Why Value-Based Storytelling Still Wins: Content Marketing in the Age of AI

Jeffro (00:03.277)
AI is changing how we create content, but not why people buy. My guest today is David J. Ebner, president of Content Workshop, a story first content marketing agency that’s helped B2B tech brands craft more than 30,000 pieces of content. From SaaS to cybersecurity, David’s approach starts with storytelling and ends with business development. So in this episode, we’re going to dig into why brand narrative still matters in an AI powered world, why giving away your secret sauce actually builds trust instead of killing your sales, and what most marketers get wrong about content strategy in 2025. So welcome to the show, David. Absolutely. I’m excited to talk about this. And you’ve been on the inside of a lot of B2B content strategies. You’ve seen how they work, put them together. What is the biggest shift you’ve noticed since AI became mainstream?

David J Ebner (00:35.394)
Thank you for having me.

David J Ebner (00:47.736)
You know, the biggest shift I’ve noticed has actually been what I will call kind of like a reversion to how things used to be, which is really weird to say in the age of new technology coming to our disposal. But now people are really focusing on volume a lot, which is kind of surprising to me, right? Over time, we have always been preaching quality over quantity. Of course, you want to have a certain amount of quantity on the content and marketing side because you have to have ad bats. You can’t hit a home run or bring in runners if you’re not at bat, right? So you need to have production. But what I’ve noticed is that there’s this pressure put on, I think, marketing teams in general to produce more, to show kind of like value and worth. And there’s an assumption that AI can be used to produce more volume, right? Because it should be easier, right? So I think that’s really the biggest shift I’ve seen over the last couple of years.

Jeffro (01:38.939)
Yeah, well, it’s interesting to say that because I do hear people like Hormozi and stuff talk about the volume of content that his team puts out. And so now suddenly people see AI tools and they’re like, oh, I can post a lot more stuff. The difference is he’s spending a lot of money for a content team to do it with quality at scale. And if you skip the quality step and just go to scale, like you created more stuff, but it’s not really helping you.

David J Ebner (01:45.422)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (02:01.61)
Exactly, right. And that’s the problem, think, lot of especially smaller brands that don’t have those massive budgets to ensure quality are facing right now.

Jeffro (02:10.733)
Yeah. So another thing you’ve said is that content isn’t about just filling space, which is kind of what the volume is doing, right? It’s about telling a story. So why does that matter more now with AI?

David J Ebner (02:16.312)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (02:22.646)
Yeah, it actually, the first answer I gave you kind of alludes to this one too, right? If there is what we call the sea of sameness right now, we’re just seeing a ton of content, a lot of volume, a lot of things that say, have a lot of words, but don’t say a whole lot, if that makes sense, which presents an opportunity to brands so that they can zig where other people are zagging, right? And when I mean zig, what I’m saying is that, you know, focusing on the brand story,

Jeffro (02:30.715)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (02:49.656)
to a higher level focusing on the value that’s given to the audience in your content and your marketing can make a huge difference right now because there’s so much out there that doesn’t do that. You’re gonna actually stand out by doing what we all should be doing, which is producing a higher value pieces over time.

Jeffro (03:07.075)
Yeah. I don’t know if there’s something inside a lot of us that we avoid hard work or we think that it’s going to be harder than it actually is. And so we’re looking for shortcuts all the time. And I think that’s just amplified now. AI allows us to take more of those shortcuts and we think we’ve somehow, you know, gotten one by the world, but it’s, we’re really just fooling ourselves.

David J Ebner (03:31.468)
Yeah, agreed. And, you know, I think there’s, there’s this issue right now for many marketers and many brands, that everybody’s being pushed to figure out how to deploy AI. and you have a lot of marketers right now that are thinking, well, I’ve got to learn how to use this and deploy it and show that I can do it to keep my job. But at the same time, they’re thinking, if I really figure out how to use this and deploy this, am I going to have a job? so there’s just this dichotomy right now of, of production and like wanting to show value.

Jeffro (03:54.203)
You

David J Ebner (04:01.886)
And unfortunately, I don’t think it’s, I think it’s, not making its way down to the audience. I think it’s sticking with like, want to show, you know, proof of concept for myself in my role, and less about kind of like proving that concept for our brand to the audience. So there’s a bit of a disconnect, I think right now there.

