Mauricio Romero Talks About Lead Conversion & Content Planning

Thank you for reminding me and for the opportunity to speak with your audience. I’m really happy, and I hope they find the subjects useful that we will discuss.

Okay. I started working young in the marketing and advertising industry. My best friend’s father had a big agency in Mexico in the ’80s and the ’90s, where the budgets were massive. One day, my father’s friend told him, Okay, you have to start working. We were best friends and spent almost all the days together in the afternoons after school and all the summers. I didn’t have my friend anymore. I go to his father and tell him, Okay, he will start working. Can you give me a job as well? Because I don’t have anything to do in the afternoons. And he told me, Yes, you can do that. So, that’s how I got introduced into the marketing world. And one part that I love about marketing is to make ads. In those days, it was to make TV commercials. They were made as small movies. They were filmed. They weren’t recorded on video. The film industry was big, so you had to bring prominent cinematographers from Los Angeles and go to Los Angeles to develop your material and everything. So, it was a very glamorous and unique way to do things.
So, making TV commercials was excellent. So, I love that part. So, I started to get into that part of the agency, and we started producing the TV commercials for big brands, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, and Hershey’s—every significant brand. We made TV commercials for them back then in those days. Then, I went to college, and I did my major in marketing and advertising. And when I finished school, I found my company. I was in Mexico City, and I was directing, at that time, TV commercials; because I started so young, I started doing the lamps and pulling up cables, and then I started to work as the assistant, and then to assistant of the producer and then assistant of the director. I ended up directing TV commercials.

Yeah so, my company, initially, was what we specialized in. And I studied a little bit of music. I went to the Mexicans Conservatory, and then I went to Boston, and I studied a little bit of cinematography and how to direct actors at Harvard. I was delighted with that part. But remember that the internet changed everything. The company back then was successful. We were making around 200 TV commercials per year. We started doing other services because we had all the studios. We started making radio advertising and then print advertising. It was going well. But the big business was around film production.
But remember that the internet changed everything, so people stopped watching TV. The budgets went down, and we had to reinvent ourselves because nobody was watching TV anymore. We didn’t have the previous budgets that we had, so we started struggling to make 200 commercials per year. We end up making 15 commercials a year or so. It went really down. We had to reinvent ourselves. So, we started making another service like activations and all that stuff. And it was at that time the transition when people didn’t believe in digital marketing. Still, they needed to have all the budgets or put the money into traditional advertising because it was starting to go down, and we had different results than the previous years. I started studying what was happening again and discovered digital marketing. So, this is where we had to go because of the results; you can measure everything. That was really great. Before, in traditional advertising, if you needed to make a study, making the study was the exact cost as making the campaign.
So, it was costly. Not all people had the money to spend and see what was going on or what was going on with the market. But with digital marketing, it was a must to analyze everything. You can analyze everything because you have data easily. That’s when I started to change all the agencies into inbound marketing. And, of course, being in inbound marketing is with HubSpot because they invented inbound marketing.

This was around the beginning of the 2000s and the 2000s. I was looking to make software to make digital advertising. In the research, I found HubSpot and started working with them and using the platform. So, I was the first Latin American company to start making digital advertising, and we were HubSpot’s first Latin American partner.

