Austin Armstrong: 0:00

Virality is great, y'all, but if you don't have the systems behind it, views and likes don't pay the bills.

Joeri Billast: 0:08

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. My name is Joeri Billast, I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really excited to be joined by Austin. Austin, how are you?

Austin Armstrong: 0:21

Joeri, I'm so great. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much for the opportunity, my friend.

Joeri Billast: 0:26

Thank you so much, Austin, for coming here. I directly feel your energy, even if we are far away from each other. Guys, if you don't know Austin, Austin Armstrong, he's the CEO of Syllaby. He's the co-founder of AI Marketing World Conference. He's a number one best-selling author. We come back to that, Austin. And he's also an international speaker. Yes! And yes, wow, 4 million followers on social media, maybe already more as we speak. It's interesting you mentioned your book because actually a common friend of ours, Angus, who is living here in Lisbon, mentioned that I posted about my book, which made also the top 10 on Amazon, and your book was all at the same time. Amazing. Congratulations to you. You know, we both made, I think, the number one spot at some point, so really that's uh that's really fun. You know, if you write, you get content and you can get people uh yeah, consuming it. Yeah, great. And people that listen to my podcast, they know I dive straight in, Austin. So you created so much content already. And when you look now back at posting thousands of videos, what was actually the moment that you realized that you're not just a content creator, but also a business builder who uses content as leverage?

Austin Armstrong: 1:43

Yeah, that's the whole that's such a great question. I'm glad you brought that up because it's it's literally the entire thesis of my new book is don't be a content creator, be a business owner who creates content. Virality is great, y'all, but if you don't have the systems behind it, views and likes don't pay the bills. You have to have back-end systems in place. And so when I first realized that is it is really because my main social media platform that was generating the most amount of leads and sales for my business was TikTok. And I had a lot of success on on TikTok. I was generating a ton of leads, and I was active on other my other social media, but I wasn't really paying attention to it that much. And Joeri, my TikTok got banned at one point. And that was the exact moment that was a huge triggering factor for me of oh my gosh, all of my eggs are in one basket. If I'm I'm only creating content here and my single uh lead generation sources coming from TikTok, that I I don't have a business because this is rented territory. So it forced me to figure out all of the other platforms: YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, ThreadsNow, every other platform out there, you have to have an active presence and content strategy on. And then just over the years is as well is developing multiple streams of income. Going viral is is is great. You can have an amazing piece of content, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to make a lot of money. I have a lot of friends that have hundreds of thousands of followers, some of them a million plus, but they don't have any business behind it. They're just trying to do brand deals, sponsorships, promoting other companies. They are not even monetized because they live in a country where monetization, ad revenue hasn't rolled out for them. And there's so many content creators that are going viral, they're creating pieces of content, but they don't know how to make any money. They're just doing it just for fun or for their ego or for whatever reason. And so you have to develop multiple streams of income to, and and that's it, it's so important to diversify uh what you're doing so that all of your eggs are not in one basket. If you get taken off of a platform, if uh a topic dies, uh you know, whatever, you're just you're just safe. So it's been quite the journey, but that that was that's been my experience.

Joeri Billast: 4:21

Yeah, that's interesting because I also say to people, Austin, make a backup of your LinkedIn contacts and everything you have on LinkedIn because you never know what can happen. Even if it's not your fault, you can lose it because it's on a rented platform. Now uh Yeah, and it's interesting that you mentioned how people just chase these numbers, yeah. Uh, but it's also about building trust, not just about making funny videos and to get engagement. It's also like one of the things in my book that I mentioned, building trust is important. What do you believe, actually, that maybe most people misunderstand about the relationship between reach, between trust, and then the long-term growth?

Austin Armstrong: 5:04

Yeah. You you have to remember that social media is social, social. It's a two-way conversation. If you're just putting out content to go viral or memes, and you don't you're not building trust, you're not building community, you're not building a relationship with the people that you're reaching. Even if you have some of the back-end business systems in place, you're not gonna sell anything, or you're not gonna sell as as much as you possibly could. So your personal brand is essential. What are the things that you, your page, your business, your profile stand for? What do you want to be known for? What will people agree with you on? What will they disagree with you on? What are the stances that you take? And then you have to build that trust over time by showing up consistently, providing incredibly valuable information that makes them go, wow, I want to share this with somebody else. I want to save this piece of content later so that I can reference it because it's so good. I know that this content is going to make an impact in my life if I just take action on it. Your content needs to be that good. And then you need to build rapport with everybody by responding to as many comments as as you can. Don't take those for granted. Ask questions online when you put really valuable information out there, you're gonna get some follow-up questions that are pretty specific. Take the time to respond to some of those people because that's how you're gonna build and nurture relationships. That's how people are gonna become brand advocates for you, talk highly of you, and say, you know, most people just post on content, but Austin actually takes the time to respond to people, they'll they'll tag other their friends in your comments section and be like, everybody, just go follow Austin because he shares really good information, but he also takes the time to follow up and and respond and answer specific questions. Um, that's that's why it's so important. If you want to have you, you wanna you wanna sell anything, you you have to have that trust, you have to build that rapport online, you have to respond to people and and build connections.

