The Content Experience: An Interview with Randy Frisch, President and Co-Founder of Uberflip

The practice of content marketing began to evolve into a grown-up discipline about a decade ago. That was around the time social media platforms had reached the size where they could serve as a practical delivery channel. Companies no longer had to rely on paid ads to drive visitors to their own branded web properties – they could attract inbound traffic organically through social media. And then with the democratization of publishing the content floodgates burst open.

Today the world is awash in blogs, streaming video, e-books, white papers, infographics, webinars, podcasts, newsletters and so much more, in a dizzying dogfight for attention. We’ve reached a saturation point, where no matter how good the content may be, the chances of it being noticed are remote.

Despite this explosive growth, content marketing remains a leap of faith for most companies. They may have become better at generating content – but whether it works or not remains to be seen, especially when you consider that 70% of content reportedly goes unnoticed. Which is probably why 86% of companies say that their content marketing efforts aren’t generating business value, according to Forrester. Pretty distressing when you consider how much money is spent on content marketing – oftentimes, as much as one third of a company’s marketing budget.

Despite the questionable contribution to business results, marketers are undeterred – budgets are expected to keep growing. But that means the content glut will only get worse. Even more money will have to be spent making that content visible – relying, just as before, on paid ads.

The solution, according to Randy Frisch, is to say “F#CK to Content Marketing”, which just happens to be the provocative title of his recently published book. Despite the attention-grabbing title, he’s been an ardent proponent of content marketing ever since he and his partner founded their company Uberflip in 2012. Uberflip competes in the hotly contested arena of content marketing platforms. But unlike a lot of its CMP competitors, which function as publishing workflow engines, Uberflip prefers to optimize what it likes to call the “content experience”: allowing marketers to offer a more personalized and interactive way to engage with content. Every year the Toronto-based company hosts a highly regarded event for marketers called CONEX - short for “content experience” - which just last month drew a crowd of over 700 attendees from across North America.

The main thesis of Randy’s book is that marketers have spent too much time worrying about content scalability and not enough about content discoverability. Even the best content can get buried in a chronological scroll. And often the content is too elementary or generic to be of much value to prospective buyers deep into self-education. Marketers should be thinking about how to map the content journey to the purchase journey, Randy argues, and design a dynamic experience that aligns with the knowledge level and decision stages of individual buyers.

But before getting Randy’s take on the state of content marketing I wanted to know: what’s up with that book title?