Personalization isn't "Hey FIRSTNAME", and F*ck content marketing | Randy Frisch CMO @ Uberflip

Episode Description

In today's episode of Demand Gen Chat, I had the opportunity to chat with Randy Frisch the co-founder and CMO at Uberflip. We talk about going deeper on personalization. 10 years ago, "knowing" someone's first name was enough, but we have to continue to evolve. The buying experience is also critical, it will set you apart from your competitors.

Show Notes

Uberflip: https://www.uberflip.com/

Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/

Amber Bogey - Degreed: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-bogie/

F*ck Content Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/Content-Marketing-Experience-Revenue-Relationships-ebook/dp/B07NPDQR4F

Kyle Lacey - CMO Lessonly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy/

Follow Randy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frischrandy/

The Marketer's Journey Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-marketers-journey/id958284714

Follow Kaylee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaylee-edmondson/

Learn more about Chili Piper: https://www.chilipiper.com/

About Demand Gen Chat

Demand Gen Chat is a Chili Piper podcast hosted by Kaylee Edmondson. Join us as we sit down with leaders in marketing to discover the key to driving B2B revenue. If you want benchmarks or insights on trends in the market, this podcast is for you!

Episode Transcript

Kaylee Edmondson: Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of Demand Gen Chat. I'm your host Kaylee Edmondson and today we are joined with Randy Frisch, who is the co-founder and CMO at Uberflip. Thank you so much for joining us.

Randy Frisch: Absolutely Kaylee, I'm, I'm excited to be here.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to just dive right in. I did obviously a little bit of research on you. I've read your book, um, checked out your LinkedIn profile, things of that nature. And I'm super curious to hear about your journey, um, from being a marketing manager at Rubbermaid to a co-founder and CMO of such an established company, such as Uberflip. So I know a little bit about the backstory of Uberflip. It started as Flipbook, um, and has evolved into what we know and love today as Uberflip, but I just feel like there's a gap for me there, and I would love for you to fill in the blanks for, um, kind of how you got there.

Randy Frisch: Yeah, well, I haven't been asked this one for a bit because my, my past, my past is like so disconnected that people are like, I'm not even going to go there. Uh, but I, I mean, yeah, the short answer of this is I love marketing and, and coming out of university, undergrad, that's all I wanted to do is do marketing. So the, the job that I found at the time was a big company, I didn't know any better, and it was a great learning experience. I did a bit, a bit of sales, did a bit of marketing in the three years there. Uh, it was more consumer-based, uh, which, to be honest, when I was younger, I wanted to do Super Bowl commercials, so that felt like the right play.

Uh, and then, in between that experience, and co-founding a, uh, successful tech company, very luckily, you know, I, I was in and out of different management rules and the funny thing is, again, back to the theme, I always navigated to the marketing stuff. I ran a company and like, whenever I could, I was focused on the marketing. Uh, I went into my MBA, I, I rolled up, enrolled for all these finance courses, thinking like, that's what I got to do, and I dropped them all after the first semester and went heavy again on more marketing courses. Uh, you know, it, it's just something I always have enjoyed and, and thinking about the buyer, I think it's the best way to create success, is having a united message that the entire organization buys into.

That to me is how you get to revenue. And, you know, it's not to say that it's all on the marketer, but it's the marketing that pulses through that organization that excites me.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah, absolutely. And so stepping into Uberflip, it started as, for people who might not know, it started as Flipbook, right, and very quickly evolved into something that is much greater and much closer to what we know the product to look like today. What was that transition like? Was it feedback from your market that made you shift your strategy and evolve your product? Um, was it just con- conceptualized from the beginning? You knew you wanted it to be more like Uberflip, evolve more content types, et cetera. Like what did that evolution look like?

Randy Frisch: Yeah, sure, it's... I mean, there's so many, you know, turns along the way is best way to put it. I don't want to use the word pivot because we weren't necessarily pivoting, as you always hear businesses talk about, we had a pivot. Uh, it was, as you said, it was listening a lot to customers. Uh, for those who don't know what a Flipbook is, we, we started off, we had a solution to take a PDF and make it into page flipping software, right?

