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

Hey, it's me, Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Knack. Knack is a no code email and landing page creation platform focused on a problem every marketing team runs into. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea but then it takes forever to actually ship it out the door? It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, more briefs, approvals, reviews, tiny fixes that somehow turn into weeks and by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship. Yep, that right there, that is the gap that Knack exists to close. Knack is a no code email platform built for modern marketing teams. They have AI built into the platform that lets you prompt ideas and instantly generate on brand email assets so you can create, review QA and launch your email all in the same place. No jumping between tools or messy handoffs halfway through after the email goes live. Knack also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipt to learning to improving, you should check out knack. Go to knack.com exit5 that's k n a k.com exit5 you're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show. My guest on this episode is Ryan Narad. He is the VP of marketing at Rippling. He runs a marketing team over at Rippling. This is a really fun episode because he pulled up a bunch of examples of marketing they've done over the last year. They've done a lot of growth marketing in the past, emails, ads. But he's come in over the last year and a half and they've had a really strong focus on brand and how do you become the number one brand for HR professionals And we talk about that in this episode. He showed me examples. We talked about their upcoming super bowl commercial all the way down to like little short social media videos they make on the street. Eating hot dogs to promote webinars. If you love marketing examples and want some specific examples of how to do B2B marketing that doesn't suck and and feels good and is fun and is actually fun to work on. This episode with Ryan gave me a ton of energy. I know you'll get something from it. Here's my conversation with Ryan who runs marketing at 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. So I just DM'd you like a week or so ago. I was like, hey, can you come on the podcast? And we had a great little prep call and I'm excited to get to hang out and chat with you today. Can you just do a quick intro on yourself and what is Rippling and what'd you do before Rippling?

0:00

Sure. First of all, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Have been a longtime fan of yours and have listened to your show back in the Drift days. So excited to be here.

2:52

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.

3:03

Yeah.

3:12

So I.

3:12

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 at 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 a brand was fairly nascent. So it's been a lot of fun building that over the last year and a half.

3:13

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 does Rippling do? For anybody who doesn't know, we think.

4:00

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 suite. 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 are very interconnected. A really good example of this Is Onboarding when you onboard a new hire, I think everyone has started in a new job before. You have to get inputted 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 and buy you a laptop and someone else has to go enroll you in different corporate cards and things like that. With Rippling it 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.

4:15

And then revenue, you don't have to say it so you don't get in 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. Ramp's 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 have also assumed though that this was a competitive job. The VP of marketing at Rippling is like, that's a big deal.

5:28

I thought about my next step was to go start my own company. I didn't think I had it in me to go run a marketing function again. And so it sort of happened pretty opportunistically. I left Mutiny, went to go Europe, traveled the world with my wife and got connected. Was 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, 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 in to lead was very much 0 to 1. 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's marketing motion from 0 to 1, where it's very much like, how do you. What's our story? And how do you build trust and how do you make the brand more human? And that's a lot of the stuff I've done here. Perfect.

6:13

Yeah, let's talk about that. So you mentioned, and I feel like this is probably true for companies that are very. You find this at 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. Like you said, I like how you summarize ads and 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, that went into that and building the playbook and what you've done over the last year.

7:40

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. I'll 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 stale. 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 inject 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'm. 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, I was like, okay, let me go learn this thing. And so I like came across this like very thin book that you wrote at Drift. I don't remember what it was.

8:15

This won't scale.

9:37

Yes, I reference 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 Rippling team and it's like, who is that? And there was no style and there was no voice. And so 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 the face of the company. And so I could show you a few examples of this. But what we developed was this flywheel where we would interview people sort of podcast style, similar to what we're doing today. And then 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?

9:38

Were these like internal subject matter experts in the company?

10:27

The first thing we did was figure out like a strategy for what message do we want to send. So we'll talk about Rippling'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 Rippling frees up time for them to be strategic and have a seat at the table, that they think cross departmentally. They're not just like in their HR bubble, but they think about finance and IT and all the things that are around their function and that they're data driven. And we think that like, if HR people sort of embody those three traits, rippling is the best platform for them. So then we went out and we said, okay, we have some internal folks who can, who 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, you know, turning those interviews into different types of written content. We run that as a webinar. So that's a lead gen opportunity for us.

