38: Turning customer stories into growth: Insights from Shopify's head of Customer & Industry Marketing, Génesis Miranda Longo

Today I've got Genesis Miranda Longo. She is the head of Customer and Industry Marketing at Shopify. She works with enterprise brands to build e-commerce strategies and push the boundaries of modern retail. On a personal level, she was born in Mexico, went to college, and was the first woman in her family to attend college and graduated with honors from Cornell University.

On the show today, we talk about industry and customer marketing, what it is, how to do it, telling your customer stories and what their needs are, and how to scale those efforts beyond what you can do just one-on-one. That and much more with Genesis Miranda Longo. Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing? I'm Alan Hart, and this is Marketing Beyond, where I chat with the world's leading chief marketing officers and business innovators to share ideas that spark change and inspire you to challenge the status quo.

Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential. Well, Genesis, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Alan, I appreciate it. Yeah, I can't wait to get to know you a little bit better, and before we get to talking about career and business, you grew up in Mexico?

I did, yes. My understanding is the area you grew up was not necessarily the safest area to grow up, so tell me about that. Yeah, so I grew up in Sinaloa. I was born and raised in Sinaloa, and Sinaloa is known for its narco culture, and so needless to say, it's not the easiest place to grow up, but it does make you grow up really quickly and I would not have changed anything about my upbringing.

I think it's what made me the resilient, confident wayfinding person that I am. It's really shaped everything about me and it has gotten me to where I am today. It's not great, I guess, of the situation, but great that it has turned into a positive aspect of who you are and how you show up in the world. Yeah.

Thank you. You are the head of industry and customer marketing at Shopify. Where did you get your professional start and how did you end up at Shopify? Yeah, so after Sinaloa, I ended up coming to the United States, by God's Grace, ended up at Cornell University and there, I was very focused on the brand side.

So, I loved brands. I was in a food marketing fellowship getting to work with some of the world's top brands, and through that journey I said, "I want to do that. I want to be on the marketing side for these cool brands," but my mom ended up having cancer throughout my time at Cornell. I had two little brothers, one in elementary school and one in middle school.

Oh, wow. I needed to be their caregiver. And so I realized the best, most flexible industry I could go to was tech, because back then, we could not work from home as easily, and in tech, I was at least a little bit more flexible. So I joined a company called Pros.

They are a public company. I was on their finance side, and that gave me an early education on everything to do with SaaS, how SaaS works, how we grow, what investors look for, what product marketing is, what customer success is, just like a full basis understanding. Later went over to Talkdesk to lead industry marketing during the pandemic, which was when contact center at the service was booming, and then that led me to Shopify, where that's where I am now. You still work sort of remote, I think, right?

Fully remote, but traveling a lot. A lot, yeah. Yeah. And we're here at Shoptalk.

My gosh, yes. Yeah, so many trips to Vegas. Tell me about industry and customer marketing at Shopify, like what does that look like? Yeah, it's really two things.

One is getting new customers on Shopify, and helping them discover Shopify, but also meeting them wherever they are, whether that's a place like Shoptalk, or a smaller trade show, or simply online, and then the other one is helping our existing customers grow and be seen, telling their stories and helping others see their growth and see what it is to partner with Shopify and achieve that. So customer stories. Yeah. We're kind of doing one of those now.

We are usually, I'm on the other side. Yeah, so you are a little uncomfortable with me asking you the questions. Yeah. If we have time, I'm going to shoot it back at you.

Tell me a little bit about what telling their stories looks like, and ultimately how does that help you and them in a kind of symbiotic way? Yeah, I see customer stories not as content, but as connection. My favorite thing to do is do this, sit down with a customer on Shopify and hear their stories. Hear, whether how they founded the company or how they're scaling the company on Shopify.

Then that helps me build a personal relationship with them so I can consider them for other opportunities for their own growth as well and then the other side of that is telling their stories to the world because there's a lot of companies maybe considering Shopify that want to see themselves in the stories that we're telling the world, and so that gives our customers a chance to connect with other brands, but also to not feel as lonely, because entrepreneurship or scaling these massive brands can be very lonely.

What does it help you achieve as Shopify, getting your customer's voice out there? Well, full transparency, right? My role is about revenue generation, right? So I use a lot of these stories, not just for the connections for myself, but to also connect our prospects to those customers so that they can feel maybe more confident or see other companies like them have already gone through the migration journey and see the success that they're having on the platform, and it's also really cool for sales to be able to have these stories so that they can go out into the field, and go make some more revenue for Shopify.

How do you think about scaling? Because if you think about it, it's a one-to-one medium at the initial start of it, right? Then how do you think about scaling your efforts? Well, I'm optimizing for connection, so I want to automate and use AI to build systems around everything else that is not me talking to the customer, so that I can spend my time doing what I love, which is this, and so I have built really great systems to identify customers that we should be writing stories for or telling stories of, and then having AI agents do the research for me so that I can just simply focus on getting on the meeting already knowing what I'm asking, what they're about, all of those things that normally would've taken me hours, I can now automate that so that I can spend more time having more and more of the conversations, and then quickly getting those stories out instead of them waiting two to three months to see their story on the internet.