Like, there's a lot of technology like that, and, and we had probably the better tech out there, but we knew... We didn't know where PDFs were going first of all. Uh, I, I still don't know where PDFs are going. Uh, I don't even know if they will be noticed that anymore, but one of the things that happened at some point was we wanted to figure out how to do more for our customers, like you said. And we went to them and we said, listen, we're, we're creating these one-off documents for you that page flip, and it's a better online experience, but like what would be better?

And the feedback we got was like, we need a destination where they will all live. And we're like, okay, we can do that. We'll just grab all the links and, you know, little thumbnail images and we'll make a homepage. And they're like, okay, great. That's awesome. But could you also put some of our latest videos there? And so rather blog posts? So the funny thing is we look at like early V1 of Uberflip. It never launched, but like wire frame. The idea was that we had a PDF in the middle of this page, surrounded by these little widgets of your other content. And we stared at it for like weeks and realized, okay, wait, we're too focused on what we do now. What our customers were really saying at the time was they had a problem centralizing all content.

You know, PDFs were just one format. They couldn't get their blogs in the right place. They couldn't surface the right videos in the moment. They had to send someone to like YouTube to go watch their video. Uh, and that was something that we realized, okay, well, maybe the PDF doesn't have to be in the center. We have to figure out what the buyer wants in the center and set it up that way.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah, no, I love it. It's definitely customer-led, right. Um, and, and I think a lot of companies are struggling with listening to their customers, understanding their customers, getting that customer feedback, um, and closing that feedback loop. So I think it's just super interesting to hear how you guys went about it, um, and then actually ended up delivering a product that the customers were wanting all along. They were kind of conceptualizing a, a V3 and you guys were still, you know, trying to solve a problem and kind of bridging that gap, I think is really powerful.

Randy Frisch: Yeah. As, as you put it and sometimes also you're in a current version, they're in a current version. You're not talking the same language because in some cases you don't even know what's possible yet.

Kaylee Edmondson: Right.

Randy Frisch: Right? Like, can you know in 15 years ago describing the Uber experience, like car riding experience, or could you imagine describing 20 years ago signing a document online? Like these were things that we didn't even conceptualize because we had kind of, I guess, fallen back into these bad processes, bad approaches. And it's not that they're bad, it's just that we don't know what we're doing. It was crazy. I, I, I was talking to a, a marketer yesterday, I think it was, and they walked me through their... they're not a customer of ours, but they walked me through their website. They just wanted some feedback. And we found this link to a webinar on, on their, on their webpage.

And you could watch this webinar, it wasn't gated or anything like that, which is fine. I know there's gate debates, we're not going to go there. Um, but you clicked on that, on that link to watch the webinar and it took you to YouTube, right? And they innocently did, did that because that's where the video lives and that's where they were going to take someone. And the funny thing is when I did this on my experience, I've got a 14 year old, he's obsessed with basketball and hijacks my YouTube account. So all of the videos being recommended next after this, you know, bank's website, uh, video was, you know, Michael Jordan game seven, you know, highlights, et cetera. Like it, it was a very different path than what they wanted that buyer to experience. They're not even thinking about those elements. So there's things that we need to challenge in terms of how we create a better buyer experience.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Let's go there. What are some of those things that are top of mind for you, other than... Like obviously, it takes... For me, it's very powerful to have a third set of eyes. Like we have, you know, two of us working really closely internally on things. Having a third set of eyes to take it like that perspective of like, hey, why am I being recommended Michael Jordan videos is something that sometimes you get so into the weeds of what it is you're doing that you're thinking so tactically. You're not taking a step back and thinking about the buying experience, the customer experience as a whole, um, or challenging anything that is like the status quo within your organization, right? Um, what are some of those things that are top of mind for you that should be challenged or change?

Randy Frisch: Yeah. I mean, you know, we just touched on sending someone to an experience that you can't control. I think the other one is, is we will often organize content the way we create content versus thinking about the buyer experience and what they're looking for. I mean, how many websites have you gone to where they've got this menu structure and, you know, one tab is all of our videos and the other is all of our eBooks, and the other is our infographics, if for whatever reason, we're still creating those. You know, like that's how we, we [crosstalk 00:08:16].

Kaylee Edmondson: Probably all of them.

Randy Frisch: Okay.

