Noah Brier
CTO and Co-Founder, Percolate

Content Marketing is the new buzzword. The digital transformation has led to the rise of Content Marketing as a form of engaging with prospects. We spoke to Noah Brier, CTO and Co-Founder, Percolate to understand how content marketing platforms could help marketers drive ROI.

Tell us about your role at Percolate, the team and the technology you handle.

I’m co-founder and CTO of Percolate, a leading Enterprise Content Marketing Platform. It’s a pretty broad role that involves partnering with just about every part of the organization to help set the vision for the company and the product.

At Percolate, what are the core tenets driving your technology and product marketing teams?

Fundamentally, we’re focusing on defining and owning the Content Marketing Platform category. For us, that’s all about how you build systems to help marketers manage the content bottleneck and create more marketing that drives results.

Could you tell us more about “The System of Record for Marketing”? What is the idea behind it?

One of the core theses we had when we started the company is that marketing is the only department within the enterprise that doesn’t have a core software system they use to manage their operations. Finance has the ERP, HR has the HRIS, sales has CRM, and so on. But marketing is left trying to tie tools together and most of those are much more focused on the distribution of marketing messages than the creation of them. We decided to focus on the process of creating marketing content and build an operational system that can sit at the heart of a marketing organization just like those other systems of record.

What is the State of Content Marketing Automation technology in 2018?

Gartner has said that by 2020 content is going to be the biggest bottleneck in marketing, but I think for most marketers, especially B2B they’re already feeling that. The reason for that is that there’s been so much focus on building a martech stack that can deliver on automation and, as a result of successfully delivering on that vision, they’re now left with the realization that to see the value of their investment they must kickstart their content engine. That’s why we believe that Content Marketing Platforms are such a critical part of the martech stack.

As a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms, how do you enable marketers to strategize their content management and asset management for omnichannel? Where do video and social messaging content fit into this strategy?

From the beginning, Percolate has been channel agnostic. The system can manage content regardless of destination and format. In that way, we are able to help marketers plan and execute omnichannel campaigns with ease.

Do you leverage AI/Machine Learning at Percolate? How would Data Science and AI/ML technologies influence better adoption and ROI from Content Marketing platforms?

We have a few things in the works…stay tuned!

Finally, what are your predictions about the role of Chief Technology Officers over next five years? What are the major challenges for technology teams in delivering business goals?

One of the biggest and most obvious challenges for marketers is the need to break down the silos and tie together their marketing technology systems. The whole idea of digital transformation is to move organizations to think more holistically and what we’ve seen is that in many cases they’ve gone the opposite direction because instead these systems reinforce or create new silos around web, email, etc. I think the fundamental challenge is how to think about tying those systems together and making them work towards helping to solve the content bottleneck.

Thanks for chatting with us, Noah.
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