Joeri Billast: 7:14

Absolutely, and you put out a lot of content so people see that people react and you take the time. Yeah, that's how actually how we connect it is through the content, actually. Yes, so you're posting and so you common friends, and this of course then creates a community, creates the rest. And that's actually how you build the podcast. Also, start from zero, just making content consistently and showing up with interesting guests, and that's my audience loves it. Now, another thing you talk about, because I've been following your content, of course, is about series, content series as a growth engine. Yeah. Can you talk a bit about that? How marketers can think about series, not maybe as formats, but as real assets.

Austin Armstrong: 7:57

Yeah, yeah. You have been following. I just did a great post on that yesterday or two days ago or something. Having a video that's a recurring series allows you to and that a series that works, you can test different series, but it becomes a sustainable growth engine. So what a series essentially is, is a part one, a part two, talking about a particular core theme, having a very similar opening to the video or structure of the video so that the middle of it can be swappable. So I'll give you a couple examples. Right now I'm actively doing a series of Chat GPT secrets you should know. And every single video I open it up with Chat GPT secrets you should know part 34, ChatGPT Secrets you should know, part 17. So that's a recurring series with the same opening hook I just changed the number out. And then the middle of the video, this is the sort of the bulk, the value of the video. I will, it's a new tip every single time. It's a new Chat GPT strategy or update or feature, some sort of tutorial in there. And then I'll always end every video in that series with follow me if you want to master Chat GPT. So it's a it's a package of uh a recurring opening hook, swappable information that still fits within the series, and then a recurring closing call to action as well to wrap it up. Series for me have generated billions of views organically, billions with a B. Another very popular one for me is these five websites feel illegal to know. It's sort of a back and forth sketch type of video series uh where I'll be sideways and I'll say these five websites feel illegal to know, and then in a different outfit, I'll respond to myself and be like, if they're illegal, then why would you tell me? And so it's a banter, and then I show a useful website um in my browser, and then it's back to to a reaction in the other outfit of like, is that gonna get me in trouble? It's kind of silly, but I can change out and swap the different websites that are in that series every single time, but it still fits that format of these five websites feel illegal to know. Every video is is five unique websites and some different reactions, and then I'll end it with, you know, you just earned yourself another follower. So same structure. If you like, we've done this for clients as as well. We had a a gold jewelry buyer and seller, and they they melt down gold, jewel, gold, silver jewelry. And well, we had a a series that did tens of millions of views for him, real or fake. And it'll start with just holding a big item of like big gold. Is is this giant gold finger, is this real or fake gold? And then it goes into the education process and then and and then and then ends it with a specific call to action. But that's a recurring series. So if you can find a series that works really well for your niche, your business, whatever you're creating content around, it takes the the load off of you, but it becomes a predictable series that people know to continue to come back for. And you can get a lot of followers, a lot of engagement, a lot of binge watching as well. People all of my Chat GPT secrets series, for instance, are in a playlist on TikTok. And so if somebody comes in on, I think I'm on part 35 now, many people will go into that playlist and watch all 35 videos, and those are massive ranking factors on TikTok and search engines for me.

Joeri Billast: 11:41

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense because this you give people a reason to come back and to follow. Actually, to compare this with my podcast. I got the feedback from my audience what is that the 20, 30 minute length of a podcast is ideal because people can listen in one time to it, or if they are in the car, they can binge listen to it. That's what he told me. Yeah. Now, uh Austin, of course, we are in the AI era, yeah. AI has lowered the barrier to content creation dramatically. So, what actually now becomes the new unfair advantage for brands, for founders in this new landscape?