Jeffro (04:18.04)
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of AI applications in business from answering phones after hours to, you know, generating contracts or whatever. Like it can do a lot of helpful things, but specifically when we’re talking about content, that’s the part that if you just use AI, it’s going to feel soulless. It’s not going to connect. And that’s what we really need to focus on is figuring out how to create content that does connect, even though you can’t keep up with chat GPT who’s spitting out 10 blogs a minute.

David J Ebner (04:46.338)
Right, don’t even try to keep up. I mean, the second you start to measure yourself against a production metric is the second you’re probably going to forgo quality for quantity. And, you know, it’s just not a good path. From a brand storytelling point of view, you’re not doing what the core tenant is of brand storytelling, which is build trust. Building trust with your audience is your only goal as a marketer. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. And once they trust you enough, you pass them on sales, right? You move them on over, right? But you have to build that trust first.

Jeffro (04:48.377)
Yeah.

Jeffro (04:56.09)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (05:14.956)
And you don’t do that by just spamming people. And it feels like that when you just read some of this content in these videos that are just like more of the same and don’t really say anything, you build trust by providing value at scale, like you had mentioned before.

Jeffro (05:29.592)
Yeah. So maybe you can walk us through the actual process and mentality of actually doing this. So what’s the difference between taking my vision statement, pasting it into chat, chat, dbt saying, Hey, I want to do a video about this versus me sitting down and talking about the company. What’s, how do you do it?

David J Ebner (05:46.092)
Yeah, so I think the process is the same as it’s always been. I’ll add that, you know, the AI, a lot of people are given this tool AI and they’re told to use it and build something more efficient. I think where a lot of mistakes are made is they go straight to production and tactics and don’t take a step back into strategy. And what you’re talking about, kind of those elements that have always existed that produce great brand story content have been based in a strategy that’s around a vision, that’s around your personas, that’s around your messaging, it’s around the value you produce to your audience. And then to deploy this effectively is the same way we’ve been doing it manually is find different steps in which you can deploy AI or a person to fulfill part of the process, always mapping back to that overarching strategy. AI today is very good at different steps of that process, not so good at some of the other things, right? Like the very creative elements of it, maybe the drafting itself or the QA and the editing, that process, not so good because that’s where a lot of the creativity and the soul comes into the piece and the brand story really gets to shine. But you can feed all of those elements we talked about before. You can feed your messaging, you can feed your general vision, you can feed your personas, target keyword phrases, all of that into a custom AI bot you can build and then the things that it does produce can be of a higher quality and closer to being on brand. But truly what you need to do is figure out how this piece of content produces value for the target audience, how you’re making their life better as they read it, not how you’re making your own life better or your brand’s life better. I think we focus a little too much on that about us and not about them. But you can, again, before we were just doing it, a good process that’s driven by strategy is of high quality if a person does it versus if a tool does it, the question is you just have to have the quality assurance metrics along the way. We’re seeing this a lot with, I’m going to feed my ideas, my topic ideas to this bot that I’ve built that has all of the custom knowledge base of the things about my brain that are important to me. And it can produce some pretty darn good outlines. It can cross check outlines to say, hey, are these…

David J Ebner (08:01.772)
points on brand, like where are the gaps in what you know about us and what we should be saying, our differentiators versus what you see on this page. And pointing out those gaps, it’s actually really excellent at that, but it all comes back down to like a strategic process that actually produces value versus just tactics alone.

Jeffro (08:03.438)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (08:19.566)
So do you think it’s better to be unscripted then? Or do you think, because a lot of business owners might not be naturally good on camera or talking, don’t like talking about themselves or their business. And so maybe they find comfort in having the script from Chat DPT or something. So how do they suddenly turn around and say, okay, I want to be authentic and connect. I don’t want to sound scripted, but this is where they get stuck, right?

