The Social Opportunity

Today, there are over 3.7 billion users on social media.

324 million of these are in Latin America and typical users in the region spend an average of three hours and 32 minutes per day browsing various platforms, making them a great susceptible audience for brands looking to access potential clients.

Presently, more than half of the global population uses at least one social media avenue on a daily basis, and every 60 seconds over 69 million messages are sent via WhatsApp, 500 hours of content are uploaded into YouTube, two million swipes are made in Tinder, and 695,000 stories are shared on Instagram.

Along with most other markets around the world, internet advertising in Latin America has had about a 12-fold increase over the past decade and is expected to further grow to $9.65 billion by 2022. Sprout Social’s State of Social Media report concludes that going forward social media will be the preferred way for consumers to learn about brands, ahead of all other channels including email, TV and print advertising. People are relying more on social media to discover new brands (43%), make purchases (36%) and recommend brands to their friends and family (33%), according to the report.

It’s clear that social media sells, but not all posts, campaigns and brands are created equal.

The Org looked into Latin America’s leading growth marketing agencies to better understand what strategies they leverage to help brands get noticed.

Rock Content

Rock Content, originally founded in Minas Gerais, Brazil in 2013, creates innovative marketing products and services designed to build content experiences at scale.

Founders Diego Gomes, Edmar Ferreira and Vitor Pecanha saw the opportunity to combine their experience in marketing and technology to “enable opportunities for growth,” which is now Rock Content’s mission. Among the services offered are brand experiences, sales enablement and marketing collaborations across many platforms.

Rock Content expanded to all of Latin America in 2015 and in 2019 acquired ScribbleLive, a North American technology company that helped them become a global leader in content marketing. The company currently has over 8 million website visits per month, a team of 500 employees and works with over 2,000 global brands including the NFL, Oracle, Lancome and Marvel entertainment.

Rock Content also launched Rock University, a platform where individuals can develop their marketing skills via various courses. So far, over 360,000 students have participated in their training. In October of this year the company raised a $30 million series B round led by Unbox Capital.

Si Señor Agencia

Si Señor Agencia defines itself as a tech team that does marketing. “That’s the big difference between traditional agencies and Si Señor Agencia’s value, where all decisions are based on data and algorithms,” Manuela Villegas, Si Señor Agencia’s founder and CEO, told The Org.

The company combines growth marketing and scientific advertising with an inbound strategy. Her radical approach creates effective and functional advertising that doesn’t interrupt a buyer's browsing, but instead enhances it and incentivizes buyers to make a purchase without feeling trapped into it.

Si Señor has a 70 person team with operations in 5 countries. The agency works with clients that include Nestle, Sony Music and BMW. Its revenue exceeds $3 million, according to Vilegas, and one of the biggest success cases the agency led was transforming the SOAT, a mandatory vehicle insurance in Colombia from a physical process to a virtual one, entirely shifting buyer’s purchasing behaviors.

In 2019 Villegas was named among the Top 20 Spanish speaking influencers on LinkedIn and in 2018 was acknowledged as a Top LinkedIn voice for her posts about growth hacking and interviewing leaders across diverse industries in Colombia.

Fluvip

This startup is the leading influencer marketing company in Latin America and within the multicultural market in the United States. Its proprietary technology platform allows advertisers to identify the best social content influencers for their campaigns based on artificial intelligence. The company also enables brands to connect with influencers across the world through channels such as Twitter and Instagram.

Fluvip leverages predictive algorithms to identify the best strategy, social network and activities for influencers to employ with partnered posts to achieve the best results. The company is able to immediately measure user engagement in social networks to obtain segmentation results, pivot the strategy if necessary and achieve effective campaigns. Fluvip works with over 100,000 influencers worldwide and clients include National Geographic, Avianca, Adidas and Falabella.

Founder Sebastian Jasminoy started the company in 2013 in Bogotá, Colombia and now has offices in Argentina, Brazil, Miami, Madrid, Mexico, New York, Peru and Venezuela. Fluvip has received $7.5 million in funding and now works closely with Cisneros Group, a global media and entertainment company.

GhFly

GhFly focuses on digital data driven performance marketing offering their services in nine countries across Latin America. They merge creativity, technology and data intelligence to develop the best performance strategy for companies.

Named the fifth best communications company to work for in Brazil, the startup projects 100% growth for the upcoming year. Working with leading companies in their respective industries, GhFly’s clients include AliExpress, Falabella, Garmin, Huawei and Dunlop.

Specifically for Madero, a Brazilian restaurant chain with more than 150 locations, GhFly was tasked to increase Madero’s online presence and increase movement in their restaurants. GhFly created the concept of ads aimed at the pre-consumer experience using formats such as Canvas on Facebook, Bumper Ads videos on Youtube and Cinemagraph ad models, used on Facebook which created the phenomenon they call “virtual hunger.” The campaign was overwhelmingly successful; the company managed to generate 100 million more impressions reaching an additional 10 million people than before. All this led to Madero opening a restaurant internationally in Brazil.