No, they weren’t famous. The software was ancient. It looked like a new thing instead of an excellent design. But it gave results, so it didn’t matter. They started growing. And, of course, with all the marketers that we were working with HubSpot and telling them ideas on what we needed. And the success of HubSpot has to do with that because they listen to all the marketers and start building a great platform around that. And, of course, they started growing, had public money, and made inbound marketing famous. And it became famous because of the results. You have excellent results with your clients. It’s impressive that the principle of digital marketing is straightforward. You have to listen to your customers because they will ask for answers from Google. They need answers. They have questions on how to solve anything they are trying to solve. And companies, that’s what we do. We help our customers to solve things through our solution. The principle is straightforward. As long as you answer all those questions through content on your website, Google will send you those people because Google needs your answers.
Of course, you can also pay Google, but that’s another space. But if you don’t pay Google, Google must find good information. We will use other platforms if Google doesn’t give us good answers. I don’t know, maybe any search engine. Google needs good information. If your website is filled with that information, you will be successful. Of course, that information has to be written in two languages. The first language is for the user. You have to explain how you can help them solve their problem. But the other language, it’s the SEO part. You have to help the search engine understand how to index your content and how to classify it. So, when someone asks a question, they say, Okay, here’s a great answer, and here’s a website with many answers. So, that’s how Google will send you a lot of people. And, of course, that’s the beginning of digital marketing and the things that we’re doing. And we do. We specialize in content. Many agencies now specialize in CRM because CRM is also a good part of the system. After all, you must follow up on all the leads from marketing.
But the real engine is to attract people. If you have good salespeople, the CRM will make their life much easier. But even if you have a great CRM and a tremendous following and nurturing campaigns, if you don’t have good salespeople, it doesn’t matter. And salespeople are off our side of the agency. Salespeople should be on the client side. So, that’s why we are still specializing in content. And, of course, we can help all the sales teams to follow up. And we help them with the nurturing campaigns, and we help them with the lead scoring and all that part. But if the sales team is not good, it doesn’t matter. They are not going to close. That’s why it’s challenging to maintain the revenue in inbound marketing. You, as an agency, can do great work to attract people. But if the client needs to do their part with a good sales team and follow-up, all your efforts go down. That’s the trick when we need to select good clients. That’s a big part of it. It would be best if you had a client that is willing to adopt new technology, that is willing to adopt new ways of doing things.
It has to come from the top. It would be best to have the CEO sign in so the salespeople can start doing that. It’s an excellent project because when salespeople understand that when we answer a question, that question becomes a sales meeting, and that sales meeting becomes a sale and then a customer, that’s when they get it. Because salespeople need to get it from the beginning. They say, Okay, now I have more responsibilities. I need to learn a new platform. We were doing okay with our Excel or whatever they use to follow up, but we don’t need that. It’s a lot of extra work; we must help the agency make the content. It’s a lot of new work they still need to get. But when they start seeing the results and the blog that they help us with, they receive a comment that goes directly to him, and he follows up that lead, and then he earns that commission per sale. That’s when salespeople are happy.

Okay. The first thing is you have to have the buying of the CEO, and all start there. So, if you have the support of the CEO, everything becomes more accessible to implement inside the company. And what we do with all our clients is put them into a cohort and give them a course. It’s around 15 hours when they learn what we do within marketing. What is the process? Why do we need to make content? We show them other clients’ success stories so they can see how a blog can make meetings with them, with sales meetings, and then how they can follow up and close the sale. It’s all about education. The other part is at the beginning, we had a lot of copywriters, and the copywriters did the research and were making all the content. It didn’t work because it wasn’t the content of the client. It needs to include the soul of the company. The only thing we do right now is tell the company that we need to conduct interviews with the subject, the experts, the experts that can give us the answer.
We go, and we interview the expert. And, of course, we make the content. We convert that into a blog, an ebook, a video, whatever is needed. But when they answer that question, it has the special sauce of how they do things, and they are pleased. And, of course, when the last user, the actual client of our clients, reads the blog, he’s reading the real solution. It’s not something that we made up. We were used to that in traditional advertising because the clients didn’t know how to communicate anything. We gather a lot of copywriters and experts, put them into a meeting room, and just put them in beer and pizza. After two days, they came up with a great story. They made up the story around that and made it with an excellent way to communicate it. We don’t do that anymore. We can’t do that anymore. We need to do real stories from the companies. It changed many things, and we had to learn all that in these 15 years we’ve been doing digital marketing. It was a natural mindset change that we had to do because we were in the traditional advertising and thought, okay, making content.
We’ve been making content all these years. It’s the same, and it wasn’t the same because it didn’t connect to the audience they were looking for. And now, doing this, we have excellent results making that. Those tips are those that always try to educate your client. Everyone in the company needs to know what they are doing, because sometimes we have to work not only with the salespeople but also with the people who are making the product, with engineers as an example. And the engineer needs to understand that his answer is something that’s going to help salespeople to understand how they do things. For example, we have a tequila from Mexico, and one of our clients is the second biggest tequila brand. It’s Tequila Sosa. There were a lot of questions that people were asking. Is it reasonable to freeze the tequila or not? Should you make it frozen or not? We went to the expert, so he had nothing to do with marketing or sales. But that’s something that people were asking. It results that if you take a liquor and freeze it, you’ll lose a lot of aromas.
It’s not the best thing to do because if you have a terrible tequila and you freeze it, you won’t see the difference between a good one and a bad one. So it’s not the best idea. Of course, if it’s hot, it’s good to drink it with ice. But that was something. Another question is, how much tequila can you drink before getting drunk?