David J Ebner (08:29.41)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (08:46.23)
Yeah, mean, everybody is not, everybody doesn’t have to be in front of a camera too, right? Like if, no matter what you come off inauthentic, whether it’s a script or you’re just saying it because you’re not comfortable in front of a camera, I would just like, you know, take a step back and not do that thing, right? Like becoming off inauthentic is probably the worst thing you can do as a brand. It will destroy all that trust you’ve built over time. I feel more comfortable with the script. I feel more comfortable because writing,

Jeffro (09:12.026)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (09:16.106)
is a thinking process. So even if you write the script yourself, you’re thinking about what you’re going to say and your cadence and how you’re going to say it, you should practice it, of course, or you’re having chat GPT write it for you. You’re reading it, you’re reviewing it, you’re thinking about it. there has to be a thinking process that happens before, I think you’re going to produce better quality. It’s the reason why actors and actresses like rehearse their lines, even if they know they’re going to go off script. It’s best to know a base of knowledge so that you can deviate from that than to not understand it at all.

Right, you know, again, know, pick your poison on that front. It’s most important that you’re authentic. The second most important thing is that you’re producing value. And if that is easier for you to do with a script, I would, that’s my, that’s at least my cup of tea.

Jeffro (09:50.105)
Hey

Jeffro (10:00.824)
Yeah. And while you’re talking about that, one thought that came to my head is, I think for some reason there’s some assumptions or stereotypes like, okay, I’m to make a video. I’ve got to sit in front of a computer and talk and do a talking head video. But I think if that’s not your element, then it is going to come across forced or awkward. Whereas if you’re a mechanic and you’re sitting at your desktop, you’re like, okay, always make sure you change your spark plugs because blah, blah. That’s boring. But if you’re in the shop and you’ve been thinking, I see the same problem over and over, people keep coming into me. I want to make a video about it and you’re filming yourself in the shop. Like, hey, I just saw this thing again for the third time today. Let me, if you come under here, you look at this, you see how this connects, that’s because blah, blah, blah. Like, okay, you are now naturally talking about the thing and it’s way more interesting and you don’t have to be scripted because it’s an element that you’re comfortable in. So that would be something I would recommend too.

David J Ebner (10:48.226)
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that if you, if you’re a small business owner and you talk directly to your clients every day, I would just, just take the same approach to that video content. Like you just said, like you would explain it to a client the same way, right? You would take them under there and be like, you know, here’s why you get this loud sound coming out of your muffler. There’s actually a giant hole in it underneath your cabin and it’s letting, you know, bad fumes into your, you got to fix that. Right, that’s gonna be way more authentic, like you said. So I would even just pretend the camera is a customer and take it from there.

Jeffro (11:22.5)
So then, I mean, obviously that’s a great start. The next natural question is, okay, good content, is this strategic? Does it help, know, when you’re working with clients, how are you helping make sure that their content supports their growth and isn’t just entertaining people?

David J Ebner (11:37.986)
Yeah, exactly. We have a lot of little sayings around here. We’ve been doing this for 13 plus years now. that usually you come out with a lot of sayings after that. We have one saying that art that doesn’t convert anybody gets an F and becomes a fart and nobody likes a fart. So that’s a little one I keep in my back pocket. to that point, we’re not creating art for altruistic sake. We are trying to build a business.

Jeffro (11:55.074)
you

David J Ebner (12:03.724)
That little frame we put around our art, that boundary is conversion. So we have to work with the creativity, with the things that we want to accomplish inside that frame. So with that in mind, I always tell the clients that I’m working with, and you alluded to this in the intro, about giving away the secret sauce. And that’s really hard to do for service-based companies, because they’re like, I have no intellectual property other than what’s up here, which is what I’m telling people right now. And do I keep offering that to people. But if you lean back into how you can help people, just simply think about helping people and how you can provide answers to the common pain points with your common customers, you’re going to drive so much trust and bring so many people to you over time that it will lead to conversion. Set up different metrics in which to measure your pathway on that, whether it’s time on page or impressions or views or clicks or form fills or literally money, like you can find a pathway to measure a lot of that stuff. But inevitably that production is going to lead to more interest, even if the audience is super small. So lean into that as much as possible into helping people. I once did this sales bootcamp because I lead sales at our company too. And it’s not my, it’s not my initial like skill set. Right. So I went to this bootcamp and this guy had said on the first day that

Jeffro (13:25.209)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (13:29.428)
Selling is just helping help somebody whether you’re have a product to sell them or not Just help them provide answers give them assistance in some ways you help them will be your products and solutions But sometimes it’s not So we end every sales call telling people that our friendship is always free that if they have questions whether we work together or not like feel free to ask us we’re here to help them and From a content production point of view and a way to turn content into sales. We just think about that Mechanism that you’re just helping people all this stuff starts to like the flywheel starts to get like serious momentum.