Kaylee Edmondson: Probably all of them, right? That's probably how they all are, but how many people go to a website and say, I really prefer to learn through infographics. Let me select this drop down.

Randy Frisch: Yeah, exactly. It, it's not how we work. We're like, I want you to solve my problem, and, and it's interesting when we, when we look at buyer trends and, and what the buyer wants versus what we sometimes associate. Like let's talk more about like personalization, because that's where, that's where we got to get to.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yes.

Randy Frisch: But the, the idea with personalization is some people get lost, and it was interesting in last year we did this really interesting survey. We went out to a, a combination of buyers and marketers, and we asked them the same question and we got very different answers. So I'll give you one that I, that I found really interesting. We asked both marketers and buyers, what is personalization? Like, what does it mean to be, you know, to have personalization? The marketer, their answers were that they can deliver knowing your name, your company, and your job title. Like that, if they can do those, they feel like they've personalized. Those were the top three in that order.

For the, for the buyer, their number one answer was the problem I'm looking to solve. Number two was, you know, my company, you know, my title. Uh, and, and, and there's this disconnect there, right? Like we're so focused on saying, I know your name. And don't get me wrong, like 10, 15 years ago, when a big company knew my name, and like when blockbuster would email me and I'd be like, how did blockbuster get my name? This is so cool. Now we get that same email and we're like, how did I get on their list? Get me off this standard.

Kaylee Edmondson: Exactly.

Randy Frisch: Yeah, I mean this is [crosstalk 00:09:56]. We know how that, we know how that works. That's not personalization anymore. What's personalization, ultimately to me, is the ability to deliver relevance, right? Like, and that is that ability to solve the problem. One of the, one of the examples I love, that's granted much more consumer based, like i- if everyone listening to this is, is... I mean, this is a podcast, you're probably already on your phone, right? So you take out your phone, open up Spotify, you could be listening on Spotify to this for all we know. And Spotify is home, don't stop listening to this, but Spotify is home, when you go there, is going to have these magical words made for you, right? And, and I love that, that terminology. Like, first of all, the idea that it's made for me is exciting.

Now, don't get me wrong. Like Tom Petty's not creating a new track for me in there, right? And, and as marketers, we don't have to try and emulate by creating a ton of content for every buyer, we simply need to serve the relevant content, and then it feels personalized, right? And that's the key, it, it's that relevance. They know, I like Tom petty. So they're going to suggest Neil Young. I don't know, someone else. And, and, and the idea there is, is that relevance starts to build this relationship, this trust, this connection between you and in this case me, Spotify, but ultimately that's what we can accomplish as marketers. We just have to be there ultimately to solve their problems, not just know their name.

Kaylee Edmondson: Exactly. And so some of these companies that we talk about often that are really doing great at personalization, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, of course, are behemoths in the space that we're playing in. What are some companies that you could call out, or that are top of mind for you that are not Fortune 1000 companies that are doing a really great job at personalization in their marketing today?

Randy Frisch: Yeah, absolutely. So you make a good point, and, and let's, let's keep in mind again, what Spotify, what Netflix is doing, et cetera, they're also doing this for, for millions or hundreds of millions of people. So it's not really true personalization. This is they're delivering relevance, leveraging data. So if we, if we take this to demand gen marketing, if we take this to something like account-based marketing, there's different, there's different definitions of account based marketing, so they're different people.

Kaylee Edmondson: Okay.

Randy Frisch: Yeah. There's all those curate, who we will tell you that ABM is like choose 10 accounts and like really go after those in a one-to-one basis. And then there's others who say, you know what? ABM is really just like a mindset for marketing that we're going to do our best to deliver a more true, personalized, relevant experience to every buyer by knowing which buyers should buy from us. No matter which spectrum your at on there, it's a combination I think of using art and science to accomplish this. Now, if you believe that it's only 10 accounts, you are still going to use data, right? You're going to do a lot of research yourself, and you're going to use platforms that deliver your intent and, you know, understanding of what someone's looking for. But you will very much hand maneuver to say, these are the assets that I'm going to put in front of you.

But we can still do this at scale for, you know, a thousand accounts. And to give you an example, Kaylee, I know, I know you asked for one. So there's a company that we've gotten to work with, a- and they are quite big of a company, but, uh, I'll give you smaller companies too after, uh, called Snowflake. A lot of people, you know, have heard the snowflake story. It is one of a kind like a snowflake. Uh, you know, they, they've seen huge success.

