How to Build a Brand in B2B with Ryan Narod (VP of Marketing at Rippling)

Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Zoom webinars. That's right. Zoom webinars is the virtual event platform built to engage, connect and scale. I don't know if you know this, but I actually love webinars. And I'm not afraid to say that. I'm not afraid to tell you this on the podcast here. And my last two companies and now here at exit five webinars have been a big part of our content machine. And I know I'm not alone. Despite what you may have heard online about webinars being dead and B2B, they have this habit of saying everything is dead and B2B, including webinars, but they're not. And I can confirm we hear it constantly in our community webinars when done right, continue to drive revenue for marketing leaders right now. And it's one of our best performing channels here at exit five. 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That's the difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. We hold a high bar for our content here at exit five and I'm excited to be doing it all on Zoom webinars now moving forward. If you're a B2B marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one this year, you should consider Zoom webinars and come to an exit five live session. Check it out powered by Zoom. So you can see the platform in action all for yourself. Learn more about what Zoom offers marketers at zoom.com/exit five that zoom.com/exit five. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at customer.io. Customer IO helps marketing teams get more impact from every message they send. So you can actually reach the right people with the right message at the right moment. Some might call it the holy grail and marketing with so much AI generated content flooding your inbox and feeds right now. It's more important than ever that what you're actually putting out is thought through not just AI'd into existence. Everyone thinks they're magically a marketer now because they have access to AI and all these tools and the result is rough. More robotic emails, more noise, more blood. We've all seen it. But marketing is a craft. I think that I'll die on this hill. Hopefully not die. But it takes creativity, thought, taste, and no AI can't do all that stuff for you. The best teams aren't ignoring AI either, though. It's a little bit of both. They treat it as infrastructure, built the right way, and it can make marketing feel more human not less. And that's exactly what customer IO is doing. Helping product led teams build personalized campaigns across email, SMS, push in app, and webhooks using their own first party data. So messages feel intentional and actually land with your customer. AI handles the grunt work behind the scenes and sharpens results over time. So you can focus on strategy and not set up while still sounding like an actual human. See why more than 9,000 brands trust customer IO to power their messaging, including notion, less mills, and Angie. If you need a new vendor to power your customer messaging, go and give them a look. It's customer.io/exit5 customer.io/exit5 You're listening to the Dave Gararcho. Hey, it's Dave. My guest on this episode is Ryan Narad, his VP of marketing and rippling. Rippling is one of the best examples of a B2B company that's figured out how to build a brand people actually recognize, which seems to be interesting to a lot of you right now because this was one of our most downloaded episodes of all time and it has only been out there for about 60 days. So here it is again in case you missed it. Ryan walks through the actual campaigns they ran to get there from scrappy iPhone videos and webinar promos to high production customer stories and even their super bowl commercial because people often say, oh, sure, if I had a budget like rippling, I could do that. Well, we give you both examples in this podcast, including how they shifted from being great at growth marketing to building something with real personality. I like them because they're a balance of growth and brand. And we talk about how they measure brand without losing accountability to pipeline and actually driving revenue. Enjoy my conversation with Ryan from rippling. Super excited to have you here, Ryan, because I've been connected with you for a while, but you joined rippling a year and a half ago. Rippling is one of those companies I think is doing great marketing and it's everywhere and it looks like you're having a lot of fun. And so I just DMed you like a week or so ago, I was like, can you come on the podcast and we had a great little prep call on them excited to get to hang out and chat with you today. Can you just do quick control on yourself and what is rippling and what you do before rippling? Sure. First of all, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I've been a long time fan of yours and have listened to your show back in the drift days. So excited to be here. All right. That's all. Thanks for listening folks. We'll catch you on the next episode. That's it. We're good. We got what we need. We got the clip. That's yeah. So I let's see. I think you nailed it. Been here about a year and a half. I joined rippling after leading marketing and started as the first marketing hire and mutiny where we got to market to marketers, which was a lot of fun before that was at other early stage startups and Google mostly doing developer marketing. My background is in growth type of marketing, but at rippling, I initially joined to build all the brand parts of marketing, so which is really fun because I love doing things that are new to me and rippling had a pretty robust growth motion built out. So really good at ads and emails, but everything else from what's the story to content to brand was fairly nice. And so it's been a lot of fun building that over the last year and a half. And a bunch of people probably use rippling. I would describe it as the new HR payroll benefits vendor that everyone is using, but that's probably not how the head of marketing would like it explained. How do you what is rippling do for anybody? I don't know. We think of it as this is the one system you need to run your entire workforce. And so we offer everything from HR and payroll and talent products, which again are already fragmented. You've got different systems normally to run your payroll to store your HR information to do applicant tracking. We bundle that all in one sweep, but