In March 2012, Ramón Estrada resigned from his full time job as an executive at the largest housing developer in Mexico to launch a hipos.com. The company revolved around his hard work and after just a few months they opened an office in San Ángel, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Mexico City. In Mexico a large percentage of the population still remains outside the financial system. This is why when it comes to making the decision to take out a mortgage loan, people usually choose the easiest option. For example, they go to the closest bank, which may not necessarily be the best alternative. "There is not really a culture of comparing prices and getting information on the best alternatives", says Ramón.
This is why hipos.com decided to create a digital platform where people could learn and compare various existing loans and choose the most convenient alternative according to each person's profile, promoting transparency and informed decisions. They started by launching an online mortgage comparator which was developed internally by the team at hipos.com. This attracted a lot of attention and they started to receive their first visits to the site.
"We started to have visits mainly thanks to the efforts of our public relations campaign and user referrals. However, we still had to build trust in the channel and improve the financial knowledge of our users."
The digital platform allowed for greater reach at a lower cost; however, once the initial enthusiasm was over, hipos.com needed to ensure constant visits and increased trust of portal users.
Soon after the site was launched, Ramón realized that credibility was critical. Although hipos.com first began by providing an online comparator, if the users wanted to learn more they had to provide their personal information, and many did not want to do this. "We were asking people to provide their personal information without telling them what our value proposition was and we realized we needed a new strategy."
Implementing an Inbound Marketing StrategyRamón decided to use HubSpot after reading about the value of inbound marketing from a book on lead generation. He learned about the importance of cultivating sales opportunities by automating certain marketing processes and creating the able to engage in personally customized relationship with customers. Shortly thereafter, the company began to looking for marketing automation solutions.
"We looked at Marketo and other alternatives, but decided on HubSpot because their consulting was very good. We did not know anybody in Mexico who was using the software, but HubSpot helped to connect us with one of its clients, that sealed the deal for us."
Ramón tells that hipos.com already had a webpage up and running, but it was more of an attractive site to provide information and had not been optimized to convert leads. With the support of a HubSpot partner, the company designed and set up a new version of their site on CMS Hub. This has helped immensely by giving their team the tools to change and modify their own website without having to rely on outside developers.
This decision to work with HubSpot has not only turned their website into a inbound marketing machine but has dramatically shifted the company's culture and approach to both sales and marketing.
Aligning Sales and Marketing