Okay, the first thing about keywords is to gather your salespeople and ask them, What questions do you receive? And it’s fantastic because we’ve done this with marketing and sales teams. And we will go with marketing teams. They can tell us about 10 or 15 questions. And when you gather your sales teams, you can answer 200 questions.
It’s amazing how we humans are starting to talk to the machines as if they were humans. This process is critical because when the salespeople catch a question, people are typing it just as they are telling you, How do you do this? How do you solve that part? And it’s incredible how that becomes SEO, a strong base of SEO. When you have those questions, then, of course, all the platforms of SEO can help you understand how they search or the exact words of how they search it. But the first part is to gather your sales team, gather those questions, and then put all those searches into your system, whatever system you have, and the system will help you with the statistics. And then, you have to see two parts of the statistics. People are looking a lot for a term, but the general terms have a lot of traffic, but it could be a better lead because they’re very generic. You have to balance a little bit with long-term keywords. That’s why I like the long questions. You have to think because we’re going to get more accessible to a long-term question or a long-term keyword, and we’re going to rank faster than a generic keyword. That’s another thing we’ve learned through the years.

Yeah, that’s the thing that we’ve learned. And, of course, the platform helps you a lot because they have all the statistics on which terms they are looking for. Remember, the difficult part is that we can refer to the same term differently when we ask a question as humans. As an example, if we were looking for the weather forecast 15 years ago, you had to put the weather forecast in your region and put your region. Now you can tell alexa, like I said, is it going to be rainy? Alexa, understands that it’s the same term. That’s the other tricky part about SEO. That’s why the platforms are beneficial because they help you to see this part. Okay, you have the main question, and put it in there. The search tools will give you all the other ways people are looking for that, and they will tell you which ones have more visits. That’s the thing about SEO that we do, but we like to gather all the information from the sales teams. Once you do that, you have an excellent SEO strategy. Of course, you can do many things because you have many experts that do the analysis and all that stuff.

You have the tools, and it’s not an exact science. It comes to error and trial because sometimes you think that some keywords will perform great, and they don’t. And then you have surprises that you have some keywords or questions that you say, okay, someone that is very specialized or a very narrow part of the population is looking for this specific question so specific that you would think that no one is searching for it. And those are the search terms that run fast. And then you have outstanding leads from that because they are precise. I don’t know, it’s strange. So you have to look at all your data, and it’s part of human marketing. You have to analyze and improve. It comes to trial and error. If you see something working, do more content around that subject. If the subject that you thought would be great is not performing as well, you have to start looking for those long-term keywords or more specific questions, as I tell the client, because not all clients understand the long term.
I tell them we need more specific questions. So that’s it. And you have to perform this every month to start improving. And that’s the way to improve it. And then, if you have the ten most busy blogs bringing you a lot of content and visitors, try to review them and see if you can improve them. You probably have a blog that is converting a lot. So, see what content you made and how you made that content. People are converting so much and try to copy that into the other blogs with a lot of busy, not too much conversion. It’s not only writing the content; it’s looking at which content is performing. The toolkit has many busy charts and conversions, and tries to see what things are converting, mix them, and rewrite them to make them better. That’s it. And, of course, when you convert, also it has to do with the offers. Remember that the offer is not lowering your price. I’m offering you more content where you can learn more about how to solve your problem.
And if the problem is significant to that person, they will read a lot of content. Because that’s another thing that many clients tell me my clients don’t read. And when I talk, I always ask people, Do we have pregnant women here or young mothers? There is always one saying: Okay, how many blogs have you read about changing a diaper, getting your child to sleep early, or making the formula for your kid? And they tell me more than 100. That’s how I tell the clients, okay, the same thing. People want to solve their problems. That problem is essential. They’re going to read a lot. So, that’s when inbound marketing or content marketing gets the power. You are telling them how they can do that. And after that, you are going to tell them my solution is a good way that you can solve that problem. Why don’t you try my solution? That’s the buyer’s journey.

