Rob Ayala Talks About Inbound Marketing and Outbound Activities

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Harshit or H, as you told me, could call you. Thank you, H. As H said, I am Rob Ayala from Digitalegia. We’re an inbound agency with more than seven years working with inbound strategists, specifically with the technology industry, with SaaS companies, of course, the service. We also work with education companies, schools, colleges, universities here in Mexico and Latin America. We also work with pharma, ecological companies as well. That’s our main three industries that we work with. Well, thank you for having me.

Well, sure. It all started when I started to work with a company. It was a SaaS company actually. We used to sell software for schools. Right now it’s like the main software here in Latin America for school administration. It also has some other tools like LMS, grades, stuff like that. I was the sales VP there. My main goal was to increase sales, of course. I started to dig on how to sell more or how to sell better. In that research, that’s the way I found Inbound. Actually, when I was the sales VP there, I also was in charge of marketing. That’s why I was in both roles back then. And making that research is that we saw that we were already doing advertising on digital. We were creating blog posts, we were creating social media, we were sending emails. So, when I discovered Inbound back in 2014, 2015, somewhere back then, I was asking myself, this is the stuff that we already do, but maybe we don’t do in that methodology that inbound predicts. We started to implement the new methodology and it started to work better. We saw that we had better results with qualified leads when there were people that come from an inbound strategy instead and an outbound strategy.
With the outbound strategy, you were making a lot of effort to create a sale. We saw that and that’s when I saw a real necessity on the school market, especially back then. That’s why I decided to start my own company. At the beginning, we started to work just with school, but when we saw that we could really help software companies, we expanded those services to the software companies. Well, it’s been really challenging work with all customers, from startups to big companies. But that challenge is a good challenge and it’s been really satisfying. All results and all success stories we have.

No, I think it was a little bit different. Not exactly the same because now I used to have a team, but it’s not the same to just coach a team as an entire company and to be worrying about KPIs and growth strategies, growth goals and stuff like that. When I was just in sales, for example, well, my goal was the sales goal and I had to reach that. It just was about my goal. Having a whole team, different from administration, human resources, the development team, the search engine, the organization team, etc. It’s been challenging, but it’s also really satisfying. I also studied my master’s degree, so I knew how to better do that, and I have an MBA now. It’s been challenging. It’s been different, but it’s been really good. I don’t regret my decision to go into an agency line or to start my own agency.

Yeah, I also teach. I have always liked teaching since I was a kid. I used to teach English classes in Mexico and stuff like that. But right now, we offer courses, we offer capacities also for our customers. But I’m teaching a diploma degree after bachelor’s degree in a university here in Mexico. It’s called University de Anahuac or Anahuac University. I teach the inbound marketing course and I also teach the strategic digital marketing course also.

Well, yeah, right now in the agency, all of our services, they have been evolving also. For example, we started with offering web design with SEO and application, but right now, we got a new service that comes from web development, but it’s called Web Design growth Web Design. It’s orientated to increase our visitors, our conversion to leads. We have a service where we are analyzing and just observing what’s going on with every website. We know with information what to improve, what to change, and not just base our decisions with a subject opinion. We base those changes on those improvements with data. That service helps us a lot to improve our results, too, with web design. But that’s just one of our services. Our main service is just the inbound marketing service, although we have the whole inbound strategy service, for example, we divide the inbound in mainly three or actually right now, four sub services. The inbound marketing service, we mainly create a content strategy or an inbound strategy to get more qualified leads. We also have a sales team, a location. That service is likely to have the proper CRM for the sales team and to teach them how to use the tool and also teach them how to make a better sale in an inbound way.
We also offer the inbound service. That’s when we need to have a really customer success team and they are in charge of the customers, they follow up every inquiry they have. The inbound service, it’s really good to improve churn rate. That helps a lot. We also offer that. Right now, we offer a 40 month service. We offer integrations. We integrate many, many tools with probably their marketing, automation tool or their CRM, or depending on how many tools they are using or their ARP. We need to integrate so that it’s flowing in a safe environment, but in the same ecosystem that helps the company have all the data in the same place and everything is on real time at the same time. We do that also. On the other hand, as I told you, as we teach or we consult companies as well, there are two differences between it because we offer capacity stations where we teach methodology or we teach how to use tools, the automation tools and stuff like that. But when it’s a consultation, it’s just like sitting next to the customer and seeing what their goals are and working with them with their strategy.
It’s more towards focusing on the customer.

