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Rock Content leads by example. The company’s golden rule is to grow using the same content marketing strategies it sells. To support this, the entire marketing team functions like a laboratory that’s constantly testing new content, tech, and distribution methods, and then imparting all of its hard-earned lessons to its customers.
Marina Cordeiro, Marketing Manager at Rock Content, illustrates with an example, “We have a webinar series called Marketing Backstage where we just show our backstage. So if today’s topic is SEO, I walk our audience through how Rock Content improves the on-page and off-page SEO to rank on Google for our target keywords.”
It’s an innovative approach that catapulted the company into the limelight when it launched in Brazil in 2012. Since then, Rock Content has established itself as a thought leader on all things marketing-related, acquired three more companies, including ScribbleLive in 2020 and WriterAccess in 2022, and extended its market presence to North America and Mexico.
Now Marina’s challenge is innovating new ways to expand in these markets while continuing to deliver the insights and content plans that customers rely on to grow. Here’s how HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and content tools help her achieve that.
Drive revenue and engagement using landing pages
In 2023, AI was the hot new topic on everyone’s lips. Customers were clamoring to know how they could use tools like ChatGPT to increase efficiency and improve content marketing—and they looked to Rock Content for answers. Rock Content recognized the opportunity to educate its audience, generate leads, and increase revenue.
“Every month, we try to understand what’s trending and then we aim to launch at least four new lead gen assets per month per language. For example, we launched an eBook about AI back in April because everyone was talking about that and we wanted to be part of the conversation,” says Marina.
Rock Content uses Marketing Hub and content tools to quickly create personalized landing pages for these new assets at scale. As they uncover best practices, Rock Content shares findings with its audience, empowering them to launch their own high-quality content strategies that build awareness and drive revenue.
Find the messaging that drives conversions
Rock Content operates on the philosophy of “when in doubt, test and look at the numbers.” So that’s exactly what Marina and her team did when Rock Content decided to run a special promotional campaign for its customers and they needed to know which offer would attract customers the most.
- Offer 1 gave closing customers up to $2,000 in discounts
- Offer 2 gave closing customers a 10% discount
- Offer 3 didn’t mention a specific monetary benefit, but it promised a free interactive experience to anyone who closed
Marina and her team used HubSpot to quickly design and launch four landing pages that iterated on these three offers. Then they started A/B testing. To drive engagement, they experimented with different headlines, content, images, forms, and calls-to-action, and they continued iterating until they figured out which variations performed best.
After three weeks of testing, attribution reporting revealed a clear winner: most Rock Content customers valued the free experience above any form of discount. Marina and her team passed those leads along to the sales team to nurture, and at the same time, they were already thinking about how they could use those insights to fuel future campaigns.
“After this promotional campaign, we will run a post-mortem to consolidate all the learnings. Next time we decide to do a different campaign, we already have some data to back us up and define which way to go,” says Marina.
Localize content at scale—and increase lead gen by 359%
Breaking into new markets is notoriously difficult. So, unsurprisingly, when Rock Content first entered the North American market, its blog content only averaged around 50,000 views per month—a far cry from the three million monthly views it was generating in Brazil.
In the ensuing years, Rock Content invested heavily in content cultivated for its U.S.-audience, in order to consolidate its position and scale globally. The content team doubled down on English-language blog posts, creating thousands of posts on trending topics, including AI and its homegrown interactive content builder, Ion.
Even at this scale, creating blog posts in HubSpot is simple and intuitive, so the content team saves time during the creation, localization, and optimization process. Blog templates make it easy to ‘plug-and-play’ and the drag-and-drop form module enables the content team to embed CTAs and forms to capture leads.
“We are focusing on growing in the U.S. and we’ve seen a strong increase in lead gen and blog traffic. Everything that we used to do in Brazil to grow the company, we are now replicating in the U.S. market, and I believe we are doing a really good job to leave our mark over there,” says Marina.
As of 2023, Rock Content’s English-language blog is its single greatest source of lead gen in North America. Within three years, organic traffic from the blog exploded by more than 10X, increasing from 283,495 total unique visitors in 2020 to 3,308,897 in 2023. Blog lead gen grew by 359% over the same period.
Discover the channels that generate ROI
While Marina’s team is thinking about how to generate MQLs and drive product trials, they’re also thinking about how to make content fun and engaging for Rock Content’s audience. Part of driving that engagement is understanding the best way to distribute its content.
“After the blog and SEO, email is the channel that brings in the highest results,” Marina says. “In 2023, my team sent 24 million emails to the 1.5 million contacts in our CRM. We segment them per language first, then according to our GTM strategy and different filters (e.g., latest content download, job title, company industry, etc.). Email helps us nurture our contacts with news or educational and evergreen content.”
Rock Content also maintains an active presence on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. One of the companies it acquired has (and maintains) a strong Pinterest account. And video content has been blowing up—more now than ever before.
To engage leads at the right place and time, Rock Content uses Marketing Hub automation and content tools to efficiently keep up with all of its different marketing channels. Using HubSpot, Marina and her team:
- Send targeted, relevant emails while Rock Content is still top of mind, thanks to built-in email tracking and at-a-glance insights into each lead.
- Save time as they prioritize social interactions, publish content directly to the most-used platforms, and automatically see the best times to post.
- Create, edit, and scale ad campaigns for different regions and efficiently manage all of their ads over time in one place.
Create targeted content that clicks with the right audience
Marina and her team are pros at creating targeted content that readers will love. They work closely with the CX and sales teams to understand what topics customers are interested in, products they’re engaging with, and questions they’re asking. Then, they build content to solve those specific pains and use HubSpot’s built-in segmentation to make sure the right content reaches the right person at the right time.
She says, “I’m always incentivizing my team to work with segmentation. So, for example, we are launching the marketing planning bundle for 2024. Ahead of that launch, we’re looking at who engaged with that content last year. We’re also looking at returning customers who are expecting Rock Content to help them plan this year. And we’re analyzing things like job titles, company size, who engaged with what product, etc.
Each month, Rock Content builds custom dashboards for the main campaigns so they can track engagement, conversions, and how those relationships evolve when the sales team takes over. They use this knowledge to eliminate guesswork during outreach while ensuring that customers receive the updated, timely content they care about.
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