Episode
226
Discover how to craft authentic brand stories, balance content with algorithms, and use AI effectively in marketing with insights from expert Danny Cox.
According to Danny Cox, our expert guest on the Content Amplified podcast, content all comes down to one thing—telling the right story.
Danny has a rich background in digital marketing, with experience ranging from top agencies like Weber Shandwick and Razorfish to launching his own ventures. His passion for content marketing and storytelling is evident as he shares actionable insights into how brands can craft authentic narratives that resonate with their audience.
Danny emphasizes that the foundation of great content isn’t just quantity—it’s purpose. “At its core, an organization exists for a reason,” he explains. “It’s not just about producing content to feed the beast but using that content to reflect the brand’s purpose and mission.”
Too often, businesses fall into the trap of churning out content without a clear reason. Danny warns against following trends blindly or creating content just to game algorithms. Instead, he advocates for a strategy rooted in:
As businesses grow, they often lose sight of their original purpose. Danny explains that early-stage founders usually have a clear “why,” but as the company scales, that sense of purpose can dilute. How can marketers reignite the passion that once fueled the brand?
Here are Danny’s key recommendations:
While staying true to your story is critical, marketers still need to navigate the realities of SEO and social media algorithms. Danny acknowledges this tension but offers a balanced approach:
With AI-driven content tools becoming mainstream, Danny offers a nuanced take on how marketers can leverage this technology without losing authenticity:
Danny leaves us with a powerful reminder: “Content marketing is more than just a tactic—it’s a way to build lasting relationships with your audience. When you stay true to your story and deliver consistent value, you’ll create not just content, but connection.”
Whether you’re just starting out or managing a large-scale content operation, Danny’s insights are a valuable guide. By focusing on purpose, authenticity, and audience-centric storytelling, your brand can cut through the noise and truly amplify its impact.
Ready to rethink your content strategy? Take a step back, ask yourself why your brand exists, and start telling the story that only you can tell.
(Transcript is AI generated, we apologize for any errors)
Ben (00:25)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Danny. Danny, welcome to the show. Danny, it's gonna be a fun conversation. I'm excited for the subject, but before we dive in, a couple things we love to do to get to know our guests, tell us about your background and history. And then we always ask, what do you love about content and marketing?
Danny Cox (00:30)
Thank you.
Awesome. So I have had a fun and varied career across the digital marketing ecosystem. Everything from working for large holding company agencies like Weber, Shanwick and Razorfish to starting businesses. I randomly, strangely ended up starting a solar sales business that turned into a solar installation business. And despite going to school for journalism and focusing on website development and brand management.
I have the ability and skills to change out an electrical main panel now. So you never know where things will take you occasionally. But I have been able to work on brands big and small and have gotten to do pretty much everything there is when it comes to the marketing ecosystem, especially from the perspective of content marketing and have tried to do my best to put my journalism degree to good use.
Ben (01:32)
So Danny, today's conversation is gonna be fun. Before we were talking, know, and before we started recording, really we were talking about what you love and what you're passionate about. And this element came out, this theme of telling the right story and not just producing content for the sake of content and even like following some of these metrics. But when we talk about telling the right story of a business.
What does that mean to you and how can we start to discover the right story and how does that impact the rest of our content marketing?
Danny Cox (02:02)
Yeah, awesome question. For me, it stems to a lot of the same conversations that I have with clients when we're talking about brand work, for example. Like you hear questions like, what's your why? What's your North Star? And it's easy to chalk it up to platitudes or cliches, but having that vision of why we exist as an organization, whether it's a nonprofit or a for-profit or a startup, regardless of what you have, an organization at its core is
an artificial person and it is there for a purpose. Regardless of what it's there, there's a reason why you filed the paperwork and spent the money with the secretary of state to have it recognized. And so really understanding and remembering what is the reason that we're here for helps tremendously from my perspective in terms of defining what the strategy should be and what success looks like. Because at the end of the day, it's easy to get excited about content marketing. It's easy to listen to the podcasts and the articles about
You need to feed the beast. need to create this situation and be your own publisher. And those are all true, but they're powerful tools that need to be used for the right reason. And that's where having that moment of introspection, of reflection of why are we here? What is our purpose for existing? Who are we trying to serve? And what are we trying to get them to do? Will help dramatically in terms of making sure that you're in the right channels, that you're with the right frequency, that you have the right messaging points.
that are going to affect that change or inspire that emotional connection that you're trying to make with your intended audience.