then we also offer products for finance. So everything from bill pay to corporate cards and then products for IT. So everything from device management to access to security. And the reason we put this all under one roof is because all these things were very interconnected. A really good example of this is onboarding. When you onboard a new hire, I think everyone has started a new job before. You have to get input, it's some information in your HR system so that you can get paid and get your benefits. But then someone on the back end has to go run to the Apple store by your laptop and someone else has to go enroll you in different corporate cards and things like that with rippling and all just happens automatically. So that's a little bit of why we put everything together. There's a cost saving thing, but then there's also a time saving automation thing. And onboarding is a really good example of that. And then revenue, you don't have to say it's you don't get trouble, but I did a Google search. It looks like rippling revenue over estimates over 500 million. So obviously the company has been growing like crazy. And it seems like a super exciting rippling is in that kind of bucket of companies in the B2B SaaS space that I think a lot of people are talking about. It's like, I don't want to not name others. I'm not going to, you know, rippling is everywhere ramp. We love our ramp card. We talk about it all the time. Ramps an example of that too. How was your journey from Mutiny to taking this job? I know I said, typically, I don't want to do a lot of career stuff, but I would have assumed you're an impressive guy. I would also assume that this was a competitive job. The VP of marketing at rippling is like, it's a big deal. I thought about my next step was to go start my own company. I didn't think that I'd had it in me to go run a marketing function again. And so it's sort of happened pretty opportunistically. I left Mutiny when to go Europe, traveled the world with my wife and got connected with starting to think about starting my own company. And yeah, got connected with some folks at rippling. And the conversation initially was pretty open ended. It was like, hey, we've got here are the things we have figured out and here are the things we don't have figured out. And I was just naturally drawn to the things that solving problems that the company doesn't have figured out. And I felt it's a really unique opportunity in terms of there's a lot of upside in that. When you come into if I was to come in here and like really focus on growth initially, the growth function, meaning like paid channels and whatever like they had that pretty dialed in. Obviously, there's more incremental improvements you can make. But it felt like despite rippling being a big company, a lot of the brand stuff that I initially came into lead was very much zero to one. And so we can talk about that evolution in more detail today. But that's like ultimately where I thrive. And even though again, it's a bigger company, it actually feels very much like building a startup marketing motion from zero to one where it's very much like how do you what's our story and how do you build trust? Then how do you make the brand more human? And that's a lot of the stuff I've done here. Perfect. Yeah, let's talk about that. So you may mentioned, and I feel like this is probably true for companies that are very, you find this that companies who make good products for some reason because I think maybe they're often product led or founder, you know, the founder is an engineer type of thing, but they do often have that kind of growth thing figured out. And like you said, I like how you somebody adds an emails, you're a growth guy, formerly growth guy, you come in and you just, you said, we got to do a bunch of brand stuff. Can you explain what does that mean? Does that just mean like, Hey, Ryan, here's the budget, go buy some billboards? I want to know everything that went into that and building the playbook and what you've done over the last year. Yeah. So I would say if I think about the functions that go into brand, obviously a lot of people think about brand as let's do commercials and billboards and all that stuff. That's not where we started. I think we started with like where I would start if I was at an early stage B2B company, which is not with billboards and TV commercials. It's like, how do we build content and build content that people trust that is good, that furthers our message, but isn't like too salesy. And so we all talk about that evolution in a second, but it's all the basics. It's like content webinars events. We were doing that before. It's not like we had no content, but you know, my read on it was like, it was very much like SEO content and corporate and style. And so, you know, my first order of business was take stock of all the things that we do that every B2B company does before you invest in billboards and ads, which and injects like a few principles into it. So as I thought about the principles, it's like human first. And I like if I think deep, this is, I mean, here's where I'm going to flatter you for a second. But I remember when I was like first, I left Google. I went to an early stage startup to run marketing. And I was like, okay, let me go learn this thing. And so I like came across this like very thin book that you wrote it drift. I don't remember what it was. Dispelt scale. Yes. I referenced that because it's as I thought about our content, it's like people want to buy from people and people want to trust a brand where there's like humans behind it. And so if you look at our old version of our blog, every blog post was authored by the Rip Lane team. And it's like, who is that? And there was no style and there was no voice. And so, you know, I think part of it was like we staffed the team. I started hiring for all these people with weird wacky profiles that were comfortable being on camera and being like the face of the company. And so I could show you a few examples of this. But what we developed was like this flywheel where we would interview people sort of podcast style similar to what we're doing today. And then we would we would take those interviews, turn them into written things, slice them up, turn that into videos. We started upping the production value. But again, were you interviewing people? Were these like internal subject matter experts in the company? The first