Austin Armstrong: 12:18

Well, I'm gonna shamelessly plug my own tool Syllaby there. Thanks for the the setup. But yeah, I I I got into the AI world about a little over three years ago. I I probably about three and a half years, I've been using AI tools early, early Chat GPT before it was it was public. Started using Jasper or used to be Jarvis, AI for for content creation. And there are so many opportunities that it's getting bigger and and better in everything, not just content creation, but uh recently I've really been uh a bullish on vibe coding. So you can create your own software tools now and launch them, fully deploy and sell them, even without even being technical. You don't need to learn to code anymore. But so a huge opportunity that you can take advantage of is the video space right now. So I come from a marketing agency background. I I did done for you marketing services for about 12 years and turned everything that I was doing into my startup Syllaby. So it's Syllaby s-y-l-l-a-b-y.io, and it basically automates everything that I was doing on the organic video marketing side of things. So, what Syllaby does is it shows you trending viral topics that your customers are searching for. So it takes out the guessing game of I don't know what topics to create. It'll automatically generate the script for you, it automatically generates the videos for you. And we use the latest AI video generation models as well. So Google VO3 and Sora 2 and Kling 2.6 and Seed Dance Pro, all of these latest AI video generation models you can use inside Syllaby automatically. You can create your own perfect videos, and then you can connect all of your social media accounts, and you can schedule and publish and fully optimize to all of them. Within Syllaby, you can actually create 30 days of videos up to five videos a day on unique topics in your industry that can drive website traffic back to your lead magnets or anything that you want to sell within a couple of minutes. And so it's a huge opportunity right now to leverage tools like Syllaby and blanket your competitors. Because they're going to be leveraging these AI tools as as well. And we've just created a crazy opportunity for you to get your your name, your business, your word out there faster.

Joeri Billast: 14:57

Sounds indeed really like unfair advantage. And indeed, there are wonderful tools like Syllaby. And I also see you're posting about this. The AI landscape is evolving all the time. Um, and so it's now the moment to take advantage of it. Now, talking about Syllaby, I also I also heard, I think, that it was built after deep user interviews. So I'm also curious what surprised you the most about the emotional, psychological blockers that people have around video, around visibility?

Austin Armstrong: 15:31

Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So yeah, we've done, oh my gosh, thousands of user interviews. I mean, just at we were talking about Web Summit at Lisbon, Portugal. I a quick uh story about that. Yes, we got signups from sponsoring that, but the real benefit from from sponsoring and having a booth all three days at Web Summit was that we did over 500 in-person demos of Syllaby in three-day period. That's 500 plus user interviews, just real data of why did you come to our booth? What language attracted you to our booth? What do you want this tool to do? What are your expectations? Did we meet them? Did we fall short? Where are you getting hung up? What is this useful? What is your specific use case? We got all of this valuable information. And anything that you want to build or create in in your life, you have to talk to users and undercover what those real pain points and problems are. You don't want to just have a vitamin, something that's nice to have. You want to have a painkiller. You want to create something, a software tool or whatever it is that you do that solves real problems. And so some of the problems that that we've uncovered over the years that prevent from people from just taking action and creating videos is they don't like to show up on camera. They they feel self-conscious, they don't want to be on camera for whatever reason. Maybe they're in an industry where they are not allowed to be on camera. Maybe you're in a regulated industry where you're not allowed to provide financial advice or or or talk about something in particular, and you cannot or will not have your face on camera for whatever reason. But also not knowing what topics that your customers are searching for and just kind of scattershotting ideas and running in place because it's it's not working. You don't know what topics to create, you don't know what to say on camera. So we have a script generation tool in there that that follows my video framework, my start video framework, which I have fully outlined in in my book, Virality, as well. But we outline the scripts for you in a format that performs really well. We connect to all of you, you don't have to learn how to edit. So it takes time to learn how to do video editing. It's it's very time consuming and and tedious to know all of the nuances of that. And it's hard to publish on every social media platform. There's like 10, there's like at least five, six major social media platforms that everybody's telling us that we should be active on. But y'all are busy, you don't have time to publish on every single platform. And with Syllaby, we automate that entire thing. So all of those were pain points that were brought up to us over and over and over again. And we're like, well, let's just solve this. We can we can automate this entire process. And so in just a couple of minutes, you can create a bunch of videos that don't need you to show to be on camera, on topics that your customers are searching for, with scripts that perform exceptionally well, that are already edited and have all of the transitions and background music and subtitles applied for you, so you don't have to learn video editing, and that automatically are scheduled and published to all of your social media platforms. So we claim, and it really is pretty true, that Syllaby saves you 70% of your video production time and the budget, because you can do all of this automatically in one tool rather than paying for four, five, six different software tools.