Ben (03:30)
I love that. So when your business starts to grow, can imagine early on the founders have a lot of this why, and it probably comes out in their content and things like that. But as a business starts to grow, I can imagine maybe sometimes the why gets lost. How can marketers and people across the business kind of rekindle that fire and understand why again, you even started and why it's even worth pushing forward with this business and helping customers.
What are some recommendations there to really make that why, you know, penetrate the entire business?
Danny Cox (04:03)
Yeah, that's a great question. Aside from just the platonic, it being the right thing to do of trying to make sure that you have alignment and making sure everyone's rowing in the same direction, those are all good things to do. But what I think we're seeing across B2B and B2C is that brand matters. And the definition of brand, different people have different definitions for it. And where I see there being really
a lot of value in investing in it is you see new organizations like Liquid Death, for example, that has started out, you know, in a category that has traditionally been considered boring and they have stuck out and really resonated, especially with a marketing audience, because they're doing things that I think there's a lot of pent up feeling like, we would never be able to do something like that. We could never get away with doing some of the things that they're doing. But they're creating an emotional connection in a category that
normally is very boring and focused more on purity and like occasionally taste, but it's table stakes across the board until you inject that element of storytelling, that element of creativity, because these are things that are innately human that we crave. Like you see paintings in caves from before we had verbal language because there's this innate human drive to express ourselves and to tell stories and connect in that way.
And so it's easy to lose track when you've got a giant organization, but by really making an internal commitment to what our brand values are, what our mission is, what our vision is, making sure that your team is marching along to that drumbeat and really has a clear understanding of what the organization is trying to achieve is going to help that permeate through the different channels that you're working on.
Ben (05:48)
I love it. So, you know, you talked about feeding the beast and I think that's such a good description. You know this everyone's a publisher and we need to act like a media company. When it does come to producing content, obviously we are trying to impact Google rankings and there's LinkedIn algorithms and things like that. How do we balance telling our authentic original story that's going to impact and, benefit other people and build our brand?
while still feeding some of the beasts so at least our content gets some exposure. How do you balance those two things?
Danny Cox (06:22)
That's a great question and there is not an easy answer to it because it's a situation where we're playing in playgrounds that other people control and we're really trying to find the right ways to make sure that we get the visibility. I do think that there have been updates with the algorithms and LinkedIn specifically made an announcement a couple of months ago that their goal was to extend the shelf life of content that they wanted people to focus more on creating actual value that was going to have
a longer shelf life than just whatever trend is happening right now. And I think that the AI overviews from Google is trying to do the same thing where the goal is ultimately to connect users with content that is valuable. And that's where I think if marketers stay focused on who are our core audiences, who are the people that matter to us as an organization and what are the topics that are interesting to them, how can we add value?
Because you also don't want to fall into the trap of only telling your own story and talking about the latest product and pricing updates. Because if you've been to a party and you have somebody that only talks about themselves, that's not somebody you talk to for a very long time. But when you have people that are integrators, that are connectors, that tell things in an exciting way and have stories that are relevant beyond just their own specific situation, those are the people that you gravitate toward. And that's where the content marketing ecosystem really is a nice
allegory for things that you run into in regular life because if there are brands that are telling stories that aren't about the product that are relevant or interesting or valuable to me, I'm more likely going to continue to open the email newsletter or follow their brands across the social ecosystem because they've demonstrated to me that they're worth that amount of time. And it is not an easy challenge for marketers to over...
come because there are so many different distractions that are competing for Mindspace that you're not necessarily even competing with competitors in a traditional business sense. You're competing with influencers doing a dance trend, trying to capture that same amount of Mindspace. And it's not going anywhere anytime soon. There are more and more ways that we can be distracted and have content pushed at us. So that's where I think for me personally,
the more we can see those natural, innovative, less disruptive and more enhancing content opportunities, people celebrate those. Like if you look across the last 30 years, a lot of the most viral moments have not been from an artistic standpoint. It comes from commerce because it has a large enough platform that there's that sense of relevance and understanding and familiarity, but it does something in an unexpected way that captures people's attention. And it's like, wow, that's, that's really cool. want to tell other.
Ben (09:04)
I love it. So one big technology that marketers everywhere are trying to figure out and have to some degree or another is AI and understanding its role. Some of the boundaries of when they should and shouldn't use AI, where it's productive, where it's not things of that nature. And really mass hordes of content are recreating every day. Like there's so much new content because of AI.