thing we did was figure out like a strategy for what message do we want to send? So we'll talk about Rip Lane's overall marketing strategy in a bit. But for the HR audience, which is where we sell the bulk of our product today, the story we wanted to tell was we believe a future where HR people are strategic and not having to like do manual tasks because Rip Lane frees up time from them to be strategic and have a seat at the table. Yep. That they think crossed departmentally. They're not just like in their HR bubble, but they think about finance and IT and all the all the things that are around their function and that their data driven. And we think that like if HR people sort of embody those three traits, Rip Lane is it's the best platform for them. So then we went out and we said, okay, we have some internal folks who can have a point of view on this. But also there's external folks, whether they're customers or non-customers who we can sort of understand how they think and how and their playbooks and really just start to tell that story. And so we interview them. And again, we have this machine of turning those interviews into different types of written content. We run that as a webinar. So that's a lead general opportunity for us. Would you think about the output of these going in or would be like one of our customers like is the VP of HR at this cool company and like she has a really strong opinion about this. Let's just go interview her, get the content and we'll figure out what to do with it later. Did it have like an end goal? We're talking about customers. We started with what are the logos that are sort of recognizable, right? Again, as we're building our brand and like cool ones. So we have customers like liquid death. And so we brought them on board and we made it fun. Like we bought liquid death cans and shears. And again, it makes the whole experience for human as we start to have these conversations with like anything we would do a prep call and in that prep call sort of tease out what are the person's anecdotes? Where do we want to steer the conversation? So there's a fair amount of prep of like where do we want to get them to? But ultimately we left a conversation flow. Okay. So we have this idea of like we need to reach more age. We need to tell a better story to HR people. Here's this concept that we want to go and we are to start just interviewing people lead with real faces. One of the things we talked about in that book you mentioned this won't scale. And it was like a core marketing principle was like you could totally lean into this from an AI standpoint. Today it's like, Hey, we spent all of our time using AI tools, talking AI, but like we're still humans. We want to connect with other people. And so you're leaning into something there, which is like the people don't want all of HR fully automated. They want to know someone like who runs HR and they want to have opinions about HR and strategy, but like admin and payroll and all that stuff is being done by technology. So let's lean into people, which I think you've done a nice job of bringing into the brand because it would totally be easy for rippling to be like automate everything RIP jobs, everyone, but you've also been able to like make the HR person a hero, the hero that's going to use rippling as opposed to like rippling is going to be the thing that's going to replace them. Totally. And the thing about it is if you talk to HR folks and any of our customers like they don't want to be doing the manual work. They join this job because they love people and solving people problems, copying, downloading CSVs and reformeting them to get it into another system and coordinating with IT to ship laptops. And these are not the things they want to be doing. And so the message of, you know, we free you up from not having to do that so that you can be strategic and bring insight to actively do your CEO like that message really resonates. Okay, so that was kind of priority number one, which is like getting your hands around the story. Do we have more to say on that piece of it? I think it's a couple of things. I think one is getting the story straight. And the second thing is just injecting the human touch into everything we do. So that, oh, sorry. Can I ask a question on getting the story straight? Obviously, when you join the company already was doing, you know, hundreds of millions in revenue or whatever, right? Successful company already. You didn't hire like some like messaging agency. Did you have long reviews with all the exacts in it? Or did you just like come up with the story and ship it? What was the level of creating this story? So I would say there's story on different levels and it's a work in progress. I'm like really getting this down for the whole company. So I would say the easiest story to tell is a story that is for a specific persona. So I think we have our story down when it comes to HR. We have our story down when it comes to finance. We have our story down when it comes to IT. And we have dedicated teams. They chart team, obviously, being the biggest that goes really deep on understanding the buyer, understanding the product offering we have kind of connecting the two. And so that is relatively straightforward. And we ran an internal process, had a bunch of stakeholders, but like we didn't go and hire fancy external consultants. If you take it one step up, which is what is the rippling story? I would say this is sort of like a work in progress and one where if you think about companies that do a lot of things and I'm talking about like Oracle or IBM, a lot of their overarching stories like transform your business with the power of the cloud, like something that says nothing. And so we're I actively do not want us to tell that story, but to find sort of the click in between a persona story and one that resonates with the C suite, but is not super generic is not easy, right? And so we talk a lot about are we an operating system for your workforce? Do we want the capital operating system or lowercase operating system? These are the things that, you know, I think is an ongoing challenge, but it doesn't slow us down. Like I don't think we're blocked because we don't know what to call ourselves at the end of the day. If you go to our website, the way we describe ourselves is where the one system to manage your entire workforce. Yeah, I just had it up because I think this is a good example