing and the copywriting really comes in. And the economy of the, you know, the saying brevity is the soul of wit from Shakespeare, that's a, I would almost say a forgotten craft or a forgotten skill, but it's really important. Sometimes you only have five words. Sometimes you have 15 seconds. Sometimes you have 15 minutes, right? So you have to make use of every space of every letter, every word, but then it has to be the right word. And that can take a long time. And so you really need to do your homework and you really need to know your craft in terms of writing. Ben Ard (06:53) So any recommendations for kind of getting those reps in for writing? mean, do you recommend marketers like write novels or should they just make ad copy? Like how is an effective way if I'm listening to this podcast today and I'm saying, you know, I, you know, maybe I need to do more on the reading of, you know, and consuming of stories, but I need to develop this skill and especially with AI in the mix. Ricky Baizas (07:12) Hmm. Ben Ard (07:18) I need to hone this so that I can use this skill in all sorts of different ways. How do you recommend people kind of get in those reps? Ricky Baizas (07:24) You know, you need to go back to the basics of actually picking up a pen and picking up a piece of paper. I, like for me, for example, I have this three by five index card. This is my to-do list. This is my pen. The reason for this is you got 10 lines and then obviously you have very limited space here. Your brain is forced to economize. Okay, I need to fit this in. So you got to take a step back, slow down. and see how can I do this. If you do it every day, you get that practice. And it's just very quotidian, right? It's very functional, where this is just my to-do list for the day. But as you do it, you notice you get better at being economical with your words, because you only have like this limited. As opposed to this, it's for, you know, it's infinite. You can have as many notes as you want. You can't even find it anymore. or you're distracted. But if you have this, you're limited with the space. Keep doing it every day. So that's for the to-do list, however. I have another one. This is called a, it's like a daily journal that I have, but it's a five-year diary. So I write here every day too, so that I can look back at it. Again, it's very limited. So it forces you to be disciplined with what you put down, but you're also forced to slow down because you have to, to think and put whatever's in your brain down on paper, you notice that you get creative about, what word am I gonna use here so that it fits, right? So I think you need to go back and develop the discipline again of writing something down, pen and paper, condition your brain and your hand, and then everything follows from. Ben Ard (09:00) I love that. And I have done a lot of research into journal writing and things like that. And my family, it was interesting. So my father passed away suddenly like a couple years ago and we got into his computer and found his journal and it was just bullet points. And it was oddly enough, like not that interesting as sad as that sounds. And so I did a lot of research. I'm like, okay, what kind of journal do I want my children? Ricky Baizas (09:04) Mm. Ben Ard (09:25) to be able to consume and someone had this really cool philosophy, find one story every single day that happened your life and tell that story. And that's the kind of thing where I was like, man, I wish I could have my father's stories. And I was like, okay, cool. So I need to do that. So there's an awesome opportunity there that I think makes a lot of sense when it comes to actually doing that. Ricky Baizas (09:33) There you go. Yeah, and you know, you know, Benjamin, just like your podcast, you have 300 plus, right? Your episode number one doesn't sound the same as 344. So it's the same with journal writing. By the 50th entry, it will be much different. You'll find your groove. You'll find your voice. Like you said, you're going to find that insight or that thing that makes it different. Whatever it is, you know, you'll bump into it eventually, but you got to do it. Ben Ard (09:54) very true. Ricky Baizas (10:10) You gotta do it every day. You gotta develop that discipline like brushing your teeth. And then it becomes easier and then yeah, it just becomes part of your day. Ben Ard (10:19) I love that. So when you're doing storytelling in business, do you think about the story first or do you think about the format that it's going to go in? So if it's going to go on Twitter or something that has limited characters or if it needs an image or a video, do you think about the story or do you typically think about the format and then go backwards and find the story? Ricky Baizas (10:36) Obviously there's a lot of constraints, Resources wise, like what budget do you have? What timeline do you have? And all these things come into play, right? So it's never a fixed one where the story comes first or the platforms comes first. It's really the resources come first, right? Let's be realistic. How much budget do we have? How much time does the creative department, the content team have together with, and that really determines everything. And somehow you come up with something. You throw in all of that. You don't come up with gems all the time, but once in a while something happens. So yeah, the restraints come first. Can you do all platforms? Can you only do meta? Can you only do YouTube? Or can you only do TikTok? Yeah, I think that determines it. And then... You know, that's where the format comes in, right? Whether it's 250 characters or 300 word blog or whatever, or a 30 second video. but the insight, the, the germ, the, the, the nugget is I think the most important thing that you've got to spend some time. And I would say 90 % of the time you should, use to come up with that insight. And that's just one sentence. That's like the big idea, right? Once you have that. everything else follows. You can easily repurpose that for whatever platform. So it's like YouTube, for example, right? Or even podcasts for that matter. Spend 90 % on the thumbnail. Because if they don't click on that thumbnail, nobody's gonna watch your 17 minute video. Yeah. Yep. Ben Ard (12:07) Yep. 100%. Yeah, I love that. So we're getting close to running out of time. So I have one final question. When it comes to storytelling, you talked about not every time do we always find that hidden gem, that beautiful story. How do you know if your story has resonated with the audience? And how do you use that feedback to help you become a better story writer over time? Because obviously I'm putting in daily reps for myself. I will develop skills, but I'm also kind of the audience when you're writing for someone else. How do you get that feedback and apply it? Ricky Baizas (12:39) I think that's the beauty of the internet and digital now where you can kind of test it. You know how these authors, test the book covers, they make four different book covers, put an ad out on meta, see what clicks first. If you've done it enough times, you'll know that, this particular piece has worked before because I got engagement on it very quickly. The velocity was quick, so that's how you know. So I think that's why archiving is very important now. where we can just easily produce whatever, how much content we have. But nobody's looking back and saying, hey, you know what, when we posted this, we got this engagement very quickly. So we know that works already. But if you don't have that, you do have the, we all have the privilege of testing something first, put it out there maybe as an opening sentence or just a snippet of it and see if people, not only if it resonates. But if it resonates quickly, because as you know, that's what the algorithm likes, right? That where, somebody picked it up right away and reacted to it and engaged with it or shared it or started debating you already because it touched on you, right? Ben Ard (13:46) Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I you know, obviously people look at social media metrics like likes and engagement and things like that. I love that you're focusing on speed, things of that nature. I think that there's a lot of hidden metrics and things like that that people could look at. Ricky Baizas (13:55) Yeah, velocity. It's changing now too though because sometimes, obviously Meta, they will show a post that you did maybe four days ago over and over to some people. So they've kind of changed that where it's not just recency or primacy. So you never know. You really just got to keep putting out there, putting it out there because you never know when it's going to get picked up. And Meta and TikTok and all these platforms, of course, they're challenged, right, to so they're recalibrating their algorithms so that there's a longer shelf life for everybody's content. Ben Ard (14:33) Yeah, I love that. Well, Ricky, I love your story. I love your information on storytelling. I love the passion for it and all the insights. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing all of this. For anyone listening who would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Ricky Baizas (14:48) Just search for Ricky Baizas on LinkedIn is the best way I would say. Yeah. Ben Ard (14:50) Okay, perfect. And we will link to Ricky's LinkedIn profile in the show notes for anyone listening. Again, Ricky, thank you so much for the insights. They really do appreciate it. Ricky Baizas (15:00) Thank you for having me, Benjamin. I hope we can do this again next time. I enjoyed talking to you and more power to your podcast, man. Ben Ard (15:07) Thank you, appreciate it.