What is your personal philosophy when it comes to AI and telling this original and authentic story, something that matters? Where does the technology help? Where does it hurt? Any pieces of advice when it comes to that?
Danny Cox (09:38)
great question. And it's such an interesting and still early enough in its trajectory that we're still all figuring out collectively how to use it. for me personally, I see a lot of opportunity is in the democratization of creation in that people who may not have had the skills to verbalize or design something on their own have
at least a tool to help get them to a better place of expressing what they're trying to create. I've never been a designer. I don't have the skills to like just draw something that I have in my mind. I have been more on the word side of things. And so for me to be able to go into mid-journey and describe a specific setting that I can see clearly in my brain, but I can't use my hands to make it real, that's a powerful tool. Where I see...
the challenge and the drawbacks is that not every image deserves the spotlight. And I also have a personal place of passion for creators. And I don't see it as something that is a replacement for that because even if we get to the point where you will have a complete inability to tell the difference between a human created image and it.
a generative AI produced image, there's still something to be said for the human aspect of this was in someone's mind and they brought it to life. I think that if it's used as a way to just create more volume and it's just a way to put a speed to market from a garbage standpoint as far as what you're outputting,
that is just going to create more noise and it's going to create a lot of clutter and it's going to turn people off. I also feel like there's a natural life cycle to that. And I feel like we've already seen a little bit of like all the skyrocketing interest already tapering off a little bit. And now it's being used by a more pro-sumer type audience from a concepting standpoint, from a initial, you know, mood board or...
sketch low fidelity, but to then hand it to somebody who has the artistic capabilities to bring that vision to life, because now we're speaking a better shared language. That to me is where there's a lot of value in the space and where I think that will kind of naturally land is just using it as a way to increase the capabilities of a single person in the same way that someone can use a word processor to type a lot faster than they could write out by hand.
for using a pencil to write faster than they could by hammer and chisel. Like there's a natural progression and evolution of the technology. At the end of the day, we still have human minds because generative AI and large language models are trained on things that they've already found. And while there are some innovative patterns and connecting the dots between larger data sets than we as humans have the ability to process at one time, there's still...
that element of parsing the data into something of value. The metaphor that I always come back to is Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the answer to life, the universe and everything being 42, but they lost the question. And that's where I feel like we're at right now is prompt engineering and really understanding what is the question now that we have access to all this information is a different type of creativity. And it's an interesting place for business owners to
and marketers to really focus on enhancing and sharpening those skills. Because if it's just, how can I write more spam and put it in more people's inboxes? It's just gonna clutter the space and not have that value. But if you start to think about it and how can I enhance what I want to actually achieve, suddenly you have a really, really powerful tool that wasn't readily available to most people even a year ago.
Ben (13:17)
I love that. That is one of the better definitions of AI I've heard and how to properly use it. I love how you explain this idea of it's an execution piece. It's allowing someone to have a vision, a dream, this direction, and it can help you execute on that. And if it's a beautiful vision aligned with your audience, it can help you get there and be a tool to do that. But if you have the wrong why, like we talked about earlier,
and you don't have the vision or the connection with individuals, it doesn't matter how well it's executed, it won't hit home. And if your dream and vision is just crappy spam to produce sales, again, that's going to produce a lot of material that's really polished. You know, the term is a polished piece of crap is still a piece of crap, right? And I think that that's really true with AI. And I love how you term that. And I think it ties in well, like you mentioned, the why.
Danny Cox (14:03)
Yep. Yep.
Ben (14:12)
If you have a solid Y AI can benefit you, but if you don't, then it's just going to produce a bunch of garbage. And I think that that's a really cool viewpoint. love it. Danny, I have learned a ton in this episode. We've already run out of time. goes by so fast, but Danny, I'm sure there are plenty of people that love what you've talked about. Would love to connect. How and where can they find you online?
Danny Cox (14:33)
Great question. Best place is LinkedIn. I live and breathe on LinkedIn on a daily basis because I am an enormous nerd and love business as a platform for good in the universe. So that's the best place to find me and reach out and would love to have a conversation and see how we might be able to work together.
Ben (14:50)
Awesome. Well, Danny, again, thank you so much for the insights today. Really appreciate it.
Danny Cox (14:54)
Thank you so much, man. Appreciate