of I think it becomes sometimes you try to be too cute or you try to say something like, you know, we used to like the head on homepage had I'd always had to be so like pithy for some reason when it's like, I don't know, sometimes just say what you mean. And it's like man, you say manage your entire workforce on one system, increase savings, automate busy work and make better decisions by managing HR payroll, IT and spend in one place. Pretty with a picture of, you know, already on an iPad, like looking at payroll. Pretty damn clear, right? So we talked with it in our little prep call, but like the challenges though is how do I make that believable? How do I get people to buy into that? Well, HR has been around forever. There's a million other pieces of software I could use. How does that play into your your storytelling? I think the first layer of this is just explaining to people like what we are. And that on its face is differentiated, right? Like there's no other platform that has all of the functionality that we offer all in one place. And so we want people landing on our site or receiving our message like at a base level, understand that. And then I think once we have them, which is, you know, typically comes out in the demo, but you'll see a lot of this messaging woven through our website. That's when we can talk about our platform differentiation. And so the story there that again, we have so much that we're rolling out soon around platform that this story is always developing. But the story there is we have spent more dollars in time than any other player in the space building the underlying platform. And what that means is that for something like let's just use reporting as an example. If you go with a point solution, let's say a recruiting tool, you're going to get like one or two reports. Our reporting layer is sort of the has the functionality and depth of something like Tableau. And because we amortize that across dozens and dozens of products, we can afford to build a Tableau level reporting thing where a point solution is focused on building their point solution and therefore reporting is not really robust. And so I mentioned reporting as like one example, but there's a workflows engine. There's an application builder. There's like all this stuff underneath the surface. That is like a thousand times more powerful. And those are the reasons, by the way, that all the point solutions are fine at the application layer, but where breaks is because underneath the surface. All the people have edge cases around reporting and integrations and all this other stuff that only we can support. I love the nugget. You could, I don't know, I'm your marketing expert. You probably already do this. You're doing it, whatever I get to pretend for 10 minutes. But that line about we've spent the most time and hours on this is actually really interesting. Have you heard the ramp at you listen to founders podcast David center. I've heard a few episodes. All right. Whatever doesn't matter. I'm so cool. ramp sponsors are podcasts and the ads are really good. The ads are about how ramp like they only hire like 0.001% of the engineers that apply to work at ramp. And I'm like, that's such a sick line to like articulate like no, we're better. Cause I think it's so hard as a marketer sometimes to like prove that we're better. We try to do it in all these different ways. Right. Like 4.8 stars on G2. Like, okay, everyone can talk about that. What's unique to us? And I love this as a marketer is kind of like you're looking for these little nuggets around the company. And so like, maybe there's your angle is that which is cool. I love that. Tell me some of your favorite marketing places get into enough about enough about rippling. What is the best marketing place that you've run in the last year? So spent a lot of time reworking the story. That's a huge thing. But you say you've gone from growth to being this brand, this brand guy. How do you go and execute on these campaigns? We got this great message. But what do you go and do? What are some of the best marketing campaigns you've run? Maybe instead of talking about it. Show you some. Okay. I did. It's like I said, I got Riverside for you. So let's go. So this is sort of just like a visual representation of before and after. And I think here you can kind of start to see this whole like human approach really woven into everything we do. This is a screenshot from our Instagram page. But this is sort of the vibe of evolution that that we've been going through. I'll show a couple since we started on content and webinars. And I think a lot of the folks who listen to this probably are at earlier stage companies not running super bowl campaigns. So as much as I'm excited about Super Bowl and we can get to that. I do want to share like some tactical examples of things around content and case studies and things. Okay, let's do it. Show me. God, this is so fun. More people list podcast. You should do this. I'm just going to hang out right now. This is great. Perfect. Well, if you have questions jump in, but I think like, you know, again, webinar promo. I think this is sort of the vibe of what it used to look like. The four again, we're injecting humans, but we're also trying to figure out how do we stop the scroll. And so I'll show you a couple examples of again, this is really just promoting a webinar, but a way more fun way to do it. This is from a customer chest.com. And the guy came to New York with warm out and he wanted to wear this chest piece costume. And so we made this fun weird video that people love. Looking at this pose, we've been talking a lot about this recently. I've always bought into like real faces. They just work better on like we said when I was at Drift, for example, the best ads we did early on were just like this seemed to, you know, so counter into it at the time of take a picture with the iPhone in the office and use it as an ad and outperformed to like brand blessed creative. But I'm seeing this with like stuff that we record in person because I think like even these podcasts clips, they don't perform as well as it used to be because so much of the social media feed is filled with like dudes podcasting right. But when you see something like this, it's instant scroll stop. I'm like, what's this is that what street is that and is that a person dressed up as a as a horse, you know, like there's something to that exactly exactly. I'll show you another one just just really quick for fun. This is a webinar with craft hines and so what better way to talk about it than hot dogs. Love it. And are those two people on your team? Two people on my team, super scrappy, you know, production, they go outside, even in the cold. Yeah. And tell them this. So are those are videos is in 10 of those two posts on LinkedIn specifically or is like, hey, let's go make a funny one minute video and we'll figure out what to do with it later. 