Jeffro (14:03.339)
Right. And you kind of need that because a lot of this doesn’t happen overnight, right? You’re not just going to make one video and suddenly be super successful. So you have to keep doing it. And if you’ve got the goal of helping people, then you’re going to do it either way, whether it’s turning into sales today or not. And I imagine this comes into, this matters for high trust businesses where the sale doesn’t happen instantly. Maybe it’s a larger budget item, you know, replacing your roof. I don’t do it all the time, but when I do it, it’s.

David J Ebner (14:18.574)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (14:32.665)
you know, it’s gonna be a big deal.

David J Ebner (14:34.924)
Yeah, in very few decisions anymore, low trust decisions. There are some certainly like everyday needs of life. Like, do I really need to trust Charmin to buy their toilet paper? To a degree, I do, but like, okay, I’m not thinking about it that much. But like to your point, I just got a new roof on my house and that really mattered who I trust on that. And then take it to the nth degree with people buying enterprise software for cybersecurity, like trust is everything. That’s all there is is trust. And that might be a five-year sales cycle and a million dollar sale, but you have to start that somewhere.

Jeffro (14:44.515)
Yeah.

David J Ebner (15:03.606)
Somebody’s gotta be thinking about leads two years from now, right? I know there’s so much pressure on people to like generate leads and traffic now three, six, 12 months, like we had to hit our quota, we gotta report our earnings, whatever it may be, but if nobody’s looking out for two or three years from now and the work that we’re doing right now is actually burning those bridges, we’re gonna be screwed if we don’t have that outlook. So this value-based helping mechanism of marketing and sales is really looking toward the future more than anything.

Jeffro (15:33.006)
Yeah. And it’s also just a signal of reliability when you’re posting content regularly helping people. because now let’s say you’re at the point where you are ready for finding someone to do a new groove. you saw a video that someone posted like that was really good. You go to their channel and they’re like, this had one video from a month ago and then two awkward ones from last year. Like, okay, I might keep looking, but if I look and I see that he’s been posting every day, he’s got, you know, Maybe it’s not a ton of views, but it’s consistent. And I watched a couple more of his videos. Like that’s what we do when we’re doing research. We’re going to binge some of the content. And if it’s consistent and helpful and they’re like, okay, I like this guy, I’m going to hire him. And that’s just how it works. Like he didn’t know that you were going to find his stuff two years from when he created it. But because you’ve done that work, you’ve built up that backlog, that library, that trust is suddenly all like called upon at once. And it comes through in those videos.

David J Ebner (16:18.446)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (16:30.902)
It definitely does. a library of content, a library of value really matters. I mean, we’ve got brands we’ve been working with for years and they’ve got thousands of videos and articles now on their site. just when you go there and you see, you see all those, you’re like, this person is an authority on this topic. They’re not just, you know, willy nilly posting one piece every once in a while. Like they are true authority. And that topical authority leads to trust, usually.

Jeffro (16:57.305)
So then what do you say to a client who’s been doing this for a while? They’ve created a bunch of stuff and they’re at a point like, I don’t know what else to talk about. Like, I feel like I’ve answered all the questions that come up a lot and I’m just like kind of running out of ideas. Is that where you tap AI or what’s your approach there?

