To discuss the state of content marketing, Mobile Marketing Magazine sat down with Randy Frisch, CMO and co-founder of Uberflip, a content experience platform. In an effort to bring awareness to the importance of content marketing, Randy also co-wrote F#ck Content Marketing, and helped create the Conex Experience Tour.

1. Where does Uberflip fall into the marketing community?                                     

Uberflip is Software as a Service (SaaS) for marketers, which allows them to take all the content that they’ve created, organize it, and ultimately personalize it to the different audiences that they need to engage with, regardless of the strategies they use.  

We started Uberflip with the understanding that marketers need to be in control of content. We realized that content is what drives all the campaigns that we activate through marketing. 
Now, a lot of people may look at content and say, well that’s not over-strategic. The way most people go to market is through account-based marketing, demand-generation marketing, inbound marketing, or perhaps even through sales enablement. Ultimately, we don’t say we go to market with content.

At the same time, when you think about it, any of those marketing strategies that we talked about – from EBM through to sales enablement – the core of every campaign we execute links to content. The destination of those, or the experience, is content. To execute those, marketers need control, and that’s where Uberflip comes in. It allows a marketing team to work closely but freely with their developers on getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time. The goal of that is to engage our audience and to, at the end of the day, drive revenue. 

2. What gave you the inspiration for the Conex Experience Tour?

To be honest, we tried to run a roadshow tour a few years ago to build awareness around content experience. Content experience is the idea of going beyond creating content and using content in our marketing campaigns. That requires just going beyond pulling a content marketer into the conversation, but also including demand generation marketers, digital marketers, and other new roles like account-based marketers.

The challenge a few years ago was that the only people willing to listen were the content marketers. What we realized was that it wasn’t enough to change the way we approached and leveraged the content that’s in our organization.

In the years that followed, we started to see more people from these different disciplines realizing the value of content. The goal of the tour was to meet and get different marketers with different backgrounds talking about more creative ways that they can leverage content. It was very exciting to see how far the industry had come over the last three to four years, so much so that everyone from our speakers to our attendees were tuned into this idea of content experience.

Even if they didn’t understand the term, the idea of leveraging content and ensuring that it was personalized to the different accounts, sectors, verticals, or industries that they were targeting, was truly a top of mind consideration for 2019 and beyond.

3. What insights do you want your attendees to leave with?

A big aspect was getting people to change the way they think about content. Creating content doesn’t mean that we’ve done our jobs. Creating content is an important step and it’s a challenging step. There’s a lot of great companies out there that help us become better content creators, but the goal was to get people to go back into their office and challenge the idea of what content is for, at the end of the day. 

We wanted people to go in and put a focus on content experience. To facilitate that, we helped attendees walk through a framework, called the Content Experience Framework, which walks through five simple steps to getting a better content experience at the door. The first step is to centralize your content. The second step is to organize your content. The third, and perhaps the most fun, is to personalize that content, after which we will distribute back to those personalized experiences. 

Lastly, step five is generate results. The goal was to have people pull that framework back, leverage the right people in the organization, and when the time’s right, introduce technologies like Uberflip and others they heard of from some of our sponsors – companies like Sigstr, PFL, Demandbase, and others. 

4. What does F#ck Content Marketing mean? 

To be clear, when I wrote this book, which originated as a blog post, I wasn’t suggesting that content marketing or content marketers should f*** off. The idea was that we need to leverage our content, and that we need to focus on the content experience.

In fact, at one point, my own team was uncomfortable with me publishing this idea as a blog post, suggesting that I could change the terminology to Stop Content Marketing. Again, to be clear, the idea was not that we would stop creating content, but what’s the point in it, if we’re not going to leverage that content.

Now, although that may be clearer, it probably wouldn’t have all fit onto the cover of a book. The book itself is broken into three sections. The first section kind of paints the reality of where we are today. I’ve drawn a lot of examples from our consumer lives where we interact with brands like Netflix, Spotify, and others that deliver memorable experiences, that are engaging, personalized, and relevant.

The challenge to marketers’ relays that a lot of their campaigns that they’re executing need to emulate those experiences and break through the clutter. After all, the people you’re trying to target on their own mobile device may be watching Netflix or listening to Spotify in the moment you send them an email. When that email comes in, if it’s not personalized, relevant and engaging in the same way, how should we expect someone to care.

The second part of the book walks through the framework I discussed above. The third part of the book walks through an understanding of who will own content experience inside of your organization. This requires a big shift in thinking, where some organizations are going as far as adopting content experience managers, and others are relying on the demand generation, account-based marketers, digital marketers and others on the team. Buy in to the importance of leveraging and mapping content to the right people at the right stages of the journey.