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Data dog is a one billion dollar revenue enterprise behemoth and they run their ABM motion exactly this way targeting real signals instead of generic titles vector built to playbook with their head of global ABM and campaigns at data dog breaking down his whole entire approach to enterprise ABM. So if you want to learn how to build a proper ABM program that scales, this playbook is worth a look. It's data dog. It's a great one to study. Check it out vector dot co slash exit five. You can see all this info there. Go check it out. It's vector dot co slash exit five. Hey, it's Dave. Look, I want to tell you about drive 2026. This is our annual event we do for the exit five community. It's a two day B2B marketing conference in stove Vermont. We built it for marketers who want to get smarter and actually connect with their peers. This isn't a generic industry conference. It's a small intentionally assigned event where the programming the venue and the schedule all work together to create the conditions for real conversations attendee spend two days getting into the tactical details of B2B marketing. What's working what's not and how the best teams are thinking about the problems that actually matter. This is all about workshop sessions and discussions that are built around participation not pass of listening. I want you to actually come and be there if you're going to take the time to leave your family leave the office get outside of work like actually be here. Take notes pay attention and makes it all worth it. And here's a thing though the B2B marketing stuff that's what's going to get you to justify the ROI on your ticket that's why you're going to be able to tell your boss you want to go to this but the best moments that drive don't happen on stage they happen at breakfast on an afternoon hike over a drink after dinner right somebody's going to be roasting marshmallows at this place it's that type of event. We designed this for this connection this is on purpose long breaks unhurried meals and opt in activities where people spend time together outside the session room because look we're all people where else in your life can you talk to someone else who understands your job as a B2B market I go to my kids swim lessons I can't sit there and talk to that next to me about B2B marketing but you can through the exit five community and that's what drive is all about it's September a through 10th 2026 at the lodge it's Bruce Peak and Stovermont check it out exit five dot com slash drive. So come slash drive to learn more about it it's exit five dot com slash drive and I hope to see you there. Well, it's let's go make a funny 30 second to one minute webinar promo that beats stuff like this and you know we posted on LinkedIn we included in promo emails things like that and it just outperforms anything that is static and boring. Is it the simplest reason why is because it's not static and boring it's just a pattern if you're playing on the pattern interrupt of like B2B marketing. It's pattern interrupt it's human and it's fun these are good examples dude because oftentimes if I have someone on who's at a you know big company obviously Ripley can do it they can spend money in a super well like two people and your team can go walk out the street with their iPhone and go do this totally I'll show a couple other examples like again this is how we used to do case studies. It's actually a good segue into like you could do case studies in a in a way that is expensive in a way that's not so like this is you know someone on my team going to a customer's office and just doing this. Anyway, so that is like completely shot on iPhone. Yeah well look. The one on the left instantly my brain goes case study you know like it's some brand is promoting themselves were on the right I'm like what's up with this dude to the house. Totally. Yeah so we make it fun and then start this this person on your team just I'm just curious about her her role social media person she's the social media person and what is her job. Her job is she partners basically we've got a team that is focused on different teams focused on different areas of the business right we've got an HR IT finance a team focused on rippling for startup founders and so her job is sort of be like the geek keeper for all of our social media like don't just post what people ask you to post and keep a high bar and what that ends up meaning is like people will come to her say I have this product launch drive this webinar or have something. And she will partner with them to make it great that's why I'm trying to think about how to ask that question about sounding like an idiot you know this one guy left the review for my pockets. and he's like, this host, this guy was really a CMO. He knows nothing about marketing. (laughs) But the reason I asked was because I love this role, but I've always thought it's hard to incentivize this person and are they gold on how many followers Rippling has, but there's actually an interesting model where, if they're set up to be the person that has taste and humor and knows how to make good content on social media, I love the idea of like, they work with everyone on the team to help promote their thing and make it better. - Exactly, exactly. And I think in between, she's got her own agenda of like things we wanna do, but in practice, there's so many things we wanna say across the business that the job sort of becomes like air traffic control, but also really up leveling things so that everything we do on social is both good and consistent. - Or keep going, you're doing a nice job, you're hired. (laughs) - All right, I'll show you an example of, this is a short cut down from a whole length feature film we did with berries, which is one of our customers. And this is what it looks like if you're bigger and have a little bit more budget than sending a person out with