Yeah, marketing and sales and web design are our main three services.

This is a story I like to tell because it’s our story. But I don’t like to tell because it’s ours. I like it because of what it tells. When we started the agency, well, we started with the inbound methodology, yes, but with some strategies that helped us get some leads, but we also had advertising. But right now, we have three years since we quit advertising, and everything we do is based on SEO. Every lead and every qualified lead that we get is from our SEO strategy. SEO strategy is very robust because we need to have topic clusters. We need to have keyword research. But all those leads come from the inventory. Mainly, they look for us on Google, or maybe they found us on social media. But when they see our offer and they see how they get to us and how they saw the content, how we drove them through a path, the sign to get to talk to us in a way that it wasn’t intrusive. It was when they were ready. That’s the main qualified lead acquisition that we have right now. When we get it, well, the first step is to…
We have an SDR team that sees those inbound leads. They make a call, they make a video call, phone call, or whatever it’s needed. They make a briefing where they see the needs of the customer, the challenges, their goals. It’s also good for us because we can have that qualification of that lead by talking with these guys. That’s our MQLs or marketing qualified leads. Those are the leads that they are working with. If it’s a good lead, they convert it to an S an SQL, so, I say it’s called a sales qualified lead, and they turn it to the sales team. The sales team, I also participate really actively right now in the sales team too, and I sell a little bit. I like my history a lot. But yeah, I like to sell too. I like to get involved with the customers. I like to get to meet them. I like to get to know their challenges. I like them to see my face and see that if I’m not going to be the one who’s going to be executing the strategies, but I’m behind the team, just getting to know that everything is going according to plan.
Then we make that sale. Well, we talk to sales on the sale. We dig a little bit further with that lead to see those specific challenges or maybe some metrics that we need to make our proposal. After that, we make that proposal. I could tell you that lately, most of the time, we have a successful closure. We’re really happy with our sales method, our lead acquisition method, because they are inbound. Actually, when I get the most satisfaction is when the customer or the lead says, or tells me, The way I get to you, I want my customers to get to me. I feel really happy when they tell me that because it seems that we did a really good job there.

Yeah! Yeah! But spend years of effort and SEO and strategy and posting content and keep posting content about it and just making changes and updates or maybe un updated content and stuff like that. But also backlinking works, too. We have many collaborations with many other companies where they want to post our blogs or they want to post to our blog, stuff like that. That it really helped the SEO strategy.

Well, yeah. We have account managers, but every account manager has its own team. Maybe an account manager has 4 to 5 accounts, but they have their own team with the web designer, the content strategist, the advertising specialist, the data analyst. That’s the way we work with customers, but our main contact point with the customer is that account manager. Many of the times I have to be at those meetings to see just we have a project manager, but I don’t check on just the break point by point to see what’s going on. But as I told you, I like to talk to the customer, getting to know how they’re feeling, maybe, and to be honest, at the beginning of the contract, when we started working with them, they don’t see results just at the beginning because inbound is a little bit slow. So, maybe they start to get desperate and I have to talk to them and reinforce that, tell them that you just need to wait, just be patient, we’re going to get there. But after a couple of months later, they start looking at the results. By the end of the year, they can compare how good the study was at the beginning and the result they had at the beginning.
That’s what I tell them. It takes time, but people need to be patient. But we have some other strategies and we don’t just do it. We also need to help our customers with a little bit of outbound strategies. That’s when, for example, our advertising strategy goes really along with our inbound strategy, but we make other side campaigns that are more a little bit outbound, not that the inbound. We talk about the company, we talk about the services, and we help them get to those people that they’re on the decision stage and they may really get to that funnel or sales funnel right away. That’s the way mainly we work with them.

Not really. Our main outbound strategy is focused on just advertising.

All of them, yeah. All of them. But lately, our main platforms to advertise are Google, LinkedIn, and sometimes Facebook and Instagram, depending on the customer, depending on… And not just the customer, depending on the buyer person of the customer, where they are, what social media they are. Right now, TikTok, it’s really big here in Latin America and I think worldwide. So, we had encouragement there too and got to know how to tick tack.