And, but we started with them very early in their definition of ABM. There was a, a gentleman named Daniel there and he was actually tasked by his boss at the time. They said, okay, here are 12 accounts. Literally, you know, this was early ABM-

Kaylee Edmondson: Yap.

Randy Frisch: ... definitely. They said, we want you to go and, and we want you to think about how we deliver a destination, an end experience, where people will consume content and show that we can actually solve their problems. So what he did was he, you know, he first tried to hack this using webpages in CMSs. Didn't really cut it. We ended up partnering with them. And, and just on those first 12, he used a lot more, I would say art than science. Like-

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: ... let's understand these accounts, let's, hand-pick the content that we have. Let's create content that fills gaps and let's deliver this. They did this. It took them a lot of time at the, at that point, but then he gets called and he's just a manager level. At the time he gets called into this executive meeting and they, they say like, listen, we don't know what's going on, but these accounts that we asked you to work on, way more engaged than anything we've ever seen. We want you to do whatever you're doing for these hundred accounts, right? Like just, just double. That's when we started talking to them, and and they actually helped us form part of what our product became there, which was this idea of a template so that we could deliver kind of like these Spotify platelets, right? Kind of logging in to Netflix and whatever's trending or whatever you watched last and what would be right for you at this stage, that same type of experience in terms of every channel that they link from.

So whether they were sending an email, whether you're clicking on the signature in an email, whether you were, you had just booked an appointment with a, you know, great platform like, like yours, and now in between that stage, you wanna, you know, learn a little bit more before that demo call. All these, these instances where they had to direct someone, they were creating a more natural experience. Now, since then, I mean, we, we know Snowflake's been hugely successful. Last I had spoken to them, they'd done the, these one-to-one landing pages for over 2,500 accounts. Now, Snowflake's amazing company, but they also have a huge team, a lot of resources. They've continued to believe in a lot of the art, but as we'd imagined with Snowflake, they've got endless data points. Um, you know, they are a data company, so they're [crosstalk 00:15:58].

Kaylee Edmondson: Exactly. Definitely works to their favor.

Randy Frisch: Yeah. But, but another one, like I, I told you, there's others, a, a great marketer named Amber Bogie at, uh, at Degreed. And she doesn't have that same team size. She wanted to prove ABM and she wanted to do it in this modern day. So she went, I'm not going to say with less art because, you know, I think all marketing requires art but you know, a lot of the science side of it, and, and really using data through platforms that give us intent, you know. We're talking about the 6senses and the demand basis and the Bomboras of the world that help us understand what is someone looking for? And again, like we said earlier, how do we solve that problem?

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Interesting. And so how many accounts do we think that she was able to tackle? Like what's her scale look like? So she's not a Snowflake, but you know, maybe she's a like 10 person marketing team or something that's more sustainable and what's her ABM approach, one side of the spectrum or the other?

Randy Frisch: Uh, so, so I'll, rather than give me the actual number, I'll, I'll tell you the way she approached it, which was aligning with our BDR team, right? And, and that was the mindset. I think that's how a lot of us have to think about this is, you know, if are... You know, let's go back to 10 accounts. If your universe is 10 accounts that should buy from you because they're all multi-million dollar deals and you only have so many BDRs doing that, then just focus on those 10. But if you have a much bigger universe and you have a BDR team that can scale, and they've got a hundred accounts assigned to them or whatever that is, you need to find that right recipe, balancing that art and science to be able to deliver something that feels personalized, right? Like what we got to remember, we hit on it earlier with all these funny examples of Netflix and Amazon and you know, all, all these companies.

I mean, maybe more than ever this past year, I mean, I'm... you can tell I'm at right now, right? This is, this is my house. That is the bar, yes. A bar, a bar, but like on the other side of the room here is the living room and that's where my TV is and Netflix is streaming there. When I take out the phone, like we talked about earlier, I got Spotify on here. I've got notifications coming to me about what I should watch on Netflix tonight. Like, that's the experience, and yet you expect me to go to my inbox when you send me an email and click through and continue to engage on something where you just send me, like we said earlier to some page with all of your e-books, right? Like-

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah.

