How to improve your inbound marketing strategy in Latin America

Student Profile: Elizabeth Morales  M.S International Management '15

By Elizabeth Morales

Global Marketing is not easy, but getting to know the challenges ahead of the curve is always helpful. Hubspot has done a great job at performing research about the state of inbound in Latin America. What helpful things did that report have for you? Fact #1 Marketers in the US and Latin America have the same top 3 priorities but very different execution.
Challenge for marketers: Implementing automation software.
The top three priorities for Marketers in the US and Latin American are: increasing contacts, converting prospects into clients and reaching a relevant audience. The study also pointed out that only 2% of marketers in Latin America have automation software in place.This means marketers in Latin America are executing their inbound marketing strategy almost without automation. It sounds like a lot of work for Latin American marketers. If you decide to implement an inbound strategy implementing automation software will be very helpful.  
Fact #2: 68% of marketers in Latin America that practice inbound marketing are predominantly using blogs and social media.
 Challenge for marketers: How is conversion happening?
Blogs and social media are key to attracting your target market. But that is just step one, you need to go beyond this and create ways to get your visitors information in exchange for the great content they want. Having a lot of likes on social media or many visitors on your blog is important but converting this traffic is also part of inbound methodology and has plenty of potential to develop in Latin America. So I keep asking myself the following questions (and I think you should be asking yourself these questions too): How much knowledge do Latin American marketers have about converting prospects and how are they reaching a relevant audience? Do they have landing pages with forms? Do prospects get handed to sales after they have demonstrated interest? How does this happen? How do visitors move through the funnel? Fact #3: Blogging is one of the top three projects of marketers in Latin America and the US.
Challenge for marketers: Meeting the audience with the content they want where they are and how they want to get it. (Hint: blogs won’t always be effective!)Creating content for blogs is at the top three most important projects. Now, are there avid professional readers in Latin America just waiting to get the latest information from your blog?  The OEI study reveals that in Latin America 45% of professionals never or rarely read any educational or professional material. I would have to say a small group is waiting for your blog and you have the potential of reaching the select group of professionals in Latin America that read once every month, which are about 20%. If you are still inclined to believe that blogs are as popular in Latin America as they are in the US try the following test. Write marketing blog and see how many results you get in google. For marketing blogs I got 322,000,000 results but for mercadeo blogs, the same thing but in Spanish, I only got 564,000 results. This can be an indicator of two things: the huge potential market for creating blogs about marketing or that there is only a small group of engaged professionals that read blogs about marketing, therefore there are few blogs about it. Either way, it is up to you to figure out how to deliver the content your target market wants.  Fact #4: Significant differences in adoption of inbound marketing depending of the country in Latin America.
Challenge for marketers: Balancing inbound and outbound methods depending on the country’s state of marketing evolution. (example below)
The countries that had the highest adoption of inbound marketing were: Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru. But for the other countries in this study (Guatemala, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Paraguay, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panamá and Puerto Rico) less than 10% of the marketers said they practiced inbound marketing. The use of inbound marketing is concentrated in a group of countries but it is still not widespread among all countries in Latin America.Therefore, for marketers trying to sell all over Latin America this means there is a need to adapt your message for the specific country, using the right combination between inbound -which for some countries is something new- and outbound.For example, in the Dominican Republic, in which less than 10% of marketers said they practiced inbound, the right combination between inbound and outbound is the key to engaging audiences. A tv commercial for Orange was uploaded to youtube and got over 1 million views. In the comments people kept saying they watched the video on TV enjoyed the music and wanted to hear it again. Below the video, you see the hashtag to continue the conversation on twitter.
Fact #5: Only 17% of the sales team uses the inbound methodology.
Challenge: Aligning sales with the marketing strategy.
Part of the inbound methodology is turning leads into customers, which is the sales team’s job. But with only 17% of sales teams in Latin America practicing the inbound methodology, is the marketing team working on great content for blogs while the sales team is cold calling and pushing products? Without a doubt, better alignment will improve results for Latin American marketers. The study that Hubspot made was unique and it is a very valuable piece of information. Nonetheless, there is a need for case studies and in depth qualitative analysis of how the inbound method is being planned and executed in Latin America, there are unanswered questions in terms of how marketers in Latin America execute their inbound marketing strategy and how they are aligning their efforts with sales. To get a more realistic picture of how Latin America is adopting inbound practices a proportional allocation of the sample size would have been helpful. Creating content that delights your customers will only reach them if you meet them where they are. Not all countries in Latin America are the same and not all targets are created equal. For example, a famous supermarket in Brazil decided to give their customers the best cooking recipes, but not in a book or a youtube video, they put TVs in certain areas in the supermarket where you could watch the chefs preparing the meals. The content was presented to the audience where they could consume it. 
As the balance in Latin America shifts towards inbound marketing there is a need to provide audiences with content they want, where they are. This means taking the principles of marketing (inbound and outbound) and adapting them to the target market’s unique preferences and cultural background.