Every inbound strategy, they should have content creation. I don’t think there’s people that worry that their content has to be really high level or really perfect. I tell them, not always. Right now, there’s a lot of content. The content has to create an awareness so they can see or visit your website and see your offerings. So, a content strategy is a really good strategy to help you improve your ranking on Google. It helps you with your SEO strategy. It helps you to clarify on those topics you are writing or creating content about. It converts you or it helps you become a thought leader in that manner. A content strategy is for sure a way that every company should be having, although with probably some automations where we can at the beginning, maybe help them subscribe to the newsletter, but then offer them some other remarkable content like maybe an eBook or maybe a guide or a manual or something that help people get to know what they need to do or what they need to have to solve their problems. That’s why content is really important.

Okay. Well, there are many steps, but they are for sure… Well, at the beginning, they need to know who their buyer personas are because we need to know who we are targeting, who we are designing that content for. At the beginning, we start from the buyer persona, but then we get to know their buyer journey. We need to know their journey and how they start from the awareness stage, how they started to worrying about their problems, how they noticed they have a problem or a necessity, and how do they drive to the next stage that it’s the consideration stage where they started to see and compare how can they solve that necessity or that problem. After that, we need to address content, especially to the decision stage where they need to solve their problem. We get to know the buyer personas, then the buyer journey. After that, with that, with that analysis, we get to know or we get to see what are the keywords they are looking for or researching on.
The internet to solve those problems. After that, we do a keyword research so we can know how those trends are, how many searches they have, the difficulty we’re going to have to get that tracking with that keyword and stuff like that. Then develop the content strategy through that buyer personas through those specific stages and using keyword research.

Well, there are many tools right now, but for keyword research, there are, of course, Google Data Studio, Google Keyword Planner. Those are the main tools that, for sure, everyone has to have. You can integrate that with Semrush or with Moz also. Moz is a great tool. It’s not that cheap, but it’s a really good tool. Quite another tool, we check answers from the public. We use… I forgot the name, but it’s something like what people are looking for or something like that. But yeah, we use many tools to have the overall of the research and see how we’re going to drive the content. Actually, we probably use dates. When we’re probably a topic, it has more searches on certain dates than other dates. We need to make sure that we have all that picture to start creating a content strategy. But we have mainly those tools. We also use other tools that help us just to analyze how optimized are the websites or the pages and stuff like that. Probably there are Wapalizer. There’s another one that’s called Woorank. Those tools that helped us tell what technology is in the website, how good technically is optimized every single page.
For example, we use some other tools to see how our content or our topic clusters are built, or our content is built around that topic cluster, for example, with HubSpot. We need to use several tools for it.

It’s very friendly. Yeah, it’s our main tool. We work mainly on HubSpot. We also work with other automation tools like probably part of Artis Station and Marketo. But our main tool, it’s been HubSpot. We love working with HubSpot. It’s a great tool.

In my experience, it takes from 6 to 8 months to get or to see those results that probably the customer wants to see. But from there, it’s the way up. It takes time. But as I was telling you, there are many customers that get that spread because there’s month three and where our leads are, it’s the month three. I told you, we’re just finishing the implementation, just the onboarding. You need to wait a little bit, a couple of months. It’s fun. But when we get to the sixth or seventh, eighth month, they say, I see what you were telling me now.

For sure. Well, traffic to the website, how many sessions the website is getting, conversion rate to leads. And actually conversion rates do not matter in all the funnel from visitors to leads to qualified leads to sales qualified leads and to opportunities and customers. All those conversion rates are really important because that tells us the quality of our leads. The numbers, of course, of the conversion leads, CPL, cost per lead, CPA, cost per acquisition. Of course, the main KPI is ROI, return of investment. Most of the time the customer focuses on just that metric. But yeah, I’ve been talking to customers and why do I want… For example, I was talking… It was a lady. She was the VP of sales and she was like, Why do I care about visitors to our website? I just need some qualified leads. And I told her, I understand that completely because you are on the sales side. But from the marketing side to get you to get those leads and that qualification of those leads, we need to drive them to the website to get to know the other services with your offerings and explain them how are we going to help them and get them to that path that we can convert them and we can nurture them to get you that qualified lead because not everybody’s ready to buy from you right now.
That’s funny. But yeah, we focus on those metrics because that tells us that our strategies are working. Also another metric that an architect didn’t tell you was source, conversion source. Where are we getting those conversions from? If it’s from social media, it’s program CEO from Google search, or it’s a Google paid search or display or whatever. But we need to get to know what’s working for that customer, for that customer, for that specific service or for that specific product because it could be the same company but different services or different products. Probably for a specific service, it works better. Google’s organic search and for other services works better. Probably advertise. It depends.

