Human-Generated Wins: Heike Young on Storytelling, Innovation and Why Resonance Beats Reach
ICYMI: Heike Young catches up with 10 Minute Martech on why human storytelling is marketing’s most durable skill.
“The companies that are developing their people-generated muscles right now are the ones that are going to be strong and resilient for that new era.”
In this episode of 10 Minute Martech, Heike Young, consultant, speaker and content creator, joins host Sara Faatz to explore the future of content marketing in an AI-driven world.
From storytelling and innovation to audience-first content creation, Heike makes the case that, while technology will continue to evolve, the marketers who succeed will be the ones who double down on the uniquely human skills that AI cannot replicate.
Heike’s Big Idea: Human Storytelling Is the Competitive Advantage
While much of the conversation around AI focuses on tools, prompts and productivity, Heike argues that marketers should be paying closer attention to what remains constant.
The fundamentals of great marketing haven’t changed. Audiences still connect with stories. People still remember other people. Brands still win by creating emotional connections and delivering value. AI can help marketers work faster and scale execution, but it cannot replace the human experiences, perspectives and narratives that make content memorable. As AI-generated content becomes more common, genuinely human storytelling becomes more valuable.
Heike Young’s 10 Memorable Moments on 10 Minute Martech
1. Taste Is Becoming a Marketing Differentiator
As AI makes content creation easier, a marketer’s unique perspective and creative judgment become increasingly valuable.
2. Outcomes Still Matter More Than Taste
Creative instincts are important, but marketers still need to demonstrate business impact and measurable results.
3. Storytelling Remains the Core of Marketing
The technology may change, but the ability to tell compelling stories continues to be one of marketing’s most important skills.
4. Focus on What’s Durable
Instead of chasing every AI update, marketers should focus on the principles that will still matter five years from now.
5. Innovation Is a Learnable Skill
Great marketers actively look for opportunities to challenge assumptions and test new ideas.
6. Protect Your Innovation Time
Even dedicating 10% to 15% of your schedule to experimentation can create outsized career and business impact.
7. Small Bets Lead to Big Wins
Not every experiment succeeds, but innovation only happens when teams create space to try.
8. People-Generated Content Performs Differently
Heike’s experience at Salesforce showed that creator-led, audience-first content significantly outperformed traditional corporate video strategies.
9. Channel-Native Content Matters
Success comes from creating content specifically for the platform and audience rather than simply repurposing existing assets.
10. Resonance Beats Reach
Trying to appeal to everyone often results in appealing to no one. The strongest brands build deep connections with specific audiences.
Heike’s Martech Hot Take
“Humans, not AI, will generate the most effective and influential content for B2B brands moving forward.”
Heike believes many organizations are overestimating what AI-generated content can achieve while underinvesting in human-created stories, conversations and expertise. As audiences become increasingly exposed to AI-generated content, brands that continue building their people-generated content muscles will stand out and create stronger long-term connections.
Heike’s Inspiration List
When it comes to marketing inspiration, one voice consistently stands out for Heike:
- Jay Acunzo – A marketer and author whose concepts around resonance over reach and becoming your audience’s favorite have shaped how Heike approaches content strategy. His work encourages marketers to stop chasing broad appeal and instead focus on creating deeper, more meaningful connections with the audiences they serve.
For Heike, these ideas serve as a useful reminder that successful marketing isn’t about being everything to everyone. It’s about creating work that people genuinely care about and remember.
Listen to the 10 Minute Martech Episode
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Next Up in the 10 Minute Martech ICYMI Series
Kabir Daya joins us to challenge one of marketing’s most common assumptions: that behavioral data alone is enough to understand customers.
Drawing on lessons from the mental health sector, Kabir explores why treating people like patterns often misses the bigger picture, how empathy and context can reveal what data alone cannot, and why the most effective marketing strategies start with understanding the human behind the behavior.
Want to Keep Reading?
Here’s the full transcript so you can explore every insight from Heike’s conversation with Sara.
Sara Faatz: I’m Sara Faatz, and I lead community and awareness at Progress. And this is 10 Minute Martech.
Heike Young: The companies that are developing their people-generated muscles right now are the ones that are gonna be strong and resilient for that new era. The ones who say, “We know that it’s harder to create people-generated videos and interview shows and articles that actually talk to real people instead of ones that were created by Claude in a few clicks.” We know this is harder, and that’s actually why we’re doing it.
Sara Faatz: That’s Heike Young, consultant, speaker, and content creator. Let’s get started. So, Heike, content marketers are having a moment, in my opinion. As somebody who’s been in the space successfully for quite some time, I would love to hear your thoughts on storytelling and taste in an era of AI.