Joeri Billast: 19:02

Yeah, sounds really wonderful. This automation, it can go really far. But then the question that I have, and by the way, I was one of the people coming to your booth and talking to your teammates about about the tool. So I've seen how it works. But my question is how should we decide, or maybe how do you personally decide which parts of the content creation should be automated with AI, and which parts should stay human to preserve then the credibility and the trust?

Austin Armstrong: 19:33

Yeah, it it really that's one of the most important things that we as individuals need to decide right now. So you need to the the answer, it's a little bit of a cop out, but everybody needs to decide that on their own. What is their comfort level with how much content is is automated or is using AI? Are you comfortable showing up and being your authentic self? And and in what format? Maybe your authentic. Content is writing text posts or writing content alongside images that you upload. And you want to outsource and automate the video production side of things. Within Syllaby as well, it's not just all or nothing with AI videos. We want you to create videos however you feel comfortable. And so we have our own custom video editor in there. And so you can upload your own videos and edit your own videos in there and just use it to schedule and publish. So you can use Syllaby to find topic ideas and write scripts. And then you record the video yourself being authentic and showing up for your audience and then edit them. And then Syllaby will schedule and publish them out. So it'll still save you a ton of time if you want to just show up. But we all have to make those decisions ourselves. I absolutely think that you should show up and show up consistently. Maybe it's the comments that you respond to. Don't let AI automate your comment responses. Let that be you to build trust and rapport. But we all as individuals need to make that decision of how much we automate versus how much that we show up. And everyone's spectrum is going to be a little different.

Joeri Billast: 21:12

Yeah, absolutely. You emphasize thinking like a business owner first. Yes. By the way, I love the cover, Austin. Thank you. Right. You can just put it in the right, yeah, in the right position. It's very smart, guys. If you haven't seen the cover, check it out. Yeah, but it makes people speak about it. And it's shareable. But you emphasize thinking like a business owner at first. In my book, I also talk the future CMO. I talk also about a similar idea. I want to ask you how do you see the role of the modern CMO evolving in the AI-driven content economy?

Austin Armstrong: 21:55

Well, I love the phrase AI will not replace you, but the business owner or the individual who uses AI probably will replace you. And this goes for all roles, including CMOs. So the role of the CMO is really to drive the overall marketing strategy, go-to-marketing strategy, inbound, outbound, all aspects of marketing and discoverability out there. And so the the CMO should use AI to be more productive, but fill in their own gaps. So one thing I love to do is a time inventory, for instance. So whether you're a CMO or whether you're just an individual that wants to use more AI to be more productive or just add to your workflow, what a time inventory is, is from the moment you wake up until the moment that you go to bed. And you can focus on just on your work schedule if you want, but for the purpose of this, just the every task that you do, put a start time and an end time. Your level of enjoyment on that task, you like it, you dislike it, you're indifferent, or it's mandatory. Like, you know, waking up is is mandatory, brushing my teeth is mandatory. It's you know, it does I have to do those things. And then associate a dollar value with each task as well. Is it worth your time? Is this if you solely focus on this thing, is it uh a high ROI of your time, or is it a low ROI of your time? And once you do that practice for about a a week or two weeks, you're gonna notice some trends. That there are certain tedious things or things that are low ROI on your time and things that you either do not like or are indifferent to. And then you want to seek out AI tools and solutions for those things. So to essentially buy back your time. Great book by Dan Martell. But that's essentially what this practice does is it allows us to either hire out, automate, or use an AI tool to take that task off my plate, freeing up more of my time to spend on marketing strategy, go to marketing strategy, meeting with key decision makers, working on joint venture deals, anything, anything along the lines that that are a high value ROI for a CML. And so that's typically the process or framework that I would walk somebody through. And it's going to be different for every individual person.

Joeri Billast: 24:30

That's interesting because I questioned myself about what should we automate with AI and so on, and the dollar or the euro is important to value, but also what do you love to do? What's what do you hate to do? You just mentioned it too, uh, so this is it. You don't love to do okay, give it to AI if you want to do something that you love to do with yourself. Now, about the I would say the length of the content. Short form content, of course, we know it creates speed, you can create a lot out there, but brands also need that depth. So, how should marketers design content systems that balance that? That it balance the fast attention, we tend the long-term brand equity.