Yeah! Yeah!

Well, to be honest, the most successful case study, it’s us. But as I told you, I like to tell our story because we have three years now without advertising and getting qualified leads from an organic and SEO strategy. But I don’t like to do that, or in this interview, I don’t like to tell a lot of us and supply that to that customer. There was a software company that… Actually, we have been working with them for two and a half years, probably right now. With them, they were at the point that they didn’t know what to do because they were at that point, they were a startup. They are still a startup, probably. But they were a startup that they didn’t have… They started to do ads. They had advertising on Google and on social media. That was just their marketing, but when we got to talk to them, just ads. But the ads, they weren’t getting them. Even the number of leads or the qualified leads, that at the point that they were going to run out of business if they didn’t change that. They got to us. We started with a good strategy.
They make an investment on marketing. They saw that they needed that and we’re still there. We helped them. This software company, it’s called Facturama here in Mexico. It’s like an invoice company because here in Mexico, there are specific stuff that the government ask you for your invoices. They’re in an electronic document and stuff like that. They have a platform to help you do so. Right now, they have over 15,000 customers in all the country. They are talking to more funding rounds. They actually got to sell part of the company to US company right now because of the change on the customer acquisition. We helped them to do so. That’s our main. I don’t have the numbers right now, but for example, we helped them from direct traffic to the website to get those qualified leads. We actually built some landing pages where people could pay, not just convert, but pay and start up an Ecommerce. But instead of just having a long sales process where people had to talk to somebody, maybe they had a demo on their software, and then maybe they had to talk to the board and make a decision, stuff like that.
We helped them to reduce that. Well, at the beginning, when the content is ready, we help them to nurture those leads and help them get to know what they need on the software, how to use the software, until they have to or they have the way to just pay it through their licences. That’s our most successful case study.

Well, the main challenge is the qualified leads. But while we start from increasing traffic and that qualification on the leads because probably you get leads if you have the right path, but if you don’t have the right content, you don’t have the right leads or the right qualification you need on the lead. I believe that the main goal is to get those qualified leads and to get to know the buyer person and really do their journey, what they’re looking for on the web. We can design a really good content strategy to get the qualified lead. I think that’s the main goal or the main challenge to get that qualification.

SEO, for sure. SEO. But we also help red traffic with ads. That’s why, for example, ads are not against inbound. It’s just the way you make the ads or how you create the ads or how you orient those ads. For example, on our content strategy, it’s supported by an ad strategy as well. We make sure that people who are looking for those keywords, who are looking for those topics, we make sure they can find us more quickly. Because if we leave everything to SEO, it’s going to take time and a lot of time. That’s why we support our content strategy with that. But being more like an inbound ad, not exactly an outbound ad.

Well, yeah, for sure there are horror stories from the sales process to working with a customer. But there was a customer and I like to tell this horror story because it tells you how to make decisions. Let me tell you, there was a customer that they didn’t really fit on our customer profile that we know how to work with and we know how to deliver the results. This customer wasn’t on our profile, but he was really interested in working with us. Probably, he didn’t have those qualifications on the profile we needed, but he had an interest in working with us. At the end, we decide to work with him and we say, Yeah, we’ll help you. We started to work with them and started to do some email. At the beginning, he didn’t understand what we were doing, like, What are you doing blog posts and what are you doing? We explained them and we told him. But he didn’t really get to the point to understand email that well. And as I told you, email takes time. He didn’t want the results right now and I want to increase my sales. And I want this number of sales.
And for example, there were unrealistic goals. For example, if he had at that point, he had 20 customers, he wanted 200. That’s unreal. The growth is just palatable and you need to be a little bit more realistic on your goals. In the end, we had a bad relationship because we were always fighting. We didn’t end up all the retainers because it was uncomfortable for us to work with him or with them actually. But we have a point person with them that’s why I said that to him. But it was really uncomfortable working with him. He was also uncomfortable with us too because he didn’t understand what we were doing because he wasn’t on the profile we were used to working with. Even though he had the interest to work with us because he had references from other companies that we had with Bright Results and stuff, he wasn’t that profile we work with. At the beginning, we end up breaking that retainer. I believe he went to work with maybe another agency or so. It was not that good for us working with him. It was more work than results. I don’t know. We didn’t fit together.
So, the lesson we learned there is that even though there is a person or a company that wants to work with us really badly, it’s not on our profile or doesn’t match our profile, our customer profile. It’s better to say no at the beginning than have that relationship that is just really tiring. And at the end, you end up bad with that person or with that company. Instead of being a promoter of your services and being happy with the agency, they are detractors. So, we learn that. It’s better to say no at the beginning than just say yes because we want more business.