10:30

Would you think about the output of these going in or would it be like, one of our customers is the VP of HR at this cool company and 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 an end goal when talking about customers?

11:45

We started with what are the logos that are sort of recognizable? Right. Again, as we're building our brand and 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. Then again, it makes the whole experience more human. As we start to have these conversations, 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 let the conversation flow.

12:01

Okay, so we, we have this idea of like, we need to reach more hr. We need to tell a better story to HR people. Here's this concept that we want to go, and we're going to start just interviewing people. Lead with real faces. One of the 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 spend all of our time using AI tools, talking to 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, 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.

12:36

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 reformatting them to get it into another system system and coordinating with it to ship laptops. These are not the things they want to be doing. And so the message of we free you up from not having to do that so that you can be strategic and bring insights proactively to your CEO, that message really resonates.

13:29

Okay, so that was kind of priority number one, which is getting your hands around the story. Do we have more to say on that piece of it?

14:04

I think it's a couple 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.

14:10

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 execs in it? Or did you just, like, come up with the story and ship it? What was the level of creating this story?

14:19

So I would say there's story on different levels and it's a work in progress on, 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. The HR 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 story is like, transform your business with the power of the cloud. Like something that says nothing. And so 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, 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 we're the one system to manage your entire workforce.

14:39

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 headline homepage headline 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, somebody on an iPad like looking at payroll. Pretty damn clear, right? So we talked about this in our, in our little prep call. But like the challenge is 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 storytelling?

16:23

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 and 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. 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 it 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.

17:09

I love the nugget.

18:56

You could.

18:57

I don't know. Here. 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 ad? Do you listen to Founders podcast with David Senra?

18:57

I've heard a few episodes.

19:10

All right, whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm so cool. Ramp sponsors their podcast and the ads are really good. The ads are about how Ramp, like, they only hire like.0001% 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. Because 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.

19:11

Right?

19:34

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. It's kind of like you're looking for these little nuggets around the company. And so, like, maybe there's your angle. Is that that. Which is cool.

19:35

I love that.

19:46

Tell me some of your favorite marketing plays. Let's get into enough about. Enough about rippling. What are some of the best marketing plays 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?

19:47

Maybe instead of talking about it, I could show you some.

20:08

Okay, I did. It's like I said, I got Riverside for you. So let's go.

20:11

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 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.

20:15

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.

20:54

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 before. 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, chess.com and the guy came to New York, we flew him out and he wanted to wear this chess piece costume. And so we made this fun, weird video that people love looking at this.

21:00

Post, we've been talking a lot about this recently. I've always bought into, like, real faces. They just work better on like we used to. When I was at Drift, for example, the best ads we did early on were just like. This seemed, you know, so counterintuitive at the time, but take a picture with the iPhone in the office and use it as an ad. And it outperformed the, like, brand blessed creative. But I'm seeing this with, like, stuff that we record in person because I think, like, even these podcast clips, they don't perform as well as they used to 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.

21:38

Exactly, exactly. I'll show you another one. Just. Just really quick for fun. This is a webinar with Kraft Heinz. And so what better way to talk about it than hot dogs?

22:17

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22:28

Two people on my team. Super scrappy. You know, production, they go outside even in the cold and film this.

24:08

So and so are those are videos. Is the intent of those two posts on LinkedIn specifically? Or is it like hey, let's go make a funny one minute video and we'll figure out what to do with it later.

24:15

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 post it on LinkedIn, we include it in promo, emails, things like that and it just outperforms anything that is static and boring.

24:24

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.

24:39

Of like B2B marketing, it's pattern interrupt. It's human and it's fun.

24:44

These are good examples, dude. Because oftentimes if I have someone on who's at a, you know, big company, well, obviously rippling can do it. They can spend money on a Super bowl, but, like, two people on your team can go walk out the street with their iPhone and go do this.

