This is episode two of my new show: Marketing Marvels.
There is A LOT of marketing technology out there, and it’s difficult to know what all the platforms and packages do, whether it makes sense for your business, how it stacks up to competitors, and a bunch of other key questions.
I want to add some much-needed clarity to marketing technology, and Marketing Marvels helps. Every 3 weeks or so I have a new show (live on Google Hangouts On-Air and streamed to my Facebook page) where I interview the founder or proprietor of marketing technology that I personally vouch for and support.
This week’s show is on Uberflip – the influencer identification and connections platform. Marketing Marvels viewers get a two week free trial.
Jay: Hey guys, it is Jay Baer. Welcome to episode number 2, dos, of Marketing Marvels, the show from Convince & Convert Media where I help you discover new marketing technology to improve what you’re doing in your business. Each and every episode of Marketing Marvels, this very show, includes an overview and then a quick demo of cutting-edge marketing technology that I personally believe in and endorse and use and recommend.
Plus we’ll have questions and answers, some from me. If you’ve got questions, go ahead and leave them either on Facebook or if you’re watching this on Facebook Live or leave it in the Google Hangout, or we can also answer some after the show, whatever you like. Leave your questions, I will ask them of our very, very special guest. I want you to participate and ask the questions that you need to have answered to figure out whether this technology is right for you.
And speaking of today’s guest, I’m super, super excited to have here on Marketing Marvels, episode two, my good friend Hana Abaza, who is the marketing genius for one of my very favorite companies, Uberflip. She’s also one of my favorite Canadians. Welcome to the show.
Hana: Hey Jay, thanks for having me.
Jay: I am delighted to have you on the show. I cannot wait to show people the wonders that is Uberflip. We use it a lot at Convince & Convert, for our own company and also for our clients, and I’m fired up about it. And a reminder to viewers of the big Marketing Marvels show that we’re going to have some special offers from the folks at Uberflip just for you, so make sure you watch till the end of today’s episode, and I’ll tell you how to hook that up.
So let’s talk about Uberflip, what it does, and why. Uberflip solves a really important problem for a marketer, which is that content marketing in particular is getting crazy, everybody’s doing more and more of it. All the research says that 70% of marketers are creating more content this year than ever before. That’s probably true for you. I know it’s definitely true for me, i.e. the Marketing Marvels show.
And so how does that content actually get merchandized? Like how does it get optimized? I think we’re past the point where we need to figure out how to make more content. It’s like well, we have it or we’re going to have it. Now how does anybody actually see it or watch it or listen to it or download it or know about it? How does that content get promoted and merchandized in a way that actually builds your business?
Because let’s remember, the goal is not to be good at content. The goal is to be good at business because of content, right? We’ve got to make sure we don’t lose sight of that fact.
So how can you make your content work harder is really what Uberflip solves. So specifically, if you want to streamline your content creation and your content management and your content merchandising, Uberflip can definitely help with that. If you want to build very highly customized collections of content for different potential customers, different target audiences, different segments, Uberflip can absolutely do that. They can kind of create collections for specific parts of your customer base. We’re going to show you a demo of that, it’s pretty slick. Different parts of the buyer’s journey, etc.
If you want to optimize different parts of your content empire for specific calls to action, so in this one we want to collect emails, in this one we want to download a video, in this one we want people to sign up for a webinar, what have you, you can absolutely do that with Uberflip very easily as well. And it’s really great for quickly and easily generating leads and then tying those leads into whatever marketing automation system you might be using today: Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua Oracle, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, whatever you’re using, Uberflip can hook you up.
So what does it really do?
It’s a platform for B2B marketers, primarily B2B marketers, to create, manage, optimize, and merchandize their content. It’s pretty awesome. Let’s take a look.
Now what can you show us? What can you tell us and show us about these Uberflip things?
Hana: Absolutely. I think you just did a fantastic job. I feel like my job is done.
Jay: Well, that’s my show. It’s why I’m the Marketing Marvels guy.
Hana: You are, you’re totally the Marketing Marvels guy. So let me just share my screen here with you, Jay. Let me know when you can see my screen.
Jay: I’m good.
Hana: And I will—awesome. So let’s dive in a little bit deeper. Now, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about create, manage, and optimize content experiences. And I think it’s interesting, too, that you’re saying merchandize, because it’s exactly what we’re doing.
And what we want to do at Uberflip is we want to help content marketers take all of this great content that they’ve got and really be able to have the power and the control and the technology to set up experiences at every stage of the buyer journey. Whether you’re using content more for top of the funnel, whether you’re using it for sales enablement, even at the customer success level.
So how do we do that?
Well, when we’re looking at sort of what Uberflip does and how we work with different companies, really we help companies do different things. In some cases we help them power their resource center on their website, because we all know that that’s where a lot of our content lives. You might be using Uberflip to create a content library or you might be using it to create a custom stream of content or a collection, like you called it, which I love, which I’m going to steal, by the way, around a specific campaign or a specific topic or maybe targeted towards a specific account if you’re doing any account-based marketing. So those are some of the popular use cases.
And how exactly do we help people do that?
Well, it really starts with the ability to better aggregate and manage your content. So the first step is to be able to pull in all your content into Uberflip. And when we say aggregate, we mean pull in your blogs, pull in your social media content, your video content, your ebooks, your white papers, all of this really great stuff that in many cases, if you’ve got a lot of it, is kind of sitting in a whole bunch of silos. It’s scattered all over the place. You don’t have a good way to manage it and you don’t have a good way to combine it and reorganizing it into a compelling experience. So that’s sort of step one.
And once you’ve got your content aggregated into the Uberflip platform, that’s when you can start to get a little bit fancy and you can create really targeted streams of content for specific buyer personas. You can create really targeted streams of content for, like I said earlier, campaigns around topics for specific verticals or audience segments. And really, the leveraging power of Uberflip to really customize the whole content experience, you’re getting more bang for your buck. So you’re really leveraging your content across the board.
Now, the other integral aspect of it is it’s not enough to just have the content out there, right, Jay? You talked about this a little bit earlier. It’s content to accomplish business objectives, right? So when we’re looking at these content experiences, either you have the ability to create them but then you also have the ability to optimize them with things like calls to action where you can generate leads, nested forms, mechanisms in order to get people to engage with your content.
So at the end of the day, you’re really getting an experience that’s optimized for your business goals. Because I think we all know at this point that listen, great content is the first step, but great content isn’t enough anymore. You really need a remarkable experience for it to actually meet your objectives.
Now Jay, I’m going to actually show you Uberflip using Uberflip, which is kind of meta, I know.
Jay: I hope you’re using it. If you’re not using your own product, we’ve got a bigger problem here.
Hana: Yeah, I know, I know. And it’s funny, because our marketing team at Uberflip is probably the best Uberflip customer, and we’re constantly talking to the product team about what more we can do. So really, really awesome to be in a company where marketing a product is so closely linked. And what you’re looking at right now is actually our own content hub. And you might call it a resource center, you might call it a content library. For us, this is what we use to really showcase all of our content.
And as I scroll down in my content hub, you’ll see this is just the latest feed of our content. So I’m just kind of on this main page. This is just the most recent articles. And as you scroll down, you’ll see there’s a really great mix of different types of content, because we pulled it all into our Uberflip platform. So here you’ve got articles, you’ve got ebooks, which we convert into a flipbook, which is much more interactive than a boring old PDF. You’ve got video content, you’ve got social media content that’s being pulled in here, you’ve got even SlideShare being pulled in as well. So really rich experience where you can actually combine different types of content that you’ve got out there.
Now, as I scroll down, you’ll notice that it’s not just content that you’re seeing, but you’re also seeing these calls to action being sprinkled in throughout the content. And there’s only two types of calls to action. There’s a form CTA, which is this little guy here, where you can fill out this form and subscribe in this case to our hub. That’s the call to action here.
And those forms are like magic. They work with your marketing automation tool, they integrate with Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot, all of those guys. And all of that contact data gets passed directly to your marketing automation platform. So you can automatically trigger your workflows, your email campaigns, your marketing programs, whatever it is that you’re doing once somebody fills out this form. So it’s a really seamless experience.
Jay: So it seems like, it seem like that collection of content is… was it ordered by date? It sort of, as you published it?
Hana: Exactly.
Jay: But you could do it differently, right? You wouldn’t have to do it newest first, you could do it with some other system.
Hana: Totally, and I’m really glad you brought that up. So this particular feed of content is just the most recent stuff that’s been published. This is the newest, the freshest, so nice mix of content, nice mix of call to action here from forms and even linked call to action, there’s a little button here. But where Uberflip really gets fancy, and this is one of my favorite features, and I have to tell you, my marketing team absolutely loves this because it gives them total and complete control. They don’t rely on our developers to change things.
Really the power in Uberflip is the ability to really create what we call custom streams of content. So if you look at this top knob over here, my marketing team’s actually gone in and they reorganized how this content is displayed. So in this case, they’ve got content by format, so we’ve got a webinar hub, all of our webinar recordings, SlideShares, infographics, ebooks. But then we’ve also organized content by topic, which is really essential. And I can’t tell you how many resource centers I land on, and B2B companies are brutal for this.
So I land on the resource center and all they do is list the format of content. They don’t organize it by topic, they don’t think about how their buyer is going to search for stuff. So what you see is, okay, here are all our ebooks. Here are all our webinars. Here are all our white papers. Never have I gone to a resource center and said I really want to read a white paper. I don’t care what it’s about, I just really want to read a white paper.
Jay: Right. You want to know how to solve my problem, right? You’re willing to accept multiple formats as long as you know why is this relevant to me.
Hana: Exactly. Exactly. So why does everybody structure it that way? And now that I’ve said it, you’re going to notice it everywhere. But really, it’s important to structure your content and to organize your content in a way that makes sense for the people that are going to consume it.
So that could be by topic, right? So if I drill in here, I’ve got content marketing content, lead gen, marketing automation, sales enablement. And again, because you’ve got all of your content in Uberflip, it’s not just blog posts. It’s the right blog posts with the right ebooks with the right videos, all of that rich content that you’ve created in one really solid experience.
Now another way that we do it is we actually will split up content and we’ll create custom streams or custom collections for specific audience segments. So I mentioned to you earlier that Uberflip integrates with a lot of marketing automation tools. So let’s actually drill down into this.
So I drill down into our Everything Marketo stream. This stream has content that’s much more tailored towards a Marketo user. A lot of our users use Marketo, a lot of our audience uses Marketo. We talk a lot about marketing automation, how to fuel marketing automation with content. So if I know you’re using Marketo, here’s where I’m going to send you, because you’re going to like this stuff a lot better than just the generic stuff.
Now the beauty of it is, Jay, it’s not just the content that’s much more targeted, it’s also the call to action that’s much more targeted. So if you noticed earlier, the call to action in the latest feeded content was really generic, right? It said, “Hey, you want to try out Uberflip?” That’s pretty much it. But now I can actually say, “Hey, why don’t you take a look at Uberflip and Marketo in action together. I know you’re using Marketo and we know as marketers, the more targeted the CTA, the better it’s going to convert for you.”
And the beauty of these little calls to action is number one, you’re creating it as a marketer, it’s really, really easy to do. I’ll jump into the back end in a few minutes and I’ll show you exactly how to do this. It’s so simple, you don’t need a developer. And in most cases, if you’re not using Uberflip, it’s going to take you weeks to get a developer to put in this kind of call to action for you.
The other beautiful part is as I drill down into a specific piece of content, I’m actually looking at the actual article now, I can also place the call to action right beside the article. So a lot of flexibility in how you place those CTAs and how you use them. Now, one of my other little favorite features about those CTAs, and I’m going to show you right here, is using them to gate content.
Now, we’ve all gated content before. We’ve all filled out a landing page in order to get an ebook or a white paper or something along those lines. And what usually happens? You get to the landing page, you have to fill it out, and then you get to another page that says, “Thank you for filling out the landing page,” you have to click on one more button, and then you’ll get sent to your ebook. That’s usually what happens, right?
Jay: Yep.
Hana: So with Uberflip, you actually have the flexibility, and of course, I click on the one webinar that’s not gated on here.
Jay: That’s not gated, yeah.
Hana: Let me find one that is gated. Hopefully this guy? Perfect, okay.
So with Uberflip, you can use those calls to action to actually gate that piece of content. Whether it’s an ebook, in this case it happens to be an on-demand video, and you can see that it’s kind of a teaser, right? You can see the content right behind that little form.
Jay: We should be using this for the Marketing Marvels show replay, right?
Hana: Yeah.
Jay: Like you’ve got to fill this out to get the video.
Hana: Yes, absolutely, 100%. You fill this guy out and you’re in right away. And it’s not as daunting a task as a big long landing page.
Jay: Landing page, yep.
Hana: You got it, you got it. And there’s still obviously a time and a place for landing pages. I’m not saying you’d never have to use landing pages again. But we actually had a customer of ours test this against a traditional landing page. They were gating an ebook, it was the same ebook.
They split test, traffic was coming from the same sources. And they actually saw a 250% increase in conversion using this type of overlay over a traditional landing page. Jay: I believe it. It’s so much simpler. It’s way, way—and as you mentioned, we’ll see it in a second, but literally you or I or anybody watching could make that in like 15 seconds, right? It’s like that. There’s nothing to it.
Hana: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s the beautiful part. And for a B2B company to have a 250% increase in conversion, that’s more leads, that’s more pipeline, that’s potentially a huge impact on your bottom line, right?
Jay: No doubt.
Hana: So this is kind of how we use our hub. And again, I’m showing you how Uberflip uses Uberflip, so it’s very, very branded. And really, you have a ton of customization in terms of what you can do for your branding. So before I jump in at the back end, I want to actually show a couple of really great customer examples. The first one is actually, I believe, done by you guys, Jay.
Jay: Yeah, that’s Uberflips. Yep, we built that for Cisco. It’s the Cisco version of Uberflip, but that’s for their partners. So if you’re a Cisco partner, you actually get access to that version of Uberflip, and my team and I populate content in there all the time.
Hana: Yeah. And I actually love this example. It looks fantastic, really well branded. What I love about this too is awesome use of calls to action, so really great form here. As you scroll down, there’s more CTAs around starting courses, around visiting certain sections of the site that they want you to go to. So this is a fantastic experience. And when you take a look at this, this is very branded towards Cisco, towards what they’re trying to accomplish. Now, you can get even fancier with the look and feel of Uberflip, and I’ll show you in the back end how you can do that.
But if you don’t want to use sort of that out-of-the-box tile look, you can actually jump in and do a little bit of custom CSS, like our friends at Proofpoint. And this is powered by Uberflip. This is the same functionality in the back end, but as you can see, it’s a totally different look and feel. So really, a ton of options when it comes to flexibility.
Jay: So you could, in theory, you could put your whole website on this platform, right? Like you could actually publish, as opposed to WordPress or whatever you’re using, Joomla or Drupal, you could actually make Uberflip your whole CMS in theory.
Hana: Yeah, in theory, you totally could. What we see a lot of people use is they’ll use WordPress or Joomla or Drupal for the static pages on their website. And that’s fine. And I love WordPress and it’s great for that.
The problem is traditional CMSs aren’t dynamic enough and aren’t flexible enough for content marketing and for optimizing goals for content. Because if we’re content marketing, we have different goals. We need to keep the content fresh. We need to change up our calls to action. We need an easy way to generate leads. And the reality is CMSs are great but they’re not built for that. And that’s where sort of Uberflip comes in.
So yeah, theoretically you could use us for everything, but the most common use case is you use your CMS for the static pages because really, they’re not going to change that often. But your content needs to be a dynamic experience, and that’s really where we…
Jay: Collection. Yep.
Hana: You got it, you got it. I really like the term collection, Jay. I’m definitely going to be stealing that from you.
Jay: Do it.
Hana: So let’s jump into the back end of Uberflip. So this is our own instance of Uberflip. And when you first log in, you’re going to go to your dashboard and you’re going to see something called content score. And content score is essentially a metric that we use, based on a whole bunch of different variables, that lets you at a glance take a look and see how different types of content are performing.
So at the top here, it’s just sort of an aggregate number, but really where the value comes in is when you start to scroll down and you can see how individual pieces of content are performing. And you can even rank them, based on different things. If you care about views versus shares versus leads, you can start to see what’s performing well. And this is a nice, at-a-glance view where I can jump in and say, “Oh, okay, this ebook is actually generating a lot of leads. Maybe it’s worth throwing a little bit of paid distribution behind it. Or this article is actually generating a lot of page views. Maybe this is a topic that we need to explore a little bit more right?”
Jay: Is there an algorithm that you’re using to figure out what that score is? So 66% is based on relative shares versus other pieces of content that’s up there?
Hana: You got it. Yeah, you got it, you got it. And it really takes into account these six variables, but it also takes other things into account. Like you have to have a minimum number of page views for it to matter, right? And there’s a few other relative things. We’ve got a great post on it on our hub, actually, if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that.
Now, as you start to drill down into how to actually manage content, that’s where it starts to get interesting. And really managing your content and really managing your calls to action are the two biggest things that you’ll be doing in Uberflip on day to day. And actually, Jay, we have a brand new feature that we just launched, that your audience is getting a nice preview of it. Not a lot of people know about this, so I’m excited to show you that.
But before we get there, let’s just take a look at how we actually manage content. Now, our CEO just gave away our new feature here with this little intercom mic. Let me close that for you. There we go. So let me go… Yeah, here it is. He totally gave away my secret. But when you manage content in Uberflip, it’s really easy.
So as I said at the very beginning, it’s all about aggregating your content initially. And to do that, it’s dead simple, right? If you want to pull in blog articles, you can do it via an RSS feed. So if you’re already blogging, you’re using WordPress or Drupal or Joomla, you give us the RSS feed and we can pull in those articles. And then you have two choices. You can continue to use your CMS, Uberflip will automatically update. Or you can just switch and start using Uberflip to blog, because we do have a built-in CMS. So totally your call there, what you want to do.
You can pull in social media content through. Just connect your account. Upload PDFs, convert them into more interactive flipbooks. More social media content. Video content, whether it’s YouTube or Vimeo, or you’re using something more metrics-driven, like Vidyard or Wistia or even Brightcove. So really simple ways of pulling in that content so you’ve got it all in one spot.
And then once you’ve got it all in one spot, you can start to create these custom streams of content, where you’re really pulling in the right content into the right stream. So these custom streams, for example, are similar to these tailored streams, these custom streams, where I’m actually picking and choosing what content I want there. And you can do this a couple ways. You can do it manually, if you really want to go in and hand pick, cherry pick certain types of content. Or you can do it in an automated way and just tag certain keywords or phrases or whatever it is, and then it’ll automatically pull the content you want into that custom stream. So tons of flexibility in terms of how you organize that content.
Now Jay, here comes the fancy new feature. Are you ready? Here we go.
Jay: Ready. Let’s see it.
Hana: Fancy new feature. Target streams.
One of the things that we’ve been hearing a lot from our customers is okay, we’re using Uberflip to power something like this content hub or our resource center. How do we get Uberflip leveraged throughout the organization? How do we let people leverage content throughout the organization? So what we’ve actually done is we’ve created almost a new type of custom stream that we call a target stream. And these streams are actually designed for our sales team.
So what you can actually do is you can add a sales user to Uberflip and they can create their own targeted custom stream. And this is what one of them looks like here. So if I actually drill into this particular target stream within Uberflip, you’ll see that one of our sales reps, in this case, it’s going to be John Henderson, came in and he picked specific content to actually send to this specific prospect that he’s talking to. And if we actually look at what that full stream looks like, you can see it’s like a lightweight version of those custom streams that I showed you earlier that are on our main resource hub. So this is really the sales enablement use case.
And the great part here is he can totally customize this. So he’s talking to the folks at Rand, he’s got his image here, he specifically customized this message. So he said, “Hey Eve, thanks for your time yesterday. As mentioned, here is your own stream of content. Created and personalized just for you.” And now when I look at this stream, I know this use case, this prospect is looking to power their resource center because he included this article. I know that this prospect uses Eloqua. Why? Because he included a bunch of the content we’ve got around how Uberflip and Eloqua work together. Right?
So really enabling your sales team to leverage all of the great content that you create, without having to wade through the resource center.
Jay: Well, and in the past, what would have happened is he would have A, called you and said, “Hey, what do we have about Eloqua, and that wastes all of marketing’s time.” And then B, he would have just taken a bunch of PDFs that you’ve sent him and he would have attached it to an email.
Hana: A hundred percent. That’s exactly what would happen. And even, like that happened to us internally so much. Sales rep calls the marketer and says, “Do we have a blog post about XYZ?” Marketers just start to blow smoke out of their ears because they’re just like, “Go look on the blog, it’s right there,” right?
Jay: Yeah, search is your friend. There’s a search bar right there that you can type into. Figure that out, but no, let me use some of my day to find you the appropriate blog post.
Hana: Exactly. Exactly. And that’s the thing, with sales reps, you’ve got to spoon feed. So this empowers them to do it. And on our side as marketers, what we have to do is we have to make sure our content is organized properly for them. So there’s a few ways you can do that. You can tag specific content for sales, so they can actually really easily and quickly search it themselves. But this type of thing is much, much, much easier to navigate through than sending them to the resource center and say look it up. And then they get the gazillion articles and then they have to wade through it. So just trying to make it as easy as possible for the sales rep, and also as personalized as possible for the prospect.
Jay: Well, I suspect that you also get stats on that, right? So when that customer goes to this target stream, you then know which of those pieces of content they actually looked at, so you can say “Aha…”
Hana: You got it.
Jay: “…There are the six things that we sent them. The three that they’re really interested in, the three points that really resonate, the three things the salesperson should follow up on, is A, B, C.”
Hana: You got it. The other advantage to this is that all the sales rep has to do is send them this link, right? And this link is hidden. It’s not going to show up on my main resource center or my main hub. So I’m going to send you my…
Jay: It’s not going to be indexed by Google, right? It’s not going to be on some sort of search engine results page or something.
Hana: Exactly, exactly. It’s not indexed, it’s hidden, it’s primarily for this use case. And then the person, Eve, in this case, that John is sending this link to, Eve can now circulate this internally within her company. She’s got a great resource that not only highlights the product that she’s championing, but also spreads all of the content throughout all of the key decision makers there. Make sense?
Jay: Yep, absolutely.
Hana: Awesome.
Jay: Very cool.
Hana: So I want to show you a few more sections here, but before I jump into that, I also want to show you how target streams can actually work really well with our also brand new—I feel like I’m unveiling all of our secrets today—with our brand new Chrome extension. Now, I just showed you a target stream that was created, and if a sales rep is coming in, and the Chrome extension is free, by the way, it obviously doesn’t cost any more to use.
But let’s say I want to send one piece of content from that target stream. What I’m going to do is I’m going to open up my Gmail here, I’m going to click on Shout, which is our little Chrome extension. I click on my target stream and I’m going to pick this piece of content to actually insert into my target stream. And the great part about it, there’s a little bit of customization, so I’m going to get to choose how big do I want to make it, how small do I want to make it. I insert it. Now I’ve got this great little visual here.
And when the person, in this case, this is you, Jay, so you’re going to get this email, clicks on this link, this is going to go right to that target stream. And then they’re going to be able to get the rest of the content from there as well. So really, really targeted, really slick, nice little use case there. That really has been helping sales reps out a lot.
Jay: I didn’t know about that feature, and I need to get that for me. Because when people ask all the time like, “Hey, what things can you speak about, do you have any background on, or whatever, or what podcast can we sponsor,” bop, bop, bop.
Hana: Yep. We’ll hook you up. We’ll hook you up for sure. Awesome.
Jay: I’m so excited, I’m so excited now.
Hana: So target streams, sales enablement, some new tools around that. And really, the rest of these are really just key features that people use on a day to day. So the calls to action are another major thing and incidentally, those calls to action, in the next couple of months, bear with us. We’re going to also have those available right within the target stream. So if you’re a sales rep, you can also put in a little call to action to get people to email you.
But as marketers, we’re creating these calls to action all of the time. And what we want to do is we want to be able to give you the tools and the flexibility to be able to spin one up quickly and easily. And in Uberflip, this is essentially how you do it. So you click add CTA, you pick between just the button call to action and a form call to action, and then we take you through about four or five steps where you customize the background, the color, the message, the button copy, how many forms you want in there.
And all you have to do is set up your integration with your marketing automation tool once, and then you’re good to go and everything is synched perfectly. And if you really want to get fancy with your calls to action, you can actually start to, again, apply some custom CSS to it and get some images going in the background, just like these ones. So really a lot of flexibility, but the key is that you can do these in a matter of minutes. It’s not waiting six weeks for a developer to change a button on your blog, which unfortunately is the case in a lot of, not even big companies, even just mid-size companies.
Jay: Yeah, it sure is. It sure is. Hey, one question I was going to ask you is we’ve seen the integration of—one of our viewers has asked this question—we’ve seen integration of SlideShare and videos and PDFs, obviously, and things like that. What about something like photos? Like, “Hey, here’s photos of an event.” Can you just drop an individual photo into a stream, into a collection?
Hana: Yeah, well, because you have essentially a CMS, you can add photos to basically a blog post, right? A couple of things that we’ve done, actually… let me see if I can find it here for you. So number one, there is an Instagram feed as well, so you can actually connect Instagram directly to that, so if you’re using Instagram to promote your event, you can do it. And then a couple of other cool little workarounds.
We were at an event where we actually just uploaded photos to Tumblr and integrated that with Uberflip, and it pulled the photos in beautifully without us having to do anything at all. So a lot of different ways you can kind of use the platform and manipulate the platform to curate content, not just necessarily create it yourself.
Jay: Yeah, that’s smart, especially if you’re going to have, if you know you’re going to have a bunch, it makes sense to put them all into a platform like Tumblr, something like that, suck them in. And then if you’re just going to use it temporarily for the event, then just kill your Tumblr account. It’s a one-time deal.
Hana: Exactly. Exactly. And even, you can hide streams, right? So if you want to showcase a stream like Life at Uberflip, for example, and you only want to do it for a week long during your campaign or your event, you can do that. And you can even automate when it shows and when it gets hidden from your hub. So lots of little features like that to help you kind of automate things and make your life a little bit easier.
Jay: Well, and that is a key point I want to emphasize, the scheduling part. So not only can you schedule streams and say look, this Life at Uberflip collection is only for March or whatever. And you can also do the same thing with individual pieces of content within a stream. So if you have a webinar, for example, or you have any sort of content and it’s going to be out of date or it’s campaign-specific, you could actually set its expiration date and its appearance days. So you’re going to work in advance because you’re super organized or whatever, and you’re like hey, here’s a bunch of stuff that we’re going to do for the next four months. Put in Uberflip it starts on this day, it ends on this day, right, and just pop, pop, pop, pop. You could actually do all of that in there and it would just automatically change your content as a result. It’s really nice.
Hana: You got it. You got it. And you can also schedule calls to action as well. So content and CTAs. So the entire campaign can be scheduled and expire ahead of time, so you don’t have to worry about anything. Because we’re all that organized. Right, Jay?
Jay: We can’t make you organized with Uberflip, but if you already are organized, we’ve got you hooked up, right?
Hana: Yeah.
Jay: So you know what? It’s on you at some point.
Hana: Exactly, exactly. And so I don’t want to spend too, too much more time here in the back end, because I know there’s a couple of other use cases we can chat about, and I want to make sure we get into questions. But just real quick here. Appearance, as I was saying, lots you can do to customize the appearance. If you want to keep it simple, you can upload images and logos and adjust the colors and fonts yourself. If you want to get super fancy and you’ve got somebody who’s got a little bit of CSS skill on your team, you can actually go in and you can really customize things, like some of the examples that I showed you earlier. Like Proofpoint here, where they’ve really gone to town on their CSS.
Integrations, now I mentioned that we pull in content from multiple sources, so lots of integrations from a sort of content source perspective, so Twitter, YouTube, Wistia, RSS feeds, etc., integrations with your marketing automation. But we’ve got a lot of other integrations here, too, just to make the whole experience much more engaging. So you can integrate AddThis for social sharing. You can integrate Disqus if you want to add commenting to your hub. You can integrate BrightInfo if you want a little widget on the side to show up with content recommendations. You can even integrate Optimizely if you want to start A/B testing headlines. So lots you can do here to again, optimize that experience, whether it’s for engagement or lead gen or whatever your goals happen to be at that point.
Metrics, metrics are something that I think are table stakes when it comes to content marketing. Every content platform, good content platform has to provide a level of metrics. We do that as well. We also integrate with Google Analytics, so you’ve got some really good insight into how your content is performing. We chatted about scheduled tasks a little bit, and at the end of the day, as I was saying, our main goal is really just to make your life easier.
And Uberflip was built for content marketers, for B2B content marketers in particular, although you can use it for B2C for sure, but it was built to help you accomplish your goals and to give you that infrastructure, so you can actually succeed with content marketing.
Jay: Yeah, I think on the B2C side, it’s really fantastic from a content merchandising perspective. You just don’t have as much of a benefit from sort of the targeted lead gen kind of thing. It’s not as important, right? You don’t need a licorice lead. Somebody buys licorice.
Hana: Exactly.
Jay: But the actual experience, right? You think about companies like Red Bull or Coke or all these other brands that are creating tons of content, being able to merchandise that content in a more interesting way, Uberflip would be great for that right now, while those companies are building this same idea from scratch, which seems crazy. But if you’re a B2B, of course, you’ve got all this content, like what you showed even for your own company.
You’ve got blog posts, you’ve got white papers, you’ve got webinars, you’ve got podcasts, you’ve got all this stuff. But put that in one place and then customize it per segment and then have the custom calls to action and lead gen and tie it to marketing automation. It’s pretty damn slick. There are lots of people, lots of companies in the content marketing space. You just mentioned it’s built for content marketing. I couldn’t agree more, which is why I’m an investor in this company, proud investor of Uberflip. How does your take on the market differ from other people who have sort of content marketing software?
Hana: That’s a really great question, and it’s funny. So when we look at the marketing technology space, as you know better than anybody, I think, it’s very crowded, right? And it’s very confusing, especially for somebody who’s jumping in, trying to figure out okay, what’s going on, what do I need, what tools should I be using. And when it comes to content marketing in particular, everybody calls themselves a content marketing platform. Right?
But everybody that calls themselves a content marketing platform does something completely different. And what we started to realize and what we started to see was we would have people come in and they’d be talking to our sales team and they’d say, “Oh, well, I’m kind of looking at you guys, but I also want to look at Kapost and I also want to look at SnapApp.” Three totally different tools that do totally different things, and we work with both of those companies.
Jay: Yeah, it’s not either/or, it’s like that’s crazy. Like those aren’t competitors, right?
Hana: No, not at all.
Jay: The problem is people don’t really know what they want in content marketing because they don’t really know what’s out there in a lot of cases, right? It’s sort of like as Jobs once said, if we asked people if they wanted an iPad, nobody would have said yes, but then everybody realized this is a thing that exists, I want one now.
Hana: Yeah, no, exactly, that’s exactly it. And so it’s very much kind of educating people about the different phases of content marketing and having them understand okay, we used to look at content marketing in three cycles, right? You create content, you distribute content, you gather insights, and you rinse and repeat.
And we at Uberflip, we look at content a little bit differently. We look at it as a four-phase cycle. So you create content, you optimize the experience for your goals, then you distribute, then you gather insights, and then you sort of rinse and repeat. And what we try to do is we try and get people to think about okay, where are the gaps? Where are you struggling? Is it with the creation side? Is it with optimizing your experience? Is it with the distribution side or is it with the insight side?
And we really think of ourselves as sort of content experience or content merchandising, as you put it, because people have the content. We don’t do that for you, we don’t create content for you. We take that content and we help you put it into a package that is going to resonate with people that are consuming it. That’s what we do.
Jay: Well, if you’re making content that nobody reads or nobody watches, what’s the point?
Hana: Exactly, exactly, absolutely.
Jay: Ultimately. How do you charge for this thing?
Hana: So it is monthly, SaaS pricing. It starts at $750 a month, upwards, and then that’s where the limitations vary, around the calls to action and around the custom streams. And beyond that, we can also help you implement Uberflip, so if you want to do fancy CSS but you don’t have anybody on your team, we’ve got sort of that services component to it as well.
Jay: Okay, great. So tell me about why you’re doing this. Like why are you at this company? You could be lots of places. How did that happen?
Hana: It’s funny. I actually ended up… before Uberflip I was doing a bunch of consulting for some startups, early stage, some venture back, a couple of bigger companies in there, too. Somebody introduced me to the founders, Yoav and Randy. And at first I didn’t really want to meet with them, which is funny, because I’ve told them that before, and we kind of laugh about it. But at the time, Uberflip was focused on a totally different product, totally different market. The product was Flipbooks, which is actually rolled into the platform now, which is taking PDFs and converting them to interactive flipbooks.
Jay: Animated PDF kind of thing?
Hana: You got it, you got it. Kind of like those digital magazines that we all used to see. And a lot of the customers were publishers, right? But when I did ultimately meet with them, they actually shared their vision for Uberflip hubs, which is kind of the next product, and really shared their vision for kind of moving into the content marketing space. So I was excited by that because I had been doing a lot of content at my previous sort of consulting gigs and in my previous company.
And really, when I started, it was day one, and it was a brand new product launched, beta version launched on my first day. Brand new website on my first day. Press release went out on my first day. And they were at Content Marketing World, launching the product on my first day. So it’s funny, I took no responsibility for anything that happened that day.
Jay: Yeah, I’d say hey, I just got here, whatever. If you guys screw it up, it’s not my fault, it’s my first day.
Hana: Exactly, exactly. And this was obviously a little while ago, but that was really sort of an exciting time, because we went through that period of okay, let’s figure out who this is really for and at the time we had a version of the product, quickly realized no, this is for people that have content, they get content, we don’t need to tell them that content is good. They know that, they’re creating it. Now they really need to leverage it for business objectives.
Jay: And speaking of leveraging for business objectives, you have a special offer for Marketing Marvels viewers who are tuning in either live or who see the recording down the road. Tell us about the special offer so folks can kick the tires on Uberflip.
Hana: Yeah, absolutely. So we have opened up our two-week free trial. We actually don’t do that very often. So if you go to our main website, Uberflip.com, you’re not going to see it, because we don’t give it to just everybody. But I want you guys to have the opportunity to jump in and actually play with the tool, because I know I’m like that. I know I like to jump in and actually play with things. So I believe you have the URL there, Jay, but we are going to send people over to uberflip.com/marketingmarvels, and they can claim their trial there.
Jay: Uberflip.com/marketingmarvels. We’ll make sure to put it in the notes for people to look at this afterwards. Uberflip.com/marketingmarvels. Speaking of Marketing Marvels, Hana, what’s a marketing marvel to you? Other than Uberflip, I should say. What qualifies as a marketing marvel to you? What marketing technology are you really bullish on?
Hana: I’m a super geek about this stuff, but two that I absolutely love. Unbounce I think is the best landing page creator, I think those guys are amazing. And the company and the people are absolutely delightful as well. And you’ll see when you go to uberflip.com/marketingmarvels, it’s an Unbounce page. So there you go. And then the other one that we actually, we use internally and again, really love the company, really like what they’re doing, is Wistia video hosting. I think they do a really great job.
Jay: Yeah, we use Wistia as well at Convince & Convert. Love those guys. I really like their platform, super easy to use. I make a lot of videos for events and for our team and just upload right to Wistia. I really like their platform. Very smart guys. I agree, we should get them on the show, get them on an episode of Marketing Marvels and talk about that sometime. That would be fantastic. Thank you so much for being part of this. Thank you to Uberflip for being a marketing marvel. I love using it at Convince & Convert. As I mentioned, I invested in the company, that’s how much I believe in it.
I hope you guys will take advantage of the special trial offer, uberflip.com/marketingmarvels two-week free trial. Marketing Marvels episodes come out about every three weeks or so. To find them and to subscribe, go to bit.ly/marketingmarvels. That’s bit.ly/marketingmarvels.
As some of you know, because you’re watching it right now, we also stream these episodes live on my Facebook page, Facebook.com/TheRealJayBaer, so you can always tune in there and see Marketing Marvels episodes live in that format as well.
Marketing Marvels is a production of Convince & Convert Media. We’ve got lots of podcasts, including Social Pros, Content Pros, which is actually co-sponsored by Uberflip.
Our brand new show, Influence Pros, Business of Story, all kinds of awesome resources for marketers and business owners. Go to ConvinceandConvert.com/podcasts, or you can find them all on iTunes. Hana, any final thoughts from you?
Hana: No, just keep on being marvelous.
Jay: Keep on being marvelous. I like that. That should be the close to the show. Keep on being marvelous and make sure your content works as hard as it possibly can. Thanks to everybody for tuning in. We’ll see you next time. This is Marketing Marvels. I am Jay Baer. See you later.
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