Why would a company that already stands apart from the competition want to invest in marketing automation?
For Pulpo Media (an Entravision Communications company), having a collection of tools, instead of a platform that does it all, was preventing its lean marketing team from producing the results it wanted. Not only that, the company saw potential to improve efficiency of its operations, generate more quality leads, collect better insights and improve ROI. All that inspired Pulpo’s marketing team to search for a solution that would help them transform their marketing efforts.
We recently interviewed Oscar Padilla, Senior VP Marketing, Digital Media & Insights at Pulpo Media. Oscar leads a team charged with managing sales planning, advertising operations, and marketing in both the US and Argentina, reaching over 41 million unique Hispanic visitors a month, across generation levels and languages. That is no easy task. In addition, Oscar’s team also has the complex challenge of dealing with ad opportunities on both the national and local level, which is more than enough to keep them busy.
Since making the switch to Act-On, Oscar and his team have been using marketing automation to amplify and increase the efficiency of their national digital marketing efforts. Marketing automation has made it easier than ever for Pulpo’s marketing team to collaborate with marketing agencies interested in targeting a Hispanic audience.
And thanks to a better tool and vision, Oscar and his team are now able to produce on average 8-12 high-quality inbound leads per week from the website. Pulpo’s team is using forms to collect more detailed information on prospects and convert them into leads, resulting in closed deals ranging from $120K-$150K.
Check out excerpts from our interview with Oscar to learn why making the switch to an all-inclusive marketing automation tool made sense for Pulpo media, and how it’s helped the marketing team generate more opportunities and close more deals.
This transcript has been edited for length. To get the full measure, read the success story.
Consolidating Resources and Choosing the Right Tool
Act-On: What spurred your consideration of marketing automation? What other services were you using before? And what were the pain points that led you to have marketing automation?
Oscar Padilla: It was consolidation of tools. I was working with the team and we came to a point where we had different contracts with different pieces of what we do. We had an email company that we worked with, that helped us with our email from an ESP perspective. We had another company that helped us generate the landing pages. So we had tools that helped us create certain basic web elements for the landing page and capturing those leads. We just felt all the tools were sort of disparate.
But going back to how efficient that was, we didn’t feel that was the optimum way of managing our operations, particularly when we have a small team. We really opted to start looking for a tool that provided us more a consolidated way to perform those tasks and not have different experts on different tools. Our focus was, let’s bring on board one platform that allows us to do everything under one roof.
Act-On: What were your consideration factors? Ease of use, time to value, customer support? How did you go about your evaluation process?
Oscar: We looked at a number of factors, but ease of use was one of them, and a minimum learning curve. Obviously, the onboarding process was important. And we were definitely interested in support. And, of course, the value. We knew there were other tools in the marketplace that have an enormous amount of features and an enormous amount of elements to how they support you. But budget was a consideration into the cost benefit that we were getting.
Act-On: And so in your evaluation process, what other vendors were you considering? And how many people were involved in that decision? Was that something that came from you? Or was it a bigger group?
Oscar: We kept the team small to evaluate products and make a selection. We looked at companies like Marketo and HubSpot. So, we looked at those two additional robust tools. We built an internal process to evaluate vendors across diverse factors and to see how they stacked up in support of our needs. We then had 1:1 conversations with the different vendors. Some of these companies were more interested in the complexities of integrating with our CRM than the actual features of the tool itself to solve our needs. Even though this integration was important, it was not the overarching need we had. Throughout our conversations, and our evaluation process, Act-On kept bubbling up to the top as the most viable platform or tool to work with.
Improving ROI and Seeing Results
Act-On: Do you have specific metrics or ROI that you can attribute to Act-On, whether that’s lead generation side, opened email, click through rates?
Oscar: We get about anywhere from half a dozen to 10 leads per week. We have closed a number of deals that have generated from our lead gen web-based tool. And those deals are in the $120,000, $150,000 range. One of them, in particular, is a large agency that we formed a relationship. And we’re running an ongoing campaign with them.
Collecting Insights and Transforming the Customer Journey
Act-On: How has marketing automation helped you create a more personal experience for your buyer?
Oscar: From a publisher perspective, it really opened up doors. We have publishers send us very detailed proposals through our forms on our website. We’re getting detailed elements on how they’re looking to work with us and what they’re bringing to the table. We can assess those relationships really off of that lead that we’re getting from the web. I’m impressed with the amount of detail that they’re providing us. By the time we get that email and we make the call, we know if it’s going to be a relationship we want to pursue or not.
Act-On: One last question, how will Act-On benefit you in the future as you grow your marketing? What are some more opportunities you see and ways you can expand using the tool?
Oscar: I think today we’re probably using 30 percent of what we can with Act-On. But that’s working extremely well for us. I think there’s both an Act-On and a marketing strategy effort we need to drive. And there’s content marketing, I want the team to put more emphasis on it. And we have the tool today, which is Act-On, to help us with that. Now we need to put the back-end muscle in content writing and knowledge base behind that to take advantage of this tool and engage with customers at a deeper level.