Uberflip this week will use its Conex customer event to officially launch an app marketplace where B2B marketers can find software that works with its platform for designing and managing content experiences, according to its CMO.
The Toronto-based company — whose customers include MongoDB, LeanData and Snowflake — already has about a dozen apps available in the marketplace, and will likely see that rise to more than 100 this year, Randy Frisch said. While Uberflip makes tools that help centralize, personalize and distribute content across the buyer journey, apps in the marketplace will extend its customers’ capabilities into new areas.
An early example is 6sense, a San Francisco-based company that uses AI to identify buyers and close sales opportunities, which announced a partnership with Uberflip last week. Uberflip customers using 6sense intent data will be able to set conditional statements about what kind of content they want to serve, for instance, depending on whether a prospect is researching a product or close to making a purchase.
“The ceiling (of potential apps) is virtually limitless,” Frisch told B2B News Network in an interview at Conex. “There will be lot of apps that do things like edit call to actions, themes — kind of like Wordpress.”
As more customers told Uberflip they see its products as a platform, the company decided to go beyond the typical route of simply creating integrations, Frisch said. Many firms develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to let firms create plug-ins and extensions to their product, but Uberflip is building its own products on the APIs it offers others. This creates a lot more openness for the martech sector to innovate with Uberflip, he said.
In a recent customer advisory panel, however, Frisch said he asked people how they would use Uberflip today if they were starting from scratch. After a lengthy response, the bottom-line answer from one marketing exec was, “I would use it for anything my CMS couldn’t accomplish.” For Frisch, this was just further proof of how use cases for his firm’s product have evolved.
“We used to be the basis for people’s (web site) resource centres,” he said.
Besides the marketplace, Uberflip also released survey data in partnership with Heinz Marketing that showed more than half, or 53 per cent of B2B marketers admitted they are unable to create landing pages, blog posts, webpages and other digital content destinations easily. Personalized content recommendations, meanwhile, are only being offered by 42 per cent.
“As marketers, we’ve trained ourselves over a very long time to think about a cadence similar to what we do with e-mail,” Frisch said. “You might have a conditional statement that says, ‘If you read this e-mail, then it will change and you’ll get this e-mail the next week.’” That’s kind of like waiting for the weekly episode of a TV series versus binging on Netflix, he said.
Uberflip wants to create a similar sense of urgency around moving beyond simple content marketing to devising a strategy around the holistic content experience — in other words, what happens before, during and after a buyer has been exposed to a piece of content. This approach has been distilled into a book, F#ck Content Marketing, that Frisch published earlier this year. So far he said the feedback has been positive, though he was aware of the provocative nature of the title and its key message.
“I was nervous,” he said. “We had one CMO who unsubscribed from all our e-mail and messaged us on how offended they were. But then, I thought, ‘Was that person even reading my emails before?’”
Conex continues through Thursday.