Austin Armstrong: 25:14

Yeah, short form content and text-based content and images is just easier to make than than a long-form video. It just takes a lot more time to outline and produce and edit a long-form video, more so than any other format of content. So inherently, I would just do less long form and and more of the simpler short form content. So for me, for instance, about 70, 80% of the content that I create that is just bringing in new eyeballs, just constant touch points, just staying top of mind everywhere. I'll do maybe one to three short form videos a day. Text posts are quite simple for me to post and generate now because I've even built some AI tools that generate the text for me. I'll post like five to ten, particularly on Facebook, every single day. And then for long form video content, maybe one a week. If you can do more, fantastic. Uh long-form text or long-form video content will convert more. It just historically will convert better than short form content. You want to, yeah. And then one, two, three per week is is is a great cadence. If you can do three long-form videos per week, you're doing better than 99% of everybody out there right now, especially if AI can help you. But it just does take longer. It's it's harder to do. I personally don't enjoy it as much. I don't I don't enjoy creating long-form videos as much as I do creating short form videos and text-based content. So that tends to be where I spend the vast majority of my time.

Joeri Billast: 26:58

What I love to do, Austin, is because I love to create podcasts like recording right recording right now, where you're creating content, then repurposed it. Like a concept in my book is called fractal storytelling, so that you can't repurpose. Then of course, you create short video content based on long form video content. But of course, it's not always as engaging or as built than for the typical virality, of course. Yeah. The time goes fast, but I wanted to ask you something else. Maybe you know, or maybe you heard. I am organizing a retreat here in Sintra where I live, actually, close to uh and it will be an AI marketing retreat. It will be in April. I will have CMOs there. And imagine you are there and you are advising this room of people. What would be something, a core principle that you would challenge the month first?

Austin Armstrong: 27:52

A core principle that I would challenge. Challenge you, challenge the audience.

Joeri Billast: 27:59

Challenge the other marketers, CMOs that are there in the room. They come with an open mindset around marketing, around AI. They are there to share challenges, they are there to share wisdom with each other. And maybe from your experience, building listening to your audience, comments that you get, questions that you get, is there maybe something, and maybe there isn't something, but you would challenge them on.

Austin Armstrong: 28:23

Yes, what what comes to mind there there is one uh buzzword and thing that morally and ethically I disagree with that's happening in AI right now, and that's AI UGC with avatars. I was just talking about this earlier. I'm not gonna name any company names, but there are some avatar companies out there that are pushing you to create fake product ads or fake product reviews using AI avatars. It's a fake, it's a fake, it's a real product, it's a fake review. This is an FTC in the United States violation. I'm not sure if it's an EU violation, but it should be. This is very morally and ethically wrong. Get real reviews from products. Don't use AI to create fake reviews. You will get fined and you will lose trust from the audience that you're trying to get sales from as well. And it's a big buzzword AIUGC. Just because there are buzzwords out there doesn't always mean that you need to chase those trends. Do a self-reflection and and ask yourself is this something that I I stand for or do I stand against? And I am very pro AI. I am extremely pro-AI in in a lot of different areas and and avenues. I don't think that you should solely rely on AI for everything that you do and all of your content. But AIUGC is just one aspect in particular that just really bugs me to my core, and I've been fairly outspoken uh about it. And so I would challenge anybody about about that in particular.

Joeri Billast: 30:13

I love that, Austin. I knew I needed to ask you a question like that. So, yes, I love that you really give your opinion and your art there. That's also I think why people like the content because it's authentic. And guys, my listeners, people come on the show, they show up as they really are. Austin, it's such a pleasure to talk to you, to speak with you. So many golden nuggets we had from you today. Now, if people they want to follow you, they want to find more about Syllaby and so on, where would you like me to send them?

Austin Armstrong: 30:46

Yeah, you can just go to Syllaby.io, s y l-l-a-b-y.io if you want to give it a shot. You can go to my website directly, AustinArmstrong.ai, and that'll have all my links and contact info and information about my book and everything that you need from there.

Joeri Billast: 31:03

Amazing. As my listeners know Austin, there are always show notes, there are always a blog article, everything that Austin mentioned, and also the links will be found in there. Um, yes, Austin, thanks so much. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show. It's a pleasure to be here, Joeri. Thank you so much for your time. Guys, what an amazing episode. I am sure that this episode is useful for people around you, so be sure to share this episode with them, to other entrepreneurs, marketers, maybe even your neighbor. Um, if you're not yet following this show, this is a really good moment to do this and to hit the subscribe button, as I always say. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me these five stars, this will help me reach an even bigger audience. And of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.