Where has been the biggest learning for you as somebody that does the interviewing and is doing the content creation? Is there one element that you are like, "this one really opened my eyes to something different?" Yeah, I think I've learned that I can automate everything except for this. This is truly the most important part, and having myself beyond all of these calls and getting to know them personally, that's where the real magic is, because even when I'm automating the rest of the process, the research, the writing, like everything else, I can go back and look at it with my eyes having been in the conversation.

Then I can gather all of those insights of doing these at scale and then truly be able to see, okay, these are the trends that I'm seeing among all these conversations, which allows me to then put them together and create content for other brands saying, "Here's what I've learned from these 10 conversations with the fastest growing CPG brands", so being able to do them at scale gives me better insights, but you can't automate this. Yeah. You still have to have the human in the loop.

Yeah, and for editing too. Right. Well, what does the performance engine look like? Like when did you get this going?

Like what does it look like? How do the results look? One is getting the content created, the connection made, and then putting the story out there, but then that story won't go very far if the people internally at Shopify aren't aware that that story is there, because eventually with the scale, we have so many stories and how do you surface the right story for the right prospect or the right customer? And so I've made an agent, her name is Matchy, and she is on fire.

Matchy lives in a Slack channel for our Shopifolk, and so if you are a sales person or if you are a solutions engineer, or customer success manager or anyone else, you can go on there and ask Matchy, "who is a customer like X, Y, Z?" Matchy will serve you up some results, then she'll also tell you if there's already a customer story on them. And she'll also help facilitate the conversation if you want to, if you say, "Hey, this person wants to meet one-to-one." Which is why I think you are going to ask about Shopify champions next.

I am, but before I do that, I want to stick with Matchy for a second. How hard was it to organize your stories and your library of content to make Matchy go? Matchy is pulling lookalike customers from our data warehouse, so that's the full library, however, for case studies, it's simply pulling from our shopify.com/case-studies or even from our partner case studies.

Shopify has a huge ecosystem of partners and they all have a lot of stories, and so we can surface those up too. So if I get it uploaded online, then Matchy can simply pull and help navigate all of those. I mean, sales could technically go in there and find the right story, but Matchy just makes it so much more automated and can also give them more context that maybe they wouldn't have found online. I love it.

I love it. Well, let's definitely talk about Shopify Champions. What is that program? So I built Matchy as the front end, but then on the back end, you need the pool of references to be sourcing from, and so Shopify Champions is an opt-in community of customers who say, "We want to be a part of anything Shopify.

We want to be on a panel, we want to speak, we want, just consider us," right, they're people that are really excited to be voice and spokespeople for Shopify, and so I've created that community. I just started it, so recruiting more and more customers, but it helps me and Matchy identify who the right people are to connect to prospects, or again, to events like this, like speaking at Shoptalk. Then the value exchange is you get referenceable folks in the community that's already using and ambassadors, if you will, of Shopify, but for them, they're getting opportunities to speak, opportunities to create content with you.

Is that the best way to describe? Absolutely, and also the connections. Like I said, entrepreneurship and scaling brands is lonely, and these companies want to be able to connect with others. They want those peer-to-peer conversations, and so they're welcoming the opportunity to be connected through us and Matchy as the matchmaker.

Well, before I transition gears, as a marketer, looking back on all of the things, the great work that you are doing, what are some tips that you would give other marketers that want to do some of what you are doing today? I think just tinkering, playing with AI. I am fortunate to be at Shopify where that is not only suggested, but it's part of our performance reviews to use AI and to use AI well and effectively. We had a memo from our CEO go out saying, Shopify employees all have to use AI and that has since grown, right?

I didn't know what Cursor was a year or two years ago, and then I became a Cursor, probably one of the most marketing use, users. I don't know how to say that. Then after that, they were like, "You know, let's use Pi. Let's use Ghostie.

Let's use all these other tools." So it keeps me on my toes to see myself, not just as a marketer, but as a program manager, and to think, what are the toils that I go through and what can I automate and use AI for to make me better at my own job, which is that connecting with customers, and doing more IRL things. I'm picturing you doing marketing and then vibe coding on the side. I am all the time.

We took a little road trip to Houston this weekend and so I'm on my computer and my husband glances over and he's like, "Who are you?" well, he just sees me typing in my terminal coding away, but that's what I've become in a way at Shopify. I'm a marketer who automates and builds my own tools, so that I can be a better marketer. That's funny.

My wife is making fun of me too, because I nicknamed my personal LLM that I go to all the time has a nickname and she is like, "What are you, are you talking to your friend again?" And I'm like, yes. She is like, don't become one of those people, Alan, and I'm like, okay. All right.

All right. Oh, yeah. I probably talked to my agents more than my husband at this point, but don't tell him that. No, I won't.

Although we just did. But anyway, well, one of the things I love to do is to get to know the people that come on the show a little bit better. My favorite question to ask everyone is, has there been an experience of your past that makes up who you are today? We touched on it a little bit, but my upbringing in Sinaloa was definitely very instrumental in my life.

