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

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the agentic web, built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search, no developer needed. Your website isn't just your home page anymore, it's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company, and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists. Which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI Search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams use to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI Search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at webflow.com/four/exitfive.
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Hey, it's me, Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Markup AI. AI has made it really easy to produce a lot of content, but producing content fast and producing content that's published ready are not the same thing. By published ready, I mean it follows your brand guidelines, it sounds like you, and it's a good fit for your audience. I'm seeing a lot of marketers right now running their content through a bunch of different AI tools trying to get to a final product, but by the time it comes out the other end, it doesn't sound anything like them. It just sounds like AI.
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**Ryan Narod** (1:57)
True.

**Dave Gerhardt** (1:57)
Markup AI helps you catch that first, so you're always putting your best stuff out there. Go and check it out at markup.ai. That's markup.ai.
You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Hey, it's Dave, my guest on this episode is Ryan Narod, he's VP of Marketing at Rippling. Rippling is one of the best examples of a B2B company that's figured out how to build a brand people actually recognize, which seems to be interesting to a lot of you right now because this was one of our most downloaded episodes of all time, and it has only been out there for about 60 days. So here it is again, in case you missed it, Ryan walks through the actual campaigns they ran to get there from scrappy iPhone videos and webinar promos to high production customer stories, and even their Super Bowl commercial because people often say, oh, sure, if I had a budget like Rippling, I could do that. Well, we give you both examples in this podcast, including how they shifted from being great at growth marketing to building something with real personality. I like them because they're a balance of growth and brand. We talk about how they measure brand without losing accountability to pipeline and actually driving revenue. Enjoy my conversation with Ryan from Rippling. Super excited to have you here, Ryan, because I've been connected with you for a while, but you joined Rippling a year and a half ago. Rippling is one of those companies I think is doing great marketing and it's everywhere and it looks like you're having a lot of fun. And so I just 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 you do before Rippling?

**Ryan Narod** (3:41)
Sure. First of all, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I've been a long time fan of yours and have listened to your show back in the Drift days.
Excited to be here.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:53)
All right. That's all. Thanks for listening, folks. We'll catch you on the next episode.

**Ryan Narod** (3:57)
That's it.

**Dave Gerhardt** (3:57)
We're good. We got what we need. We got the clip.

**Ryan Narod** (4:01)