an iPhone. So just to show you, and again, we test, we think that we need an arsenal of like all of these things together, so it's not one or the other, but we run two-cell on parallel, so I'll show you an example. So that's an example of a more higher production, hype video, again, there's a longer version of it with a little bit of talking heads, but even that, I think feels really different and distinct from typical case study videos. - Yeah, there. - Can you just go into the process for creating that? As much as you can share, if you're comfortable, how did you find the agency to do that? What did it look like? How long did it take? What did it cost? Roughly, what was the deliverable? I think someone who wants to do something like that would really benefit from hearing from you. - Yeah, so we're really fortunate. We have an internal team that's called Brand Studio. They're sort of our in-house creative agency. And so a lot of what we do here is very much in-house. Obviously, they partner with external folks for larger-scale productions. And so I think the process for us is that was driven by our customer marketing team. So Emmy who leads that team really worked hand in hand with berries and making sure from day one that they are happy and successful as a customer. - That's a fun marketing job, by the way. Doing customer marketing in a company with cool companies like work on this shoe with berries or something is very cool. - Yeah, and not just cool, but I've been at early stage startups where you have a small handful of happy customers. Here we have tens of thousands. And many of them are big brands and household names. And so for something like berries, we treated it almost as if it's a sports sponsorship. Like as if we were gonna go and announce that the New York NICS are the official HR partner of rippling or something like that. And so what that meant in practice was the partnership was much deeper than just making this video. It was like how do we go and activate this across the entire year? So obviously we shot this film, but also Sharm, which is one of the biggest conferences for HR professionals. We set up a pop-up berries class where we actually brought real berries and structures and equipment outside on the lawn at Sharm and had hundreds of HR professionals do like a live berries class in the morning sponsored by rippling. That's obviously a value add to the conference. So they were excited about it. But those are the types of things that we brought to life to basically make this partnership real and really squeeze a lot more juice out of this customer story. - All right, so I want you to keep going, but I have a question. Let's rewind 10 years and you're first startup marketing hire Ryan and you're listening to this. And this guy is this famous VP of marketing at this company. They have all these resources. They got a brand studio team. Instead of letting someone listen to this and say, this is not possible in my company. We don't have the budget. Let's make the case for the scrappy version of this. How can you apply this kind of brand thinking to a startup maybe that doesn't have the same budget that you guys do? - Yeah, I mean, I think this example that I showed first with the iPhone shot camera cost nothing. And then there's varying degrees of cost and sophistication in between. So I could show a few more examples because I think at rippling we do it all. But I would say without like talking about the actual stats 'cause I don't have it in front of me, the thing that costs order magnitude more doesn't actually outperform by an order magnitude. Like in many cases, this stuff, the whole thing will do just as well as the thing that is high production value. So as much as people get excited about these and I get excited about them too, I would say there's really nothing stopping you as long as you can cultivate happy customers to go and either create content at their offices. But that's fun. And then there's also, I call up an example, but there's somewhere we didn't even get the customer's permission to go create the case study. We just use like, you know, the social media, there's like the green screen feature. And so our social media manager would, you know, basically talk about the customer story, just like reading it from a case study that we wrote internally, obviously making it more fun with imagery or graphics from the customer. If it's a coffee shop, maybe they'll, they have stuff online, we can rip or things like that. And so that kind of stuff does almost as well as this. So I believe it looked, I think that if you're in B2B and you sell to a persona that is online all the time, HR is a good one, marketing sales, there's a bunch. Not all, I understand that not all is going to be perfect fit here, but I love this idea of just like forcing yourself to try to make content that costs nothing with the phone and having somebody on the team do that because that's where you can get all these ideas. And you know, you can get one of these quick, scrappy, funny video ideas. Two people in your team go down to the streets in New York and get a hot dog and that becomes something that costs nothing and you turn it out that day. I love that approach. And hot dogs in New York, I will say, I've heard they can be up to $50 or so. - Oh, that's true, yeah, forget it. - Forget it. All right, show me some more examples, keep going. - Okay, since we're talking about production value, I'll show you like high production value, medium and low. And I put this on the slide in terms of funnel stage. So about the first campaign that I ran when I joined here was this campaign called HR Deserves Better. So we even bought a domain for it. And the thesis for this campaign was HR people are sort of like stuck in long-term relationships with their old platform and it's fine, it's fine. It's just their held back by it, right? And so we did this analogy where it's like, remember when you were starting out, you had all these dreams, but your HR software's holding you back. So we did this, we released it around Valentine's Day and we made this fun video that was essentially this guy breaking up with his HR system. So anyways, example of sort of higher production value, but this is the type of thing that we can get a lot of mileage out of running that on TV, CTV, all of those more premium channels. And then I wanna compare it with something that we spun up like very inexpensively, which