I learned how to navigate uncertainty, to say the least, and even when I came into the United States and went to school and navigated education, immigration, I would have to go back to Mexico every single summer not knowing if I would get to come back into this country, and that uncertainty of just saying, "how can I maximize my year because this may be my last year here?" That builds grit. It builds resilience. So I would say that, and also knowing what it is to have community that supports you and believes in you no matter where you come from, and now I'm grateful to get to do that with others, and to open up my home to people that may be going through similar situation.

Well, if you were looking back and giving your younger self advice, what advice would you give them? I would tell little Genesis to not wait to be given permission, to just go do it, or to not be asked to do something, but to just go do it. I think connecting that to what we talked about in marketing, I didn't wait for someone to tell me to go build a tool. I just built it because I had the resources to now, and if I didn't have the resources that I can go find them and learn.

I think not waiting for you to be ready is key, and I've just employed that in a lot of areas of my life, like adopting a teenager, even if I was not ready to be a mom, or buying a house, even if I maybe wasn't ready for that either. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Well, what's one topic that you are trying to learn more about right now?

I'm really interested in using, and how people are using AI not just for automation and efficiencies, but for decision making, and how they're using AI to gather more context to make smarter decisions. So I've been really interested in seeing how people are doing that across context, whether it's shopping and using AI to give you more context on how to make the right purchase or in marketing, before I would need to go to data analysts and now I can kind of figure things out on my own.

So that's been a really interesting shift in roles and responsibilities. So I'm interested in learning more there. I'm earlier in my journey than you are, but you start to use it to research and learn information. And then you do kind of like at some point there's like a tipping point where you go, "just go figure this out for me, and tell me what the answer is."

I haven't gotten yet to the point where they actually go do it yet, but I imagine that's coming. I've been having my AI agent in Pi send Slack messages for me, but I do tell it at the bottom, I'm like, "make sure you say it's my Slack handle is glow g Longo. So it's like at Glow's Pi and a little robot. It's like this message was sent from Glow's Pi.

That's funny. That's really funny. Most marketers, and I'm assuming you are, because we have already been talking about all these things that you are learning and looking at. Most marketers tend to be very curious people, and I always am curious what you are curious about in the world.

Oh my gosh, I'm curious about so many things. Parenting a teenager is something I'm very curious about. Farsi is another one just because that's, he speaks Farsi, he's from Iran, but professionally, I'm really curious right now and how new communities are being created. Niche communities, people are, they are craving these people to people interactions.

They're craving communities where they can learn and find a sense of belonging, and so as a marketer too, it's how do I create those communities and those IRL experiences while also automating everything else on the back end. So I'm really curious to see how IRL things, even like how Shoptalk will evolve because people are craving these types of opportunities to meet others. I'm sure you are, you are finding this as you are thinking about it, but it's hard to automate the in-person part, because people are messy, like just inherently, but I agree.

Like we all are craving that human connection. And it's also like, what does a dinner turn into? A work dinner. That's right.

People used to just show up at a work dinner and just sit there and have conversations with the people on their left and their right. That's not how we should be doing dinners. We can be so creative now. I had an event - a couple months back where I got stickers made.

This is like when ChatGPT first started doing image generation. This was last year, and I made everyone a sticker of their pet. Oh, wow. And when we got to the event, I gave all of these, it was, Bark was our customer we were showcasing so pets, so the pet was the theme, but I gave everyone these stickers of pets.

I'm like, these pets are lost. I'm their owner, and that was how I got everyone to mingle and get to know each other instead of just throwing everyone into a room and having them, I don't know, what did we used to do before? And so I am going back to your curiosity question. It's how do we use AI to augment these experiences?

Like I used AI to generate a bunch of stickers of people's pets, but those are what those experiences are now, what are enabling the human connection, and so I think we can continue to explore more and more of those use cases. I really love that example. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, two more questions for you.

What do you think is the largest opportunity or potential threat facing marketers going forward? Well, we've talked about the opportunity. I like to say that before AI, I was a wayfinder. If I needed something, I would go find the people to help me do it, but now I'm a waymaker.

I don't have to wait for people in the data org or in the engineering org to help me. I can figure it out myself with the tools, and so I would tell marketers to change that mentality and to maybe stop feeling like you are blocked and just tinker and try to figure it out, and then when you get somewhere, launch the MVP, start getting people to use your tool like Matchy has had, I launched it a couple weeks ago and it already has over 500 people, that over 500 requests going through Matchy across the revenue organization at Shopify.

So now if I do need resources, I can say, "Hey, engineering team, I need your help to make this even better," because look at all the usage instead of waiting for them and making the case of we should build this tool together. One more question, if you can say, what's one way Agentic AI will fundamentally change how we shop in the next year? It already has. Can that be my sentence?

At Shopify we're seeing AI driven traffic increase 8x in 2025 and 15x for AI driven sales, and even with our recent Shopify announcements, with our partnerships with ChatGPT, Microsoft, we're just going to continue seeing more and more of that traction. I love it. I love it. Well, Genesis, thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for having me. All this was fun, next time though, I have to interview you. Oh, okay. Next time.

Next time. Thanks for having me. Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte Digital podcast.

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