Yes. That’s another thing we struggled with before, and we took them from the old advertising school. You have a campaign that has a message, and that message and that message you make it to TV, to radio, and to print advertising. So it’s the same. Of course, the base is written in digital advertising because of all the platforms they develop to index and classify written content. They are making great efforts to classify what’s seen in an audio or video, but they are getting there and need to have it in all the languages. Try to see which contents are performing well in the region part, and then you have to adapt them and make them a blog, a video, and then a podcast. So it’s the same thing. The same content should be in three formats: audio, video, and the region part. Of course, making that is a lot of effort and budget. That’s why I recommend first seeing which are performing well in the region space and then making them in video and audio. Of course, you must adapt them because, for example, a blog, how long should it be?
A blog should be around 600 words. There can be more, of course, but around 600 words, anyone can read it. If you make it shorter, it has to be excellent content, or people desperately need the solution to read 3,000 blocks; they don’t do that. So 600 words it’s the correct amount. Then, for video, it should be around two minutes up to two minutes. So try to do those 600 words in one to two minutes, at most two minutes, because you won’t read it. And when you try to do it in a podcast, people are used to listening for 15 to 20 minutes. So try to do that. It has the same content; start talking about it. It could be straightforward if you interview your client and put a camera in front of them. In those interviews, you can make their resume and make them one minute. Then, you put the cold content on audio and have 15 minutes. Then, you have your copywriter to make great content in 600 words. We also like interviews because we have the three contents in one effort.
That’s why we think interviews are so significant with the subject matter of experts. The only thing is that some people get nervous in front of the camera. You must know who inside your client’s company is willing to have a camera in front of them. That’s the only issue we found with interviews, not all people; when you put an in front of them, they freeze and need help to think of a good answer.

Yes.

I didn’t hear you. Sorry, the connection wasn’t so good. Can you repeat that?

Okay, here is the thing. Yes, we are all inbound. Clients are telling us, Wait, why don’t we also do outbound? Because we can forget about Outbound, or you can forget about not the cold calls, but the ABM now that it’s getting along. It’s like a cold email, but it’s account-based marketing. It’s the same technique. It will knock on a door, and hope you are at the right time with the right person. We still have to do the three efforts. As I tell the clients, you can attract people in three ways. The first one is to knock on every door. That’s why we make the calls. That’s why we started to make account-based marketing. We do Facebook advertising because it’s like a call. You have more information, and you’re trying to reach a narrower target group or buyer persona; if you want to see that part, we can make that effort. But those kinds of strategies are based on hope. As I told you, you need to be at the right time and with the right person.
And if you don’t connect with that person at the right time, it might be the right person. But they will only take action if you connect it at the right time. So, it’s mainly based on hope. And you have to do a lot of effort and emails. It’s based on knocking on many doors. In the second part, I told the clients that it’s traditional advertising, making brand awareness. That’s what you are doing: making brand awareness. When you make brand awareness, you can justify your investment in terms of how many leads this investment gave me because you’re making brand awareness. You want everyone to know your product, service, and solution. Having the statistics, it isn’t easy. That’s something that traditional advertising struggles with. I remember clients in the 90s telling me, Okay, we’re putting a billboard on the most prominent street in the city. Okay, how many people went through that? We can know that. But how many people look at the advertising? And how many people who looked at advertising went to your store? And how many people went to your store to buy? We can’t know that. It’s impossible to know that.

I tell clients, You have to give me a budget and forget about results on that part. Of course, we can have results or measure some results of how many people watched the TV ads or so. And we can make some mixtures. We can make a call to action at the end of the traditional advertising TV ads. We can see a tiny part of our website, but it’s making brand awareness. And making brand awareness is to be present with big budgets. And all the time in the most media that you can afford because it works in another way. If you are present all day with a live person in the media that they are watching, when they need your product, they will think about you. Different. But you must be there for many years and in all the media. So you need a budget. Are you willing to do that? And I see a little bit of Google AdWords. It’s a little that part because you need big budgets, and you need to be present, and you need volume. It would be best if you had a lot of people.
And so many little people will become your leads in Google AdWords. So, I tell them those are campaigns for brand awareness. So, if you want to gain brand awareness, that’s great, but it will cost you, and you can stop doing that. When? You don’t know. Imagine Coca-Cola saying we’re going to stop all our advertising. They won’t stop it, and they don’t care because it will have an impact. And the third way to attract people is to be present when they are looking for a solution. That’s why I tell them digital marketing or inbound marketing is the most intelligent way because, in the first one, you need the right person and the right time. The second one is that you must be present everywhere and always. You need to figure out how much money you’re going to spend. On your third one, you will attract people who need a solution. They are looking for a solution. So, what’s the best part of investing? They are ready to spend money investing in those customers to do the solution. Indeed, two others are not ready.
They only think of your solution once they need you. And you’ve been present so often that they think of you as a vendor for that solution. Those are the three ways. And I tell them we can do traditional advertising. And we were perfect back then doing that. But it’s a matter of money. Do you have the money? And all the clients say, Oh, I don’t know, I don’t want to spend my money like that. Of course, they can do that when there’s a big company. But a company needs to invest its money brilliantly.