24:51

Totally. I'll show a couple other examples. Like, again, this is how we used to do case studies. This is 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.

25:03

Well, look, the one on the left. Instantly my brain goes case study. You know, like, if some brand is promoting themselves or on the right, I'm like, huh, what's up with this, dude? The hat.

25:24

Totally, totally. Yeah. So we make it fun and then, sorry, this.

25:35

This person on your team just. I'm just curious about her. Her role. Social media person.

25:39

She's the social media person.

25:43

And what is her job?

25:45

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 gatekeeper 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, or I have this webinar, or I have something thing, and she will partner with them to make it great.

25:49

That's why I was trying to think about how to ask that question without sounding like an idiot. You know, this one guy left a review for my podcast. What a sudden, he's like, this host. This guy was really a cmo. He knows nothing about marketing. But the reason I asked was because I love this role. But I've always, like, thought it's hard to incentivize this person. And, like, 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.

26:19

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, I think in between, she's got her own agenda of, like, things we want to do. But in practice, there's so many things we want to 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.

26:53

All right, keep going. You're doing a nice job. You're hired.

27:13

All right, I'll show an example of. You know what? This is a short cut down from a full length feature film we did with Barry's, 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 these all in 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 we see out there.

27:16

Can you just go into the process for creating that, like as as much as you can share if you're comfortable. Like, 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.

27:58

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 Barry's and making sure from day one that they are happy and successful as a customer.

28:12

That's a fun marketing job, by the way. Doing customer marketing in a company with like cool companies, like work on this shoot with Barry's or something is very cool.

28:44

Yeah. And not just cool, but I've been at early stage startups where you have, you know, 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 Barry's, we treated it almost as if it's a sports sponsorship. Like as if we are going to go and announce that the New York Knicks 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 shift shrm, which is one of the biggest conferences for HR professionals, we set up a pop up Barry's class where we actually brought real Barry's instructors and equipment outside on the lawn at SHRM and had hundreds of HR professionals do like a live Barry's 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.

28:50

All right, so I want you to keep going, but I have a question. Let's rewind 10 years and you're, you know, first startup marketing hire Ryan. And you're listening to this and this, this guy, he's this, you know, 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 at 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?

30:01

Yeah, I mean, I think that this example that I showed first with the iPhone shot camera costs 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 because I don't have it in front of me. The thing that costs order of magnitude more doesn't actually outperform by an order of magnitude. Like in many cases, this social 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, that, that's fun. And then there's also, I call up an example, but there's some where we didn't even get the customers permission to go create the case study. We just use like, you know, on social media there's like the green screen feature. Yeah. 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. As this. So I believe it.

30:27

Look, I think that if you're in B2B and you sell to a Persona that online all the time, HR is a good one. Marketing, sales, there's a bunch. Not all. I understand that not, 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 on your team go down to the streets of New York and get a hot dog and that becomes something that cost nothing and you turn it out that day. I love that approach.

31:50

And hot dogs in New York, I will say I've heard they can be up to 50 doll.

32:21

So almost nothing. That's true. Yeah. Forget it, forget it. All right, show me some more examples. Keep going.

32:25

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 they're 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 is 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 want to 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.

32:30

What I call HR. I love it.

33:46

This I made with Claude. So, you know, again, no little vibe photos 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. Yeah, you get the picture. Yeah.

33:48

How did you make the video?

34:03

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 hook 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, at shrm, which is the big HR conference that I mentioned, we partnered with all of the hotels where all the SHRM attendees stay and we had this add on loop. So like when you turn on the TV instead of the Mario Lopez extra thing, you just hear this song. So like this song, people's heads, which is awesome.

34:05

That's insane. This is great. This is fun, man. This is the stuff that like, I love about marketing. I love. I'm glad you took this approach of coming on here and showing stuff like this. You got. You have more.

34:56

I won't bore you with the rest.

35:07

Show me the super bowl ad.

35:08

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.

35:09

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?