David J Ebner (17:16.898)
Yeah, there’s this concept that we’re toying with around here. We’re actually building some tools behind the scenes that deploy AI for content generation. And the first one we’re building is all around this kind of concept of what is your audience talking about? So what we want to know is what the chatter is, right? what content is being produced by others, whether it’s a news entity or media outlet, whatever it may be, whether it’s sub forum or a sub Reddit or it’s a you know, a LinkedIn influencer that is talking about this topic area or whatever it is, what is being discussed that is important to our target audience? By narrowing in on kind of like what your target audience values, you will never run out of content ideas, unless you’re producing thousands and thousands of pieces like a month. Maybe you might want to circle back to some other stuff, some other evergreen stuff and make some updates as time goes on. But the world is changing so fast and the attention of our target audience is being pulled in a thousand different directions. So the idea that you’re going to run out of ways you can help them is very unlikely. But AI can definitely help do the of like the research a little bit on that. If I know who my target audience is and I know which news outlets and things that they care about, you can literally do this day with a Google alert. And you can go use AI and build some simple workflows that says every time a Google alert

Jeffro (18:32.633)
Mm-hmm.

David J Ebner (18:44.28)
happens for this keyword phrase, like, write me a quick outline of an article that would be interesting to this target audience. You can start to build these mechanisms that will feed you ideas. But in theory, AI is supposed to be, in all content production, or really any marketing, we talk a lot about funnels, right? I’m trying to make a visual funnel here. It of looks like that. So in a funnel idea, The more you put in the top, the more can come out the bottom, but everything doesn’t come out the bottom. I think a lot of people use AI like a hallway. there’s just, there’s just every idea is just going through all the way to publish, right? And if, if that’s the case and we can start to feed the top of the funnel with some ideas that are generated by like what people are talking about today, what’s urgent and important to my target audience today, then we can have higher quality and more come out the bottom. We can pick and choose and we can, you know, be picky about what we produce and spend more time and energy on the things that will have the highest bang for our buck. So I think using AIs definitely has a lot of benefits on coming up with new content ideas. I think once you have the idea, the differentiators usually come from up here, right? How do we think, what’s our unique opinion on this topic? And as a brand, if you don’t have a unique opinion on something, you should not produce content on that topic. That is only going to hurt you to say something generic.

Jeffro (20:03.193)
Ha

David J Ebner (20:06.542)
If you don’t have a unique opinion about something, it’s probably the wrong target area. If it has something to do with the solution you provide your audience, hopefully you a unique opinion on it, right?

Jeffro (20:15.673)
Yeah. And that makes sense. And I like how you mentioned the fact that you don’t have to publish everything. I actually had to remind myself of this recently because I had an idea for an upcoming piece of content that I want to create and there’s actually variations I can do on it. But I didn’t just do one and say, okay, this is going to be it. Right? Like I, I did almost a dozen different ones and I was looking at them like these couple here are not that good. I probably don’t need to make these. And if you look back at authors and people,

David J Ebner (20:35.778)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (20:44.953)
on LinkedIn that post a lot, they’ll say, you know, I draft a bunch of stuff, but I also trash most of it. And I come back to a few things that I know are good. And then I work on those. That’s what I post. And so you never see all the stuff that doesn’t get out in the world. And so that’s a great reminder.

Um, there was one other thing I was going to ask you. Um, I know we’re coming closer to the end of our time here. Oh, so another way people create content, uh, we see like Dan Martell, V. Um, and others talk about, you know, and Alex Ormosi, right? The documentation, like it is the content, right? You just record everything, give it to an editor and they create clips and posts and videos out of it. Right? So there’s, uh, that’s usually not something that a small business owner can do because they don’t have a big team. There’s a version of it where, yes, you record your Zoom calls and client calls or whatever, and you could pick stuff out from there. So is that something that you see to be effective or worth doing at that scale?

David J Ebner (21:33.912)
Yeah.

David J Ebner (21:48.694)
Yeah, absolutely. I it’s essentially like on the level of reality TV becomes your content, right? You just have somebody following you around all the time. Like that’s great for those people that you mentioned, but unrealistic for most brands. However, deploying AI can help with this too, deploying AI bots for listening purposes on calls that you have. A lot of brands that I know will have just…

Jeffro (21:56.974)
Yeah.