Randy Frisch: ... maybe I'll read the first one, but am I going to go to the next one if it's a completely different topic. No not, not likely.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah. Probably not likely, right. It's yeah. Definitely, the buyer experience all the way through and it's something that I think has been talked about for several years and of course, you guys have been talking about it. You were flipped for several years, but people are finally, I feel like, starting to come around to adopt, um, actually trying to implement some of these strategies. So I think that's really great coverage, and, you know, for everybody that's listening, um, Randy also wrote a really great book about it. I don't know if we can say it or we're going to have to beep it out. Huh, do you say that loud?

Randy Frisch: That, that's up to you. I mean, we can beep it out. I can just drop, that it's an F bomb out of the gate, you know, we [crosstalk 00:19:00].

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You go ahead. Well, good, tell people, tell people what you called your book.

Randy Frisch: [crosstalk 00:19:03] I'm doing marketing and people can figure out what we're talking about. Yeah, it's, you know, writing a book was fun and, uh, it, it was something... I mean, the book's been out for, for a couple of years now, and, and it has been an Amazon bestseller. It's been a lot of fun, you know, to go through that process. You know, w- what the book was really designed to do, it, it, it started as a blog post. So, I mean, we're talking about content.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah.

Randy Frisch: This was a blog post that, that I wrote that had the same controversial headline. And, you know, to clarify, when I, when I said the fudge content marketing, right, I wasn't saying that I don't believe in content marketing, I wasn't saying that I don't love content marketers. I think it's really hard work to be a content marketer. The problem with content marketing is the term that ended up happening. This happens with a lot of tech and a lot of buzz words in, in any industry, especially marketing, is we ended up defining it as the first step of the process. So take ABM we just talked about. A lot of people still associate ABM is let me identify the accounts that you buy from us. They don't think that ABM is also how do I get their attention? How do I give them an experience like we just talked about that's, you know, compelling and engaging.

Same thing with content marketing. A lot of people ended up defining content marketing as how do I create content, but not what do I do with all that content. And over Forrester and SiriusDecisions, they talk about how over 80% of content we create never gets viewed, right?

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: Never gets viewed. It's like 80%. That's crazy. Think about the effort and you know, the smart people who were working on this. So the idea is not the content marketing's a bad idea, but you know, my view is let's wave the white flag, let's give the term to the creation piece, right? Like a lot of us have hired. Think about people on your team who are content marketers, you associate them as content creators. They could have been journalists before. The, the, the evolution or moreso the next step that we need to think about after we create content is how do we package that content? You know, how does that content live? How is it surrounded by other content that's relevant. Everything that we've been talking about today, that, that glue, that sticks it all together, that gets you to say, I want to go there. The same reason you open up Netflix, the same reason you open up Spotify. It's, it's that relevance factor-

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: ... um, as well also the way we display it, et cetera, makes the content more compelling to spend time with. So those are the things that, you know, I put a lot of focus on with my team and, and I always have. Like I obsess over the look and feel of things. Like to me, that is-

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah.

Randy Frisch: ... that's the marketing that I love. And, and I think that's, that's the rally of the book. It's, let's, let's continue to create content as long as we're going to use it. And if we're not, then absolutely, you know, whatever F bomb you want to throw in front of there, that's what we should be doing.

Kaylee Edmondson: Exactly. So shifting gears, let's spend the last little bit of this. I want to talk more about your team and especially like demand gen itself. So, um, let's start with your perception of the relationship between content marketing and demand gen?

Randy Frisch: Uh, that's a good question. Um, so in, I mean in my, in my company, we do it differently probably than, than many, but we're, you know, we're no longer alone in how we think about this. Uh, you know, I, I think a lot of people, they, they don't value content marketing. They don't value the content marketer in the way they need to be valued.

The rule of the content marketer either needs to be expanded to think about, okay, I've created this content, where in the buyer journey, is it gonna live, right? Like where did I create this for? And, and one of the things like, forget about technology to do this, like start with like a spreadsheet, right. You know, start with, uh, like, I still like Excel, uh, like for Google Sheets, but I'd still like Excel. And, you know, think about it this way. Like if you had your X and Y axis, right?