Heike Young: I think taste has started to come up more in the last few months of my marketing career than it probably ever did across 15 years prior to that. And of course, we’re not talking about how things taste. We’re talking about your taste as a marketer and the unique lens and filter that you bring to culture, the media you consume, and how that translates into the marketing that you create. And I think this is so important because, of course, all of us are using more AI tooling to do our jobs and to be more productive. At least that’s the hope. We could have a whole separate conversation about how productive versus how many more hours we’re actually spending learning these tools is actually happening, but that’s a separate conversation.
Heike Young: But I think that while I totally agree with this emphasis on taste, I also think that as a marketer, you kind of need to make sure to balance that emphasis with all of the other skills in your toolkit. I think that if you are going into a job interview, for instance, and you are talking about your taste level and the great taste that you bring, that’s probably not gonna move the needle as much on you as a candidate as telling stories about the impact that you’ve driven and the outcomes that you’ve had by working on campaigns and programs as a marketer. And so I do think that I temper my view of taste perhaps a little more than some people.
Sara Faatz: Yeah. No, I love that. But you also hit on a key word, which is storytelling. And you’re talking about, you were mentioning it in the vein of in a job interview, selling or telling stories about the work that you’re doing. But storytelling also becomes that much more important, I think, in this new era as well. I would love to hear your thoughts on that and how marketers or content marketers should be thinking about storytelling differently, maybe, in an era of AI.
Heike Young: Yeah. We talk about AI a lot, but I would argue the bigger story here is not what’s new and different and changed with AI and not the latest Claude updates, but rather what mattered in the past that still matters today. What mattered five years ago that’s gonna matter five years from now? What’s durable? That is your marketing strategy. And I’m not super interested in these AI trends just for the sake of them. I’m certainly not refreshing my LinkedIn feed looking for the latest tool updates. I go to social media for stories, for people, and that’s kind of why I keep coming back to content as a discipline day after day, is because the internet gives us this incredible platform to tell stories at scale. And that’s really what marketing is all about. AI is absolutely a tool in how we do that, but it’s not the entire story. And it’s interesting. I recently watched the movie “The Matrix” for the first time in maybe, I don’t know, 15, 20 years, and it’s a great movie.
Heike Young: I highly recommend to anybody who’s listening to this, if you remember it, or maybe you’re way too young, maybe you’re listening to this and you’re thinking like, “I’ve never seen that movie. It came out in the year 1999 or 2000. I have no idea what it’s about.” But aside from that, I watched it recently, and there’s a lot of technology in the movie and a lot of technological updates, and there’s a lot happening with intelligent machines, I’ll say, in the movie. And I think what really struck me was after you watch that, you don’t leave “The Matrix” thinking about how cool the technology was. You think about Neo and Morpheus and Trinity and the characters and their relation to each other and Neo and the imposter syndrome that he was feeling about being the One. And all of those things are still so relevant to all of us today, even if the technology is different or more similar to that than it used to be. That’s all just kind of a moot point. That’s so much more secondary to the human storytelling element.
Sara Faatz: Yeah. I love that. Along those lines, what do you think is the most important thing for a marketer today or somebody in the martech space? Where should they be putting their time, energy, and effort? Obviously, storytelling is incredibly important, but is there a skill they should be learning or is there an area that you would emphasize as more critical today than it was five years ago?
Heike Young: I think one of the most important skills a marketer can have today is the ability to innovate. And I’ve had a lot of different job titles over the years, and one of my favorite job titles I’ve ever had was Content Innovation Lead. And I had this job title many, many years ago, and it wasn’t the most senior job title I’ve had by any means, but it was my favorite because it placed such an emphasis on innovation. And what I mean by innovation is being able to come into a room, look at a strategy deck, come into a situation, and assess what is currently being done and what could be done differently, and how to garner the internal support needed to make that change happen. Being a changemaker in your organization, I think, is so important. Not letting the status quo drive the entire show, but being able to be a person who is an innovator and a voice of revolution even, or of pioneering work inside of your org.
Heike Young: And so for me, what I always try to do in my career, in case this helps anybody out there, is I always try to find pockets of innovation, is what I call it. And so even if today you have a very run-rate list of job responsibilities that you have to do, that these are the parts of your job, you know you need to do these to drive the business forward, it’s literally your job description and you’re gonna get in trouble if you don’t do that stuff, like, you know you have to do it, can you find a way to curry some support from your boss to get 10% of your time, 15% of your time to find a little pocket of innovation and test something? I think throughout my career, I’ve done things that have worked well, I’ve tested some innovative projects that haven’t worked as well, I’ve taken bets that some paid off and some didn’t, but I think ultimately you’re not gonna have those big wins unless you innovate and unless you try something a little bit different. So being able to find a way to do that, wow, that will make you invaluable in your current role as well as any future roles that you decide to take on.
Sara Faatz: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And being able to have that space to be creative and to explore. Do you have an example of one of those innovations that just every time you think about it, you’re like, “Yes,” you’re still energized by it? Is there something that you could share with our listeners that maybe would inspire them?
