Welcome to our new blog series, Marketing Without Borders. Twice per month, we invite a leader from our global network of partners to share their experiences with their unique perspectives on marketing, technology, and business. The questions are ours, but the answers are theirs – every word, shared without edit, from their fingers to your eyes.

Today, we welcome Hector Solis, Online Marketing Manager at Converclick. Hector is a digital marketer and consultant who has spent the last 15 years helping companies to get better results on the internet. He has had the opportunity to develop campaigns with companies from Brazil, Chile and Hong Kong, from SME, like Converclick clients today, and big companies as well, like BancoEstado, and Banco de Chile, among others.

Tell us about Converclick, about the companies you work with, and the role marketing plays at those companies.

Converclick is a digital marketing consulting firm based in Santiago, Chile, but with some clients in Brazil as well. Our mission is to help SME (small and medium enterprises) to enable their full online business potential. We realize that our clients have a website, and some social network presence, but it’s not all working together with their business goals. Despite companies doing some tasks online, most of these businesses are unable to design and implement a digital marketing strategy by themselves.

What are the big marketing trends you are seeing currently? And do you see those trends changing in the next 3 years?

Today in our marketing, we see that people are connected 24 hours a day. It’s a huge opportunity for brands to tell their narratives to their customers. In Brazil, for example, recently we observed the presidential campaign and, for the first time in history, a candidate with only 7 seconds per day on television ads was elected with more than 50 million votes. He used social networks and marketing automation tools to distribute his content and it touched and engaged millions of voters in Brazil. It doesn’t mean that people are not watching television anymore, but the internet is becoming a crucial and influential channel in marketing campaigns. We believe this is happening because, on the internet, we can easily measure results and get much more valuable data from each campaign.

What are the biggest marketing challenge your clients are facing today? What’s keeping them up at night?

Since our main market is SME (small and medium enterprises), our biggest challenge is the lack of resources to be able to put all good ideas and programs into motion. In this situation, getting to the right leads, at the right time, and with relevant information (no matter if it’s a promotion or just a webinar invitation) makes the difference in achieving sales team numbers. This is why we are always encouraging our clients to develop their narratives around their products and services, and use tracking and marketing automation to distribute their content in the most relevant ways for their clients.

What mistakes or incorrect assumptions are companies making today with regard to their marketing strategy?

We noted that social networks are a magnet to SME’s digital marketing budget. But in our markets, SEM is still affordable and should be a first option for any bottom-of-funnel strategy. I see some shopping cart (ecommerce) websites driving traffic to social networks instead of driving funnel conversion with a gated video or subscription form, for example.

Can you share an example of a marketing success story you experienced recently?

We have a client that sells motorcycles and accessories. They have 5 shops in Santiago and an online store. In October 2018, their online store sold 10 times more than they did in April (same website). The difference was marketing automation. We are offering some target items based on customers’ behaviors. We have some email marketing with 30% sales conversion and it’s amazing. As we always say: sell helmets to someone who wants to buy a helmet… sell jackets to someone who wants to buy a jacket.

What are some of your other favorite MarTech tools?

We love Prestashop, WordPress, and VTiger.

What unique marketing challenges exist in your market/your clients’ markets that might surprise readers from other parts of the world?

I think that for the Chilean market, a main challenge is an extreme risk aversion that most managers have. When we are dealing with a new technology, such as marketing automation, this risk aversion becomes a high wall. Some managers are afraid (or embarrassed) to admit you are telling them something new. The market is really small (less than 20 million inhabitants), but almost 100% of them are surfing on the internet. By the way, brands are still under-investing in digital marketing, preferring to invest in street billboards with their website url rather than create simple SEM campaigns to drive traffic to their websites.

We believe there are very real advantages to an open approach in marketing solutions, as well as to business and operating philosophy in general. What does “open” mean to you in terms of marketing, business, and technology?

For sure open marketing has a lot of advantages: first of all, it enables your organization to use and analyze data from several different pieces of software. The ways Mautic integrates via API and its native integrations makes many tasks easier for marketers. At the end of the day, it means a more efficient operation, up to date with trending technologies and tailor-made to address specific business problems.