If you had your rows and your columns in that spreadsheet, your rows may be something like, you know, who are the different buyers or who are the different personas that we're selling to. A lot of us know there's as many as like 10 people in our buying cycle.

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: Who are those people. Uh, could be verticals if you're selling into different verticals. Then if, if we think about our columns, the columns would be, you know, different stages of the buyer journey. We can go as simple as awareness on to advocacy. So you could have different stages along there. Each of those points that we meet, you know, call it like sell A23, right? You know, each of those, we need to think about the buyer. Let's say you're selling to a CFO who's at the consideration stage. What content do they need there, right? And, and to your question, Kaylee, that's where the content team and demand gen team needs to be talking.

What most of us end up doing is we're like, oh, well, we got to create more content because we've promised that we're going to create three blog posts this week and two eBooks-

Kaylee Edmondson: Yap.

Randy Frisch: ... each quarter right? So we just get, you know, we become this content factory, but we're not thinking about filling the gaps. Now the reality is, depending on your spreadsheet, that thing could be really big. But together with the demand gen team start talking about what are the key points along there? Who are the key buyers at different stages. Those are the holes that we're going to fill before others. Now, if you really want to make this spreadsheet complex, add one more filter, kind of make a Z access if you could do so. And that to me is the channel that they're coming from as well, right?

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: As marketers, there's only so many channels we really use as much as we think there's many, there's email, there's social, there's ads, you know, maybe we've got PR or something like that. I mean, there's, there's only so many sales outreaches, maybe different than your, your view of emails with the map. And what you could do is add that as a filter and then fill in those boxes based on, at that stage, what is the channel and what content do I need that matches the channel they're coming from? Because for social, we may want to think about leading with a video asset versus coming off an, an ad. Maybe we want it to be something more premium that gets them to fill out a form. So these, these are the things that we need to think about, and, you know, tend to, that to me is how either content teams have to step up or demand gen teams need to lean in and talk to the content people.

Kaylee Edmondson: Exactly. It's a true partnership, and I think I've... Uh, personally I've witnessed several organizations that silo content teams and demand gen teams. And it is so dysfunctional. It is impossible to get anything out the door. Um like, I obviously run demand gen here for chili pepper. I cannot do anything without our content team. Like my job would literally not exist. Um, I am not a content marketer. I wish that I were, but I am not, and I'm like not qualified to put together valuable, meaningful content. Um, but that's what our content team is for. So I think that like a true partnership is definitely the best way to go, but I just don't see it often, um, structured that way so that you aren't siloed from one another within your marketing team.

Randy Frisch: It's, it's a, it's a really good point Kaylee, and I, I think some of it sometimes stems from a lot of the CMOs. A lot of the VP leaders often don't come through a content track, right? And I think that's because content people are almost in, in risk. I don't think we're going to go there, and and I'm going to lose some people on this comment of being like perceived as the same low value as a social media person. I don't think that of social media people, I think that they are really strategic as distributors, as opposed to just people who are, you know, starting conversation. Uh, I, I think they're kind of an expansion of your demand view, but you know, it's, it's a very different lens and, and I get to, you know, like you, I get to chat with marketers every week on a podcast and, and mostly my, our CMOs.

There's a number of them who did come from either content or PR. There's not a lot, but those ones who do, it's a very different way that they view connecting content. And, and it, and I'm not suggesting that we should only put content people in CMOs, but we can definitely learn a lot from how those people are structuring their teams.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah, absolutely. And then I want to get into this too, because this is actually something we're talking about internally. So selfish question for myself, but I would love to, uh, leverage your expertise is around content attribution or rating content success. I don't know. I need to form the question a little bit better, but how do you make sure that the most valuable pieces of content, um, are appreciated, reported upon, attributed to your business successfully so that you can go back and tell your content team, like this is what's working best and we should do more of this. So what is your like attribution model look like for different content types or for content in general?

Randy Frisch: Absolutely. Uh, it's a great question. Um, I'm going to give you the non-pure technology answer to this. I'm going to give you-

Kaylee Edmondson: Great.

