How Endeavor uses Digital Marketing to impact thousands of entrepreneurs in Brazil

Endeavor is a non-profit international organization based in United States and it is present in other 25 countries, including Brazil. The purpose of the organization is to identify and support high-impact entrepreneurs who help transform the country they live in and make a great contribution to the world.

Endeavor’s main goal is to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses, create new jobs and improve the economy of the regions where they are settled. In Brazil since the year 2000, the organization was responsible for spreading the entrepreneurship culture in Brazil.

“In the beginning, entrepreneurship wasn’t even in the dictionary”, says Rodrigo Grecco, product manager of Endeavor’s web portal. The initial challenge, then, was to develop the market and open the discussion about entrepreneurship in Brazil.

From 2010 on, Endeavor’s web portal was launched and the organization began supporting business leaders by influencing government initiatives that could help create a healthier environment for new businesses in Brazil. The country’s business scene still