Heike Young: I was really lucky when I worked at Salesforce to be part of a very innovative, small but mighty video marketing team, is what we called it. And so, we had all these teams that were focused on traditional content marketing, and we were a very small crew. I think it started with just three people and we were just all kind of working on video-specific marketing initiatives. And I was so lucky to be part of this crew. The team spearheaded several very impactful initiatives that grew our Salesforce-branded YouTube channel from about 200,000 to about 700,000 subscribers, which was incredible, incredible growth.
Sara Faatz: Yeah.
Heike Young: And a couple of things that our team did that I think really moved the needle. One was really making a big bet on people-generated content. And we partnered with some industry creators to create content for the Salesforce channel. And you can go find some of those videos. Brian Tong is one of the big creators that we worked with who was incredible in making some videos with us. But essentially, I think it was a different type of playbook because we didn’t pay Brian to make videos for his channels. We were really working with him to create videos for the Salesforce channel. And he was empowered to take our scripts and our messaging and adapt them, make them more YouTube-friendly, do editing that was in a more YouTube-first style, and kind of handle that all on his end as a YouTube creator. And then we published all of that content onto the Salesforce YouTube channel. And huge shout-out to our team and the people that worked with Brian on this project who were so amazing. It was such an incredible thing to watch because the organic results, it was just night and day.
Heike Young: In the past, we published a lot of videos to the YouTube channel that, for lack of a better word, it kind of made the YouTube channel feel a little bit like a parking lot for videos. Like we’d just put them up there, park them on the YouTube channel, and they can kind of hang out. And instead, it was a very intentional strategy to really make things that were YouTube-first in the way that they were created and executed. And the other thing that I’d say made this really impactful was that we made a big focus on creating, aside from just this people-generated initiative, we really placed a big focus on making everything that happened on the YouTube channel YouTube-native. And that went all the way through to the titles and the thumbnails. I think a lot of B2B companies, especially at the time, were basically creating thumbnails that were screenshots of the video, and that was it. And meanwhile, you have major YouTubers who have entire full-time staff that are just devoted to thumbnail creation, and they almost start with the thumbnail before they even go make a video. And so it was really a focus on making everything more audience-first and more channel-first in how it was delivered and executed.
Sara Faatz: Yeah. I love that. Would love to know, along those lines, who are you following right now for inspiration or information?
Heike Young: Jay Acunzo is my favorite person to follow in the marketing space. If you’re not familiar with Jay, definitely recommend you go follow him. He is on LinkedIn. You can subscribe to his emails. You can also find a number of great articles and blogs from him on his website. But Jay has come up with some core marketing concepts that I go back to time and time again. I think that one of the first ones I ever encountered from Jay was resonance over reach. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ll come back to that as a core philosophy of my marketing. It has been foundational to how I approach these things. Another concept that he pioneered is this idea of being a favorite. So you’re not trying to be the most knowledgeable, the most insightful, the smartest brand. You’re literally just trying to be your audience’s favorite. And that gives you permission to be a little bit quirky, be different, only appeal to a specific niche group of people instead of trying to appeal to everyone. Both of those ideas, problem, they have just served me time and time again when I’ve been trying to figure out why doesn’t this strategy feel right? Or I can’t quite put my finger on it, why does this execution plan feel off? And then a lot of times I realize it’s because we were going for reach over resonance or because we were trying to appeal to everyone, which made us appeal to no one.
Sara Faatz: Oh, I love that. I love that. One last question for you. Do you have a martech hot take?
Heike Young: Hot take. I believe that humans and not AI will generate the most effective and influential content for B2B brands moving forward. I think the tolerance for AI-generated content is getting lower and lower. The companies that are developing their people-generated muscles right now are the ones that are going to be strong and resilient for that new era. The ones who say, “We know that it’s harder to create people-generated videos and interview shows and articles that actually talk to real people instead of ones that were created by Claude in a few clicks. We know this is harder and that’s actually why we’re doing it.” I think that those companies are going to be really set up for success, and I think a lot of folks are allowing their people-generated content creation muscles to atrophy in this new world, and they’re not going to be as strong for the new era.
Heike Young: And so they’re going to start to see over time the results of this AI-generated content is going to keep… Those results are going to keep declining, and they’re going to be like, “Oh no, everybody is not talking about us anymore. Our competitors are everywhere and they’re on everybody’s… The names are at the tips of everybody’s tongues and we’re not.” And then they’re going to have to relearn how to do some of this stuff. So, it’s not that we can’t use AI. We would be foolish not to consider some of these amazing technologies available to us today. I certainly use AI for a wide variety of tasks in my daily work. I’m not using it to generate content at scale, and I think that’s the wrong idea. And I do think in some circles today, it is a hot take.
Sara Faatz: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No. But I love that and I could not agree with you more. Heike, it has been wonderful talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time.
Heike Young: Thank you.
Sara Faatz: Listeners, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Sara Faatz, and this is 10 Minute Martech.
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