David J Ebner (22:14.19)
general brainstorming calls where they’ll talk about the target audience, what they’ve learned today, talking to your customer success or who deals directly with your clients. Even if it’s you as a business owner, you’re going to hear tons of things on those calls and in those conversations that can produce content. People constantly talk about things that are bothering them or hard to do. And anything that’s bothers somebody or is hard to do in your target audience is something that if you have a unique opinion about, you should create content. So there’s plenty, there’s a plethora. We do tons of ideation calls and subject matter expert interviews. Typically we’ll just have brainstorming calls with our clients saying like, we came up with all these ideas based on things we’ve read. Here’s what we’re thinking. What do you think? And then we just start talking and record the whole thing. And then out of that comes usually like three months worth of content ideas, just that one conversation for an hour. So this idea of documenting your processes is great. Even for service-based companies, like if your business could use some standard operating procedures, some SOPs about how to do certain things, those are great jumping off points for content. Because typically, if you’re providing the service to people as your product, how you do it, some of the steps in the process which you look for key differentiators, those are all wellsprings of content that you can produce. And again, you’re giving away the secret sauce, but I promise you, nobody is buying, most likely nobody is buying from you just because of how you do what you do. They’re buying from you because they don’t have the time to do it. They have more trust that you’re gonna do it at a higher quality than they will. Or they simply just have the budget so they’re gonna buy it, right? So if you think giving away your secret sauce is gonna make you lose clients, I would call that to question, because I don’t know many, brands that that’s happened to.

Jeffro (23:59.61)
Well, especially now because we have AI knowledge and information is not, it’s easily obtainable. can find out pretty much anything. I just ask AI, how does this work? Or how would I do this? And it’ll tell me that’s not the problem. Now I know, but I still don’t have the tools to do it. I don’t have the experience to know, you know, what to look out for. And so to your point, like that’s, that’s what matters. Like, sure. Tell people. And that validates maybe what they’ve been hearing and they know you’re an expert and then they can hire you to actually.

David J Ebner (24:15.555)
Yeah.

David J Ebner (24:26.338)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (24:29.443)
do the thing.

David J Ebner (24:30.913)
Exactly.

Jeffro (24:32.471)
Okay, so what last question for you? What’s one shift that a business owner can make this week to kind of start using their story more effectively in content so that it connects with their their followers or viewers or whoever.

David J Ebner (24:45.324)
I think taking a little bit of time, if you haven’t done this already and building kind of like a traditional message map is a great exercise to really understand how to tell you a better story and how to connect with your target audience. And by message map, mean kind of like a simple grid that you have every single one of your target audiences, your personas on the left side, and then you have kind of like what their main pain point is, the solution you have for that problem, and then how combining the solution to that pain point makes their life better.

Like how is their life better now? And by working through that and just writing that out for every single one of your personas, every single one of your solutions that you offer, every single one of their pain points could be actually, it could be quite a large document by the end. That’s going to give you a lot of understanding about your key differentiators, how you make people’s lives better. And by telling those stories, not specifically like we made, you know, Josie’s life better by doing this, but saying like, here’s some advice that can help. If you have this pain point, help solve your problem that is gonna make your brand story more about your audience than about you. And the problem we see with a lot of brands is usually they start off with their brand story being about the founder, then it usually evolves to being about the brand and inevitably like the last level of evolution, it’s actually about the audience. And the faster we can get from it being about the founder to it being about the audience and taking kind of those elements out of it, the sooner you’re gonna see a return on the investment and time that you put into your content.

Jeffro (26:10.093)
Yeah. Awesome. Well, that’s a great place for us to end today. I appreciate you, David, coming on the show and reminding us that how we tell the story, just as important as what we offer and what we’re doing, because our world is getting filled with recycled content, all the AI posts and everything. So keeping this perspective on customer first value based content is more important than ever. So guys, if you want to see how story first content can drive your business growth.

Check out contentworkshop.com, connect with David on LinkedIn. And if you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who’s struggling with content strategy. Leave a review for this episode on Apple or Spotify so we can keep bringing you people like David to help you dominate the digital space. And that just means help more people online, right? So thanks again, David. That’s all for today. Take care, everybody, and we’ll see you next time.

David J Ebner (26:59.48)
Thank you.