Editor’s note: Valentina Giraldo is responsible for Rock Content’s Internationalization strategy.
Editor of our blog for Latin America, she oversees our entire lead acquisition and generation strategy .
Last year, it generated 800% growth in blog traffic while maintaining a conversion rate of over 5%.
I don’t know if you already know, but Rock Content is working to become an international company:
we have an office in Mexico and we are the owners of the largest Digital Marketing blog in Latin
America : the Rock Content blog in Spanish.
This makes me quite proud, since I am the editor-in-chief of the blog. But, I am not here to talk to you
about strategies or international SEO . Although to learn more about the subject, you can also visit my
blog on International Digital Marketing . Today, I am really going to tell you how I discovered Content
Marketing and how my journey from Colombia to here was.
If you already follow the Community blog , the beginning of my story may sound a little familiar to
you. Just like Dimitri Vieira, editor-in-chief of the blog in Portuguese, I also ended up studying
engineering!
However, I assure you that the only similarity is the beginning and my path was a little more complicated, because it involves:
- a change of country;
- learn a new language;
- three races;
- and a rather unusual requirement for her to be hired.
But let me tell you how it all began:
Engineering or advertising?
When I left school, I was very good at malaysia telegram data numbers, but I also really liked writing. I decided to study Mechanical Engineering and disappointed several teachers who said I should have studied Humanities. But I also really liked the exact sciences.
I even spent time on my weekends taking introductory calculus and physics courses, which were offered at public universities.
Every Saturday, from 8 to 4, from the age of 12 to 18, I spent my time studying Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. So, I was really good at numbers.
I started studying Mechanical Engineering, but a year into my studies at university I still enjoyed attending philosophy and communications events. I always tried to invite my classmates to go with me, but I was unsuccessful.
Until one day I was told that I needed to understand that engineers should not appreciate such things. That hurt me a lot and led me to reflect a lot, until I came to the following conclusion:
“If engineers don’t like philosophy, I don’t want to be an engineer.”
I cancelled my registration and tried to choose a new major: I wanted something like History or Anthropology, but I was quite unsure if it would work out.
Nowadays, I see that making something work is just a matter of knowing how to apply what you learn.
But at that time, I ended up opting for something more commercial and applied for the Advertising course .
Advertising or Literature? Or both?
Still, I didn’t want to leave aside subjects the trigger for these changes comes like History, Anthropology and Literature. So, I started taking Literary Studies in the first class that was opened at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, in Medellín, Colombia.
Both courses lasted 5 years and I managed to complete both in that time. So you can imagine what my social life was like: it wasn’t.
In any case, I always felt like an odd being between the two careers. I really liked advertising, but also literature, theory, criticism and Latin American studies.
And these two issues are hardly connected: while Advertising is more related to communication, sales and marketing , Literature is much more specific.
In this way, I was much more profound and analytical for a publicist, and much more of a salesperson than any literature student should be. So, I didn’t really know which of the two worlds I was part of.
I really liked the literary world, but I wanted to make it more commercial, more useful. If you know the company Rock Content and its area of work, it already makes sense that I ended up in Brazil, don’t you think?
Discovering Content Marketing
In advertising, I was very good at b2b sale lead copywriting short texts, but I needed to write more, explain terms better and write longer texts. Some professors supported me and understood that as my own style.
But the vast majority said that, in this way, I would never be a good publicist and would not be hired to work in agencies , because I explained much more than necessary.
So, just like when they told me that philosophy was not for engineers, I started to think again about whether I was in the right course. I like campaigns , the strategic part and writing short texts, but I was missing something.
That’s when I discovered Rock Content, when I needed to do my internship. But there’s one thing I need to explain, and that is that the internship in Colombia works differently than in Brazil.
In Brazil, you can start doing internships early and gain a lot of experience from that. In Colombia, you can only do an internship at the end of the course, when you are almost graduating, usually in the last semester of the degree.
What is the advantage of the Colombian model? If the company falls in love with you and your work, they hire you immediately. There is no option for them to keep you as an intern for several years, or to delude you with a possible hiring.
I started looking for internships in my city, but none of them caught my attention, they were all in advertising. So, I decided to look for an opportunity outside the country on the platform of a company responsible for internship, social or professional programs.
A novel called “Entering Rock Content”
I tried to apply for the job several times, but I couldn’t do it because it kept giving me an error. After trying a few times and not getting any success, I decided to go straight to the source and talk to the person who was offering the position.
I sent a direct message to Rock Content on Facebook and they replied that the position was no longer vacant.
The person at the company advised me to look for another position and my parents encouraged me to do the same, but I preferred to insist. Since I am very determined about things, I decided that I would not let this opportunity pass me by.
I turned to Facebook again and was directed to the Rock jobs website, but all the options they offered required Portuguese, and at that time, that was still a problem. So I was instructed to email Renato and Diego.
I had no idea who they were and, if you don’t know, Diego is one of the founders of Rock Content and CMO of the company, while Renato is the Head of the Marketing team.
I just took that as an opportunity and decided to write a story. A story about overcoming fears.
I talked, for example, about how to protect yourself from ghosts at night by placing a pillow behind your back.