Well, I could say the only way to improve is to analyze. You can’t improve what’s not being analyzed. Analyze, analyze from the beginning to the end and keep analyzing. Analyzing is the key to everything. Analyze your benchmarks to start. Analyze how your campaigns are going. Analyze the results and don’t wait until the campaign is finished. You need to be analyzing as your campaign goes to see how those results are, to see what to improve, to see and check what we need to change, what do you want, what’s working, what’s not working. Probably, if there’s something that’s not working, we can make it work, or probably it’s best to get rid of it and just focus on the things that are working. It’s really important to analyze from the beginning to the end. Analyzing is the way to improve. You need to set your benchmark, you need to set your goals, so that the analysis makes sense and you see where you start from and where you want to go and where you are at. The best way to improve is to analyze and have just that goal on your mind and to see how you’re going to get there.

It’s gonna be funny, and that’s a concept that many people misunderstand. But community management, community management, it’s something that really helps us and really accelerates results. Community management, and I say many people misunderstand it because they think that a community manager is the one who is on social media and who is saying your post on social media, who is probably saying the copyright on your post, and who is there on your social media. But that’s just one of the functions and not really because I say people who’re in social media, you need several people, you need a graphic designer, you need a content writer, you need many people to be on your social media, you want to have a really good social media story. But the community manager, the name tells what it is. He manages or she manages the community. What’s about it? What’s to manage in the community? There is a reactive and proactive action on the community managers. The reactive way is that the main or the first option people see on the community manager. Oh, yeah, he’s going to answer the questions people do on social media. Maybe he’s going to answer the comments people are doing on our posts on social media.
But community managers, they have to be proactive, too. And they need to search on other social media groups, on other social media pages, on other blogs, on other forums. And he has to be on the community, not just on social media. They need to do that research and to find who else is grinding about this content, who else is talking about these topics, and get them to grind and comment there and add links to the website and, hey, I see this solution and why don’t you check out this? And be that proactive, effectively working with creating that environment and that community, not just on the social media profiles of the company or the customer. They need to be on the web creating that community. When we do so, it really works and it helps a lot because it’s less intrusive and more effective because you don’t see an ad that tells you and you see the sponsored link. It’s somebody else telling you what to look for, what to tip, and they are helping the other people, too. It’s just a person helping you and telling you that. It has more effect or it’s more effective when we do so.
That’s our way to accelerate results.

Well, any final thought? Just a recommendation, if you are new to inbound or probably not even inbound digital marketing, take a look at inbound. Take a look at the strategy. Take a look at what you need on content matters to drive to your audience. How are you going to nurture them? How are you going to tell them? Not just tell them, not just tell them. I can say that people, they don’t… Or we actually, I can be there and I can include myself. We don’t like people to sell us things, but we all like to buy stuff. Help, like the recommendation there is to help people make a decision to get a solution to their problem or their needs by telling them how to solve them. Not by telling you your product is the best way to solve them. Tell them at the beginning how to solve those problems. Educate them, nurture them, and then solve them. You first need to offer something, then you ask for something. For example, the time of the people to maybe have a conversation and see if you can help them. But take a look at that.
That’s the way nowadays people are buying. We just research on the web what we need and when we find those answers, we see and take the next steps to solve it. Make sure you are doing that and not just focusing on your company, on your services. Focus always on your customer. And if you are or you get to be a customer’s secretary company is the way to grow better. The message here is to grow better, not just to grow by growing. The purpose is to grow better in a better way and have less return rate and improve your sales growth and stuff.

Thank you, H. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for the invitation.