35:17

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 in specific channels, we can measure the incrementality of that on website traffic and on opportunities. And also Pipeline, is there a product.

35:38

That you use for that? People love the tools and tech and whatever.

36:03

We partner with Paramark on that.

36:07

Oh, cool. Nice. Shout out to Pranav. Good guy.

36:09

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 important measures of like, how is the channel performing overall?

36:12

Yeah.

36:28

So first we prove out that things like CTV and all that is actually like incremental to the business. And then we can get into like, is creative A better than creative B, which we could talk about too.

36:29

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.

36:40

Unless it's free. I wouldn't do anything that's like purely organic. Like everything we're doing is fuel for our paid engine.

36:47

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.

36:55

Like these webinar promos we'll do organically and we'll, 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 eyeballs seeing it.

37:07

Cool. Okay, what else? You had some other good thoughts? I kind of cut you off.

37:23

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 product surface area. But for a 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. Right. Sometimes we test things that are lo fi that are made with an iPhone, and we test that against things that are more polished and professional. So even for you take top of funnel awareness for hr, I showed the example from HR Lovesongs, which is lo fi 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 algorithm's preference for one creative over another. If it's cheaper for us to serve, that means that we could serve it to more people. 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 on LinkedIn, 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 a mixed media modeling to understand, you know, is this a channel we keep investing in and that's how we keep iterating on both creative and channels.

37:26

And is all that stuff driving to rippling homepage to create a free account? Like, what's the funnel?

38:51

There are CTAs in 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.

38:58

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.

39:08

Yeah, the example I showed is like a preview that doesn't show the link. So there is a link.

39:13

Okay.

39:18

But it's not. I don't expect people to see the ad and book a demo like right away. I don't know. If you do that, maybe a very compelling ad. The goal is with HR love songs or any of these things, implants 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 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 LoveSongs 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 likelier 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 been seeing rippling everywhere.

39:18

Huh. 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, I feel like I understand how you would do marketing at Rippling Great end of the podcast. Is this something you've had to learn? Like, you haven't, you haven't run marketing at a, at a company at this stage, right? Few people have. But how do you stay sharp? Do you have a great team? They teach you this? Are you learning on your own?

40:23

I try to listen to a lot of podcasts.

41:10

Maybe you're just not a moron. I don't know.

41:12

I think about all of this just like from first principles. It's like I think of marketing unlike any other function, where 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 are very different from content folks. And there's other random teams like, you know, channel and broker and private equity and, 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, I think of this skill set that I try to hone is not like marketing stuff and more like the same skillset a founder would have to hone, managing 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.

41:14

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.

42:13

That's.

42:29

It'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 a year 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 sit on the couch and see how many new leads come in?

42:30

I'm going to keep refreshing my dashboard and just.

42:50

Is that a thing? Like, is the company excited? Everyone's excited that Rippling's running a Super bowl ad.

42:53

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's 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 this is 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, like, mundane things thwart 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 Rippling? And if we could articulate that, then I think we have a really great opening with, you know, showing off the product.

42:57

I like it. Just quickly, what is the timeline of a Super bowl ad? Like, 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?

44:12

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 time frame. And then we worked like crazy over the holidays. We shot it a couple weeks ago.

44:21

Were you there?

44:38

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.

44:39

I mean, you're in New York. If you told me you filmed it in New York, I wouldn't have been.

44:49

Like, l. A just feels like where you want to shoot a Super bowl ad.

44:52

Yeah, sure. That's fair, that's fair, that's fair.

44:56

All right.

44:58

Ryan, good to see you, man. Thank you for doing it. He's a VP of marketing at Rippling. Check him out on LinkedIn around Exit 5. 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 do some silly stuff. That's how I feel after talking and it's good. It's fun to see the evolution of from growth guy to brand guy doing super bowl commercials for Rippling. Congrats on an awesome Ron. I'll. I'll keep following you and rooting for you. Thanks for coming and hanging out with me on the pod. Cool.

44:59

Thanks for having me.

45:24

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45:29