Yes, that isn’t easy because, in marketing, you have to build trust with Google and the people. So it takes time. How much time do they need? At least they need a year to start doing that. So, it’s like investing only after seeing immediate results. What I tell the clients is okay; we’ll look at the results of our clients. And when you understand that if you invest in bar marketing, all the content becomes an asset that as long as you give a good answer, the old blogs are going to perform better than the new ones because they gain that trust in terms of the algorithm and terms of search and in terms of people. For example, I have an ebook with a client explaining finances, leasing, and credit. People need to learn the difference. So, in that ebook, we explain that part. And that ebook brings $8 million per year to the company. And, of course, it’s an ebook we did around ten years ago. And the ebook brings a lot of revenue to the company. And why is that? Okay, you have two products, and I need a loan, but I wonder if I need a credit or another product or sales and lease back.
So how do I choose? And every time you contact someone, they will tell you, Okay, you want credit or the list? I know the difference. So it’s really simple. It’s educating your customers. And if you do that content, it will become an asset that will last a long time. Instead of traditional or paid advertising, the moment you stop your budget or campaign, you have zero presence on the Internet. You become, again, no one. And if you do content marketing with inbound marketing, those questions are really good, and they will perform for a long time because they are accommodating. And we want, as consumers, to understand which product will give us the best solution.

That’s why I tell them. And, of course, I have a lot of graphics. As an example, we have a client. In the beginning, when you start doing inbound marketing, you can mix paid advertising and inbound marketing. So you can get the target of X amount of leads. But another disadvantage of paid advertising is that it’s an option; people are willing to pay more for the same terms, and they understand more about paid advertising. So, you have more players on the ground. So, the same results will cost you more and more over time, and inbound or content marketing, that content you already paid for. So you’ll leave it there, and that content will bring more people each time. So they are the inverse of investments.

Yes, that’s what we do with our clients. We explain that we’re going to spend the same money and we’re going to have fewer results with paid advertising, or you want to increase your budget. I tell them again, remember, you are mainly making brand awareness with paid advertising, or it’s a strange mixture between trying to get leads and brand awareness. The other thing with paid advertising is you have two results at the beginning. We don’t trust advertising anymore because advertising was complex. I don’t know; they didn’t tell you the truth or the complete truth. So we don’t trust advertising or traditional advertising. And when you’re looking to solve a problem, you want to learn not to buy. Of course, you’re going to buy a solution. But first, you need to understand the results of the several solutions you are looking for, and you want to wait to buy. And that’s why many people don’t click on the advertising.
Over time, the numbers started increasing like crazy because the unstable system became predictable and replicable. And finally, this is scalability. That’s clever. This is exponential growth.

Okay, we do annual contracts with our clients. And the good clients that stay with us have been since we started, we have clients that they’ve been doing in my marketing for seven, eight, nine years. And those are our good clients. I don’t know. It’s a matter of trust, and you become part of the company as an agency because you understand their language, the product, and a lot of things. So you’re building a relationship with a client that has to be the long term. So, if you have a client or a lead that wants immediate results and wants to avoid investing for the long term, they won’t be good clients. Go away from those clients. And that’s why we are a small company because we try only to accept those clients that we see that they have the culture and that we can build that long-last relationship with them. Because we need marketing to succeed, you must become part of the company. You have to understand the probe to understand who the subject matter experts are inside. For example, in the tequila company, we have 100 people we’ve interviewed inside, different people from production, and we know every one of them. When we have a question about this subject, we know we must go with this person. You can do it in a year. You do it in two or three or four years.
Of course, it’s another part of explaining to the clients how Google thinks. You might have a great answer or the best answer in the world, and you have that answer. But if Google goes into your website and you only have a few answers around because there are a million websites with good answers, how does Google give you the first place? Well, having a great answer and many answers is a matter. And how many answers? I don’t know. It’s around 1,000 articles. So, you need a really big website. And to have a really big website and to be in the big leagues in my marketing, you need to do all that content. And to do 1,000 articles is going to take you four or five years.