Rippling successfully developed distinct, effective stories for its HR, Finance, and IT personas independently. This allowed them to make progress without being blocked by the more complex challenge of creating a single, overarching company narrative, which often becomes too generic for multi-product companies.
To move away from stale content authored by "The Rippling Team," the company shifted to a "human first" model. They hired marketers with "weird, wacky profiles" who were comfortable being the face of the company and created a flywheel of interviewing experts for video-first content.
Rippling found that inexpensive, lo-fi content, like an iPhone video shot on the street, can perform just as well as high-production shoots. They discovered that the higher-cost creative does not deliver a proportionally higher return, making scrappy, human content a highly efficient choice.
Rippling's social media manager acts as an internal creative partner and quality control. Instead of just posting requests, her job is to partner with stakeholders to elevate their ideas into great social content, acting as an "air traffic control" that also up-levels creative quality.
For key customers like Barry's, Rippling extends beyond a testimonial video. They treat the partnership as a year-long activation, creating integrated experiences like hosting pop-up workout classes at industry conferences to maximize the reach and impact of the customer story.
At Rippling, creative content is rarely developed for purely organic purposes. Every asset, from a lo-fi webinar promo to a high-production video, is intentionally created to fuel their paid media engine, ensuring maximum distribution and measurable impact for their investments.
To maintain accountability, Rippling's brand team uses a mixed media model (MMM) to measure the impact of channel spend on pipeline. They also run incrementality tests by pulsing media in specific markets to prove its direct, subsequent effect on revenue.
A marketing leader's role isn't to be the best at every function (e.g., product marketing, events). Instead, it's to operate like a founder or general manager: asking smart questions, holding a high bar for excellence, and managing a diverse portfolio of specialists.
Rippling proves the value of top-of-funnel ads by measuring their effect on bottom-of-funnel efficiency. They found prospects exposed to brand ads convert at twice the rate on direct-response ads, with buyers explicitly citing they've been "seeing Rippling everywhere" on sales calls.