Randy Frisch: ... first the... Okay. Uh, because I'm not going to pitch my product or other products specifically. Uh, I, I think the, the key is the, first of all, the ability to track what's happening, right? So even if you don't have a platform, a technology platform, you know, you can do a lot of this even with like Google, right? Like, you know, Google analytics can give us a lot of insight to the path that people take. Now, it's hard to do that at scale and that's where technology will come in, but we need to be able to understand what are those key moments and what is triggering that next stage of evolution. Now, this is where, forget about which technology you have, you need your technology to work together, right?

You need your CRM, your marketing automation platform, your enrichment platforms and intent platforms, as well as whatever you're using to host your content, to all talk to each other. That is really the key because we can't go into one of these systems and, and understand just from a content system alone, what is happening unless it's connected to a marketing automation platform, unless it's connected, because what we need to ultimately do, is a very simple way that I think of like kind of three steps of what we're doing in marketing, is we're investing a lot in data, right?

We take all that data, and, and we have so much data, right? Like, you know, we got data coming out of our ass, right? And, and, uh, and it's all valuable, but it's only valuable when we start to use it, to actually attract our, our customers. There, we use channels, right? Channels like we talked about, ads, social, email. And then each of those, regardless of what channel, you're thinking about, the one thing in common with any digital channel, even many offline channels, it's a call to action. We want them to go from that channel, say email, it's like, click here. That's what you want to do.

Then where do you send them to? So what we need to be able to trace to your question is that path, to understand the data, to understand the channel, how it connects to the content. That to me, is just as relevant as what content did they consume? What content can I attribute? I need to understand the channel, the campaign, the dollars that went behind that to get them there.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, that, like you said, we have so much data and so many data points in so many different systems um, that right now we're actually trying to find the cleanest and most concise way to get all of that piped into Salesforce so that everything is like a single source of truth, and we can directly tie that to our Salesforce campaigns, which directly tie back to revenue. Um, so that we're not going around this horn of becoming like what you mentioned earlier, where it's like, oh, I have to create three blog posts, so let me just churn three blog posts out, where instead, we can do the, you know, the whole debate around like quality over quantity. And we aren't in this weird cycle of having to produce blog posts just to produce them.

Randy Frisch: Yeah. No, it's... It'll be interesting to see what becomes the data system of record with time, right? And I think, we've, we've-

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: ... all seen in the last five years, kind of a shift from thinking that the map like our Marketo, Eloqua, whatever it is, HubSpot is to, maybe it's more than CRM and less so at this point, I think, we're seeing this in B2B, but we're starting to see it in B to C, which is this, you know, the rise of a CDP, right?

Kaylee Edmondson: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Randy Frisch: Which if, if, you know, if you need yet another acronym sense for customer data platform, and it's this idea of a 360 view. It's regardless of channel, it's regardless of where that comes from. That becomes so important to filter back to, because it, it... again, back to those three steps, that data allows us to inform what channels to reach out and where to send them. And then as we engage, again, it, this just becomes a circle and we get better.

Kaylee Edmondson: Yeah. Because we need more data, right. That's the whole point of this, right. More, more platforms, more technology, more data points. Um, okay, cool. Well, thank you so much for your time. Before we wrap, I always ask one final question, who is another marketer that you are following in the space that our listeners should go follow, read their book, follow them on social, whatever it may be.

Randy Frisch: Ooh, there's so many. Who do I wanna call better?

Kaylee Edmondson: I know. You have to pick one.

Randy Frisch: No, I always like what Kyle Lacy's got to say. Uh, Kyle Lacy is the CMO at Lessonly. He's fantastic. I think he's... first of all, he gets marketing, but he's also a great leader, uh, in terms of, you know, his views and, and how he rallies his team. Uh, I've always had a lot of respect for him.

Kaylee Edmondson: And if anyone wants to follow you afterwards, where's the best place?

Randy Frisch: Uh, it's a great question. I, I'm probably most active on LinkedIn, but uh, if you want to, you know, find another podcast in addition to this great one, go check out The Marketer's Journey, uh, available on probably whatever podcast platform you're on right now. Uh, and, uh, you know, other than that, go check out uberflip.com.

Kaylee Edmondson: Thank you so much for taking the time. Um, for anybody listening, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review. It continues to allow us to bring you more valid content like this. Um, thanks so much and we will talk to you later.