is sort of on the same theme but we wanted something to test against that. And that was HRLoveSongs.com. - No, that's what I call HR, I love it. - This I made with Clawed, so again, no, the old vibe photo is like, make me the ugliest website, you can make it retro. And it went along with this video, which I think is a banger, so I'll play it. You get the picture. - How did you make the video? - So I mean, this is, we worked with like an external agency. It was actually free because this is a bit of a hack, but when we spend a decent amount on LinkedIn, and so they, when you do that, they unlock like value added partners. And so one of their partners is Quick Frame and Quick Frame plug for Quick Frame. They hooked you up with like a video person. So they spun this up for us in like a matter of weeks, but it's a lot of fun. And perform really well. We do like hacky things with this, like for example, Ed Schirm, which is the big HR conference that I mentioned, we partnered with all of the hotels where all the Schirm attendees stay. And we had this ad on loop. So like when you turn on the TV, instead of the Mario Lopez extra, you just hear this song. So like this, (indistinct) which is awesome. - That's insane. (laughing) This is great. This is fun, man. This is the stuff that like I love about marketing. - I'm glad you took this approach of coming on here and showing stuff like this. You have more? - I won't bore you with the rest. Show me this Super Bowl ad. - Yeah, we have stuff that's more like product centric. So it's not all fun and games. And then we can talk about Super Bowl. There's a lot to this one. - Wait, but before the Super Bowl though, so something like that, right? That rippling the HR hits, right? You just kind of do that. Does anybody have any expectations around like measuring that? How do we know if that worked or not? Or is it just you have a free pass to just do a bunch of fun stuff and they trust you and pipeline goes up? Like how does this all work in the machine? - As much as I like to think there's that I'm trusted, we do have a fair degree of measurement and instrumentation in place. So first thing is we have MMM mixed media model. So we have that in place where when we flex up and down budget and specific channels, we can measure the incrementality of that on website traffic and on opportunities and also pipeline. - Was there a product that you used for that people love the tools and tech and whatever? - We partner with Paramark on that. - Oh cool. - Nice, shout out to Pranoff, good guy. - So we do that also with Paramark, we do incrementality testing. So that's essentially we pulse media in a specific market and look for the incrementality of that on revenue subsequently. Those are in part two. of like, how is the channel performing overall? - Yeah. - So first we pre-gout that things like CTV and all that is actually incremental to the business. And then we can get into like, is creative a better than creative b, which we could talk about too. - So these things you might do organically would eventually become paid creative that would then allow you to measure and show some type of lift. - Unless it's free, I wouldn't do anything that's purely organic. Like everything we're doing is fuel for our paid engine. - Got it. - Perfect way to say that. So that's the guardrail. - And are you all looking at, will you do something? Do you ever do an organic thing? You're like, oh, that kind of popped off. Like, we should run that as paid. Or is it all the creative we're doing is to serve paid? - Sometimes like these webinar promos will do organically, and we'll do minimal paid behind it, and it's really targeted. But when we're talking about like advertising, these things are, they're not expensive, but they're not free. And so we definitely want to make sure that we maximize the number of I've all seen it. - Cool. - Okay, what else? You had some other good thoughts I kind of cut you off. - So we test a lot of creative within each stage of the funnel. We have just take for a given product area. And by the way, we have to think about this for all of our products surface area. But for specific product area like HR, we think about this in terms of awareness, consideration, purchase. Within each stage of the funnel, there's a bunch of creative we test. Sometimes we test things that are low five that are made with an iPhone, and we test that against things that are, you know, more polished and professional. So even for, you take top of funnel awareness for HR, I showed the example from HR love songs, which is low five-ish, and HR deserves better, which is more of a production. And so we run those in parallel to the same audience, and we look at metrics like CPM, so which is essentially the algorithms preference for one creative over another. It's cheaper for us to serve. And so that's the way we look at metrics like view rate. So we take for, you know, a 30-second ad, one will have a higher completion rate than the other. And then we look at engagement rate, which is essentially unlinked in, for example, the number of likes and comments and all that. And so like you kind of triangulate based on those, like which creative is outperforming, and you couple that with incrementality testing and mixed media model, and it's just understand, you know, as it's the channel, we keep investing in, and that's how we keep iterating on both creative and channels. And is all that stuff driving to rippling home page to create a free account? Like what's the funnel? There are CTAs and everything we do, but when we're talking about video advertising, typically people are not like take CTV, people aren't clicking through, or don't even have the awkward. Yeah, like I noticed one of the rippling things you said, there wasn't a URL, there wasn't anything, it was just showing rippling. Yeah, the example I showed is like a preview that doesn't show the link. So there's a link. Okay. But it's not, I don't expect people to see the ad and book a demo, like right away. I don't know when, you know, if you do that, maybe a very compelling ad. The goal is like with HR love songs, or any of these things, like in plants, see a rippling into people's brains. And we have a bunch of mid funnel and bottom of funnel ads that are running in parallel that will, the person will see later, whether they get retargeted or they fall into the same audience. And we do a bunch of testing even within platform to say, if people are exposed to our awareness ad, then we can convert them down funnel at twice the rate. And so those are some of the things that, if we invest at the top of the funnel, you get more bottom of funnel efficiency. So sometimes we'll show people the HR love songs ad and then they'll convert through a webinar ad. Or sometimes our good old incentivized ads that are, you know, get a free pair of AirPods will work. But those deals are actually likely to convert because they jump on the call. And I have so many recordings of this from Gong. And they're like, "I am so excited to have this conversation. I promise it's not for the AirPods. It's because I've like been seeing rippling everywhere." Oh, man, that's a perfect way to lay out so much of the challenge in marketing. It's like, if you can sit down with the CFO or CEO, whatever and explain all of the touch points, then it becomes so many of the marketers that we talk within our community. And just, it's like everything you do in marketing is expected to drive. Like, oh, oh, we ran an ad on this channel. Like, how many demos did we book from that ad? And it's like, "Ah, that's not how it works, though." And you've done a nice job of articulating like how all of the pieces come together. And I can see that. I feel like I understand how you would do marketing at rippling. Great. (laughs) End of the podcast. It's just something you've had to learn. Like, you haven't, you've been run marketing at a company at this stage. Right? Few people have. But how do you stay sharp? You have a great team. They teach you this. Are you learning on your own? I try to listen to a lot of podcasts. Maybe you're just not a moron, I don't know. (laughs) I think about all of this just like from first principles. It's like, I think of marketing unlike any other function, or it's like not to simplify other functions. But if you're like a sales leader, I think you manage people who all do the same thing. They sell. In marketing, my product marketers are very different from my events marketers or very different from content folks. And there's other random teams like, you know, channel and broker and private equity. And so all these teams, I sort of think of my role as just not having to be smart on any one thing, but just being like a good general manager. And so I think of this skill set that I try to hone is not like marketing stuff and more like the same skill set of founder would have to hone. And check out a bunch of things they've never managed before, which is ask smart questions and just hold the bar high and keep pushing for excellence. I love it. Perfect answer. I'm going to wrap on that note. It's a perfect lesson for anybody who wants to become a leader in marketing is to think about all of the things combined. I think there feels like there's a lot of pressure. Like I got to be an SEO expert and I got to be a demand gen expert and I got to be a video expert and an events expert. And that's not the case. You have to think like you're thinking. So Ryan, this was awesome. I know a lot of people will get a bunch of value out of this showing a bunch of examples. They're going to ask for more. Maybe you're from now. We'll have you come back on and show more stuff after this. This is exciting. You must be excited. It's Wednesday. Super Bowl is coming up. Are you going to just, you know, sit on the couch and see how many new leads come in? I'm going to keep refreshing my deck. Or is that a thing? Like is the company excited? Like everyone's excited that Ripling's running a Super Bowl ad? Everyone's really excited. I think our sales org is really excited to just have an in like being able to get on the phone with prospects and customers and say like, hey, did you catch the Super Bowl ad? I think it's like a really exciting moment. The whole company is rallying around. So yeah, it's definitely a big moment for us. And it's the first time I would say even though we've made a bunch of investment in awareness over the last several months to a year, we've still been like very focused on telling the story of the product. And it's the first time we're really leaning into the pain and the emotion associated with that pain. And so we needed to like abstract this for a Super Bowl high level audience and not necessarily talk about HR and payroll. We really just wanted to talk about what is the feeling of a leader who is just has these master plans and wants to take over and build something successful. And then these mundane things toward their plans. And so that's the story we're really telling with the ad, which is what does it feel like to not run your business on replaying? And if we could articulate that, then I think we have a really great opening with showing off the product. I like it. Just quickly, what is the timeline of a Super Bowl ad? When do you have to decide you want to do it, commit the dollars, work on the creative? What's the reverse timeline been like? Normally, it should probably be like almost a year, but we did it in lightning speed. So I think we decided we wanted to do it in, I don't know, maybe September, October timeframe. And then we worked like crazy over the holidays. We shot it a couple weeks ago. Were you there? I was there. I was there. It's a really cool experience. We were in LA where it should be felt like a real Hollywood experience. I mean, you're in New York. If you told me you filmed it in New York, I wouldn't have been like, "Oh, LA just feels like where you want to shoot a Super Bowl ad." Yeah, sure. That's fair. That's fair. All right, Ryan, good to see you, man. Thank you for tuning in. He's a VP of Marketing at Ripling. Check him out on LinkedIn around exit five. I got a bunch of notes. I'm excited. I just wish I want to go like make some iPhone videos right now. Or like just some silly stuff. That's how I feel after talking. And it's good. It's fun to see the evolution of from growth guide to brand guide doing Super Bowl commercials for Ripling. Congrats on an awesome run. I'll keep following you and rooting for you. Thanks for coming and hanging out with me on the pod. Cool. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit five dot com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to be free. a member for the year, go check it out, learn more, exit5.com, and I will see you over there in the community. Hey, it's me Dave. 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