Rippling’s $16B Marketing Strategy (You Can Actually Copy)

Ripink is a SAS company worth $16 billion. The reason for that valuation is their revenue is going up steeply from $168 million in 2022 to over $1 billion by 2016. And it's growing still. In fact, their revenue has grown 78% in just the last year. The growth playbook they've used to do this is brilliant. This is a business that started out with cold calls and cold emails in the founders's basement. But when that approach hits a ceiling, they've developed a digital marketing playbook that any business, no matter what you sell, can learn from. In fact, just to skip ahead a bit, look at these traffic charts from 20,000 total monthly visitors to their website in 2021 to over 1.5 million visits per month just 5 years later. Pretty awesome, right? So, in this video, I'm going to show you the three moves they made, why they work so well, and how you can copy and deploy this same playbook for your business, whether you sell software, services, or anything else. So, Rippling is one of these services that allows you to manage your entire workforce. They say there's basically a few components to this. HR, payroll, IT, finance, and then managing employees globally. Now, challenge with a product like this is you've got different audiences. So, we're going to come back to how they cater to that later on. Now, one thing Ripling has done to generate such significant growth is actually something that all brands have to do at some point, and that is to develop a story. And the best ones develop and refine their story around their core customer types. Okay, that sounds unusually fluffy for the Exposure Ninja channel. So, let me show you an example. Let's go back in time to their website from 2021 from the olden days. Here's the platform page on their website. Now, I want you to have a look at this and in particular how kind of generic this page is. We've got this little SEO focused subheading here, employee management platform. That's clearly the keyword that they're targeting. This heading effortlessly onboard and manage employees is yes, it's kind of HR focused, but it's fairly generic compared to where they're at now, which I'll show you in a minute. As we go down the page, we can see that they've got these different features like onboarding automation to allow you to onboard new hires in 90 seconds, document management, task management. So clearly they're targeting different keywords like document management software, onboarding automation software, things like that. And they've built these little sections around that. Then they've stacked all of these different features on one page so that whatever you're looking for, the hope is you'd find something on this page that works for you. But let's contrast that with their website today. Today across the website, what you'll actually see is they're keen to get you into the right bucket that describes you. on the product section. They're trying to take you to the right area of the website based on what you are. If we go to the HR section, which I guess is the most direct comparison with that old page that we just saw. Look at the difference. We're no longer targeting a fairly generic keyword like employee management platform. We've got HCM software. HCM software that makes HR more strategic. Automate busy work, minimize compliance risk, and run custom reports at Rippling, the number one rated HCM platform. Okay, so you might be thinking, all right, so they've taken this really broad targeted page which could rank for a very high volume keyword and instead they've replaced it with a super specific narrowly focused page. That doesn't make any sense. Yes, but as this space has become more competitive, in order to generate higher quality leads from real decision makers in the target audience that Rippling is going after, they've had to make more focused pages. But they've made a number of focused pages based on their different audience cohorts. This still allows them to be relevant to lots of different people across the organization, but it allows them to talk in a way that's much more native and feels much more specialist to each of those different types of people. For example, the HR leader is going to look at this and see reduce costs and complexity. Okay, that sounds good. Put your processes on autopilot. That sounds great. Minimize your compliance gap. Sign me up. Because we've segmented the pages, we can resonate with this audience much more closely using the terminology that they themselves use. So, as an outsider, HCM software might not make any sense to you, but to an HR leader who's a rippling target customer, this is now what they're looking for. And by the way, they use this segment and laser target approach across all the content. Look, if you go on their blog today, you can see they segment their content by these different buckets according to who you are. So, if you go on the HR leaders page, for example, where they've categorized all of their blog posts in the HR topic here, and we've got all of the stuff that's relevant and focused to us. But compare that to back in the day. Look how generic this stuff is. There's some stuff about loan forgiveness for COVID. We've got company news like how they pulled off an in-house rebrand in four months and the deck that they used to raise money from VCs. This is barely relevant to their target audience, let alone useful. The second pillar of their growth playbook is their content strategy, particularly on their own website. Check out this growth. So, they decided to take a slightly different approach with their blog between 2023 and 2024. Look at the traffic that their whole blog section was getting back in 2022. Around 5,000 visits per month. By 2025, this had gone up to almost 200,000 visits per month. So, rapid growth in their blog. It's tailed off a little bit since then, but pretty much everyone's organic traffic has tailed off a little bit since then because of the rise of AI overviews. So, let's take a look at exactly what they've done. Well, here I am on Semrush. And by the way, you can get a free trial at thankyouninjas.com. We're just looking at the pages in the blog section of their website. And if I go over to the topics section in SEO organic rankings, I can see all of the keywords that their blog pages are ranking for grouped by topics. And what do we see here? We see that the topics are clustered around these different audiences that Ripling is targeting. HR and employee management, payroll and salary, finance and accounting, business operations. These match those different customer segments that we see on Ripling's website. This is no accident. If we look at some of the subtopics within these, for example, in the HR and employee management section, we've got stuff like performance review examples. Who is searching for that type of content? Well, it's HR leaders. Employee benefits. Again, HR leaders. There will be some employees who are searching for that, but it'll also be HR leaders. Peer review examples, topics around grievances, how to terminate employees. not nice, but something that HR leaders search for advice around. So, Ripling has built content sections around each of these audiences and the topics that mean the most to them. And this is something that we'll do with our clients. We'll do some analysis early on when we're working with them to identify what different topics each different sub audience they have is going to be interested in. That then guides the content strategy to make sure we're producing the sorts of things that those people are going to be interested in. If we can get them onto the website, we can then explain about the proposition or the product or service in order to sell them. Now, that's not the only thing that Ripling has been doing. There's also some local SEO plays going on. Let's take a look at this one. So, in the US, there are lots of states, and each state has its own set of laws. Ripling has produced content about each of the local state laws targeting that state. Here, we're looking at the blog, and I've filtered it for keywords that contain Georgia. What we can see is that they've got this blog post, employment labor law in Georgia, that's ranking for a whole bunch of different Georgia labor law keywords. Now, on its own, this Georgia labor laws section isn't generating massive volumes of traffic. It's generating around 100 visits per month, up from a high of around 700 in 2024, but they've taken this approach with every US state. So, they've built out this huge section on the website about local specific labor laws in each state, ranking for those states. Now, you can see that the traffic has dropped off here, which is exactly what you'd expect with this type of topic, which is the sort of thing that AI overviews wants to cover or people ask chat GPT. But if you can get your content cited and you can get people clicking through to your website from AI overviews or chat GPT, there's still some good quality traffic to be picked up here. And you know that there's a reasonable chance that people searching for these things are potential customers for Ripink. So, it can be worth it given the relatively small amount of effort. Now, you might have a local angle to your content or you might not. The point here isn't local SEO for national topics. The point is segmenting and targeting very specific topics that your audience could be interested in, which will make you seem incredibly relevant for what they need. And by the way, if you'd like us to do this type of analysis for your business, you can request a free digital marketing review from the team at Exposure Ninja. We'll take a look at your business. will compare you against your competitors and map out the top digital marketing priorities for you based on your marketing goals. This service is free and you can request it at exposurinja.com/re. Now, I must say not everybody is eligible, so you do need to apply for this, but you can do that at exposurinja.com/re. Okay, the next element of Ripling's content strategy is Ripling Plus. This is kind of like a Netflix for HR and IT and finance and startups. This is a very high value content section that they've added to their website in 2025. It's a combination of videos, there are reports, there are tools, ebooks, there are newsletters, all sorts of different things targeting again these same customer segments. This has a dual purpose. Yes, it can help with SEO and it can also generate some inbound links, but really this is a content play to keep their target audience on their website. This can help to insulate from the impact of AI on your organic traffic because people are going to keep coming back to this website for the content that they get from just this website. Now, let's be honest, this is a resource inensive way of producing content. And it's not unusual to see businesses that try this for a year or two and then drop it because they just can't commit to the amount of work required to sustain this volume and the quality of this content across so many different segments. But the good news is that so far Ripling is seeing some amazing gains from this approach. Here's the Rippling Plus section on their website. And look at the improvement in keyword visibility for this section since they launched it in 2025. When they launched it, handful of keywords ranking, 12 total keywords ranking. Now we're over 1,400. So, it's seeing some good growth. And there's signs that Rippling is testing running some paid traffic to it as well, which is kind of interesting. They're targeting fairly generic terms like human resources. My guess is that they're testing to see whether someone who's searching for human resources lands on this section of the website, finds it interesting enough to sign up for the newsletter, download a report, or continue engaging so that they can bring them into Ripley's world. For your business, you have to think long and hard about whether you can commit to the resource to produce something like this. If you can, it can be a great way of differentiating you against competitors, but it's not always necessary. But something that is increasingly necessary is the third pillar of Ripling's digital marketing growth strategy, and that is digital PR. This is important for SEO, but it's also increasingly important if you're going to improve your visibility in AI search. So, let's see what Rippling does. Now, as you've seen, Ripling understands their target audience. It understands the terminology they use, the pain, the problems that they've got, and it takes this data and this information and turns it into reports like this one, the state of the back office leader, which includes a whole bunch of stats like what back office leaders are interested in and thinking about, HR leaders are thinking about training managers, effective onboarding, upskilling employees, etc., etc. Loads of data, loads of stats, some interviews, some little snippets in here. So, what's the point of doing this? Well, there's a few different reasons why this type of thing is useful. Firstly, it produces amazing insight that you can then feed back into your marketing team so they can hone and refine the terminology used on the website and the messages that they're communicating throughout your content. Secondly, these types of reports are great to send to your existing customers because it demonstrates that you understand where they're coming from. But the third reason, and the one that provides probably the most long-term benefit, is that this can form the basis of digital PR where you go out to publications with your news stories, get coverage, links, and mentions. So, let's take a look at exactly how Ripling is doing this. Look at this article on Unleash, which is a sort of website that Ripling's target audience might be reading, at least on the HR side. The headline is, "Is task tax stopping your business from growing?" And Ripling is citing data from their own report. So, they're using the data they collected in their report to go out to very specialist publications that they know their target audience is going to be reading and they're linking back to the report as well as linking through to Ripling's website. Of course, there's an amazing positioning advantage here. If I spend my time reading this website and I see this report and it resonates with me and I understand and Ripling sounds really good, great. I might click through and convert. But this type of coverage also means you get links which helps your SEO and you get coverage on the sort of sites that the AI tools are citing when they're producing their responses. We're going to look at some more examples of this in just a minute. In addition to going out with the results of their reports, Ripling is also doing digital PR like this where they're talking about Franken Systems killing your performance review process. And this is where someone from the Ripling team is actually featured as a guest author posting about all of this. And of course, the problem is you've got lots of different systems. they're killing your performance review. The solution is an all-in-one system like Ripling. This is exactly the sort of stuff we do for our clients. It works super well. Here's another example again using this Franken system topic which they've really worked hard to get some coverage for. And this is another feature post here from Jen Hash Ripling's VP of tech recruiting. They also just do some straight up vanilla digital PR. Like when they've got a new product or a new feature to add, they will do some PR to industry specific publications. In this case, HR Brew talking about the new features. Now, like I said earlier, we use this type of digital PR to a great effect for our clients. One example that we've done this for is Zugu case. They're a brand that sells really high-end, good quality iPad cases, and we've been able to get them some incredible visibility in AI search. So, getting them recommended by AI overviews and chat GBT. And we've used digital PR to do this. So, how we thought about this is, well, if Zugu case sells products for Apple devices, which publications do Apple users read? Well, it's things like Wired, Mac Rumors, ZDNet. So, we help Zugu Case get mentioned on Wired, Mac Rumors, and also getting featured in content creator like these videos on YouTube. What happens as a result? Well, when you ask Google, what's the best iPad Air case? Oh, it says the Zugu case because this article is pulling from a bunch of websites that talk about how Zugu case is freaking awesome. And this leads us to the future of Ripling's visibility. It's done incredibly well from SEO, traditional search, and content marketing. As things move more towards AI search visibility, and as users are spending more of their time reading Google AI overviews and talking to chat GBT than they used to, it's going to be increasingly important for Rippling to maintain their visibility in these AI search tools. Luckily, the foundation that they've laid and the work that they're doing now is giving them a really good base to work from. Let's take a look. So again, I'm using Semrush here to check Ripling's AI visibility. We can see they've got a visibility score of 72 out of 100. Now, there are some territories that they're not doing particularly well in, and there's also some AI tools that they're not doing as well in as others. So, they're doing pretty well in Google AI overviews, which will often site a brand's own website and a brand's own content, whereas Chat GPT will often site third-party websites. So, this could be an indication they actually need to do a bit more digital PR tailored to the type of websites that ChatGpt particularly likes to site from. And this is where things could get tricky for Ripling. AI search is such a new area and so few businesses are really prioritizing it, which actually can mean that the field of play is blown wide open. For example, if we're in AI mode and we search best HR software, you can see that yes, Ripling is in there, but so are some other competitors like Hi Bob and Bamboo HR. The key for Ripling will be taking that great growth that they've generated through traditional search and turning that into amazing AI search visibility. How are they going to do that? getting featured in more of these articles, continuing to be super clear about what sets them apart. One of the trends we're seeing across AI search is that large players who are very dominant in the space can be disrupted by smaller players who embrace AI search much more quickly to chip away at that market lead. This is a real changing of the guard moment and it's up to you to decide whether you're going to be on the right side of that trend or you're going to be one of the businesses that gets left behind. And one of the reasons why AI search is such a priority for a lot of marketers and brands now is that the quality of the traffic you get can be so high. One of our clients that we're working for, Value Capital Funding, has seen a 640% increase in conversions using SEO and AI search with a large part of that growth coming from AI tools specifically. In fact, Value Capital Funding are telling us that as a result of this work, their clients are more frequently finding them in tools like ChatGpt and Grock. One prospect even asked AI for the best company in the country and saw value capital funding being mentioned. This is happening right now and smart businesses are jumping on this. By the way, if it's something that you want to help with, then the team at Exposure Ninja does something called an AI search audit. This is a really comprehensive piece of work where we spend around a month digging through all aspects of your AI search visibility. We'll also look at your competitors to see what they are doing to appear in AI search and we'll map you out a game plan that you and your team or an external agency can implement over the next 12 months. This is an incredibly comprehensive report giving you an entire AI search visibility game plan. We can either present this to you in person or over Teams or Google Meet. This isn't a free service. We have to charge for this because it takes some of our most senior team a very long time to put these together. But the results are fantastic and AI search is only going in one direction. So, if you want to give yourself a really good foundation for the future of digital marketing, then get the AI search audit from Exposure Ninja. And to do this, you need to head over to the Exposion Ninja website. Just click contact and get in touch letting us know that that's what you want. If you're not quite ready for that level of commitment, then you also might want to check out the free website and digital marketing review. This gives you a general overview of the top digital marketing priorities that we've identified for your business against your competitors. We'll typically film this as a video and send it over to you within a couple of working days. This service is completely free unlike the AI search audit, but not everybody is eligible. So, you do need to apply for this at exposurinja.com/re. So, there you have it. Ripling has gone from cold calls in a basement to a $16 billion valuation company. They've done that using an incredible digital marketing playbook with three core pillars. Firstly, defining and telling their story and making that story really specific around those different customer segments that they've identified. Secondly, building out a content strategy which backed up that story. Super highquality, super useful content. They've also tested other stuff like local SEO and the Netflix of HR. Then finally adding in digital PR to get distribution and build that thought leadership and reputation, which also happens to be very handy for AI search visibility. If you've enjoyed this video, you might also like this one where we deconstruct Crowd Strike's $350 million a month SEO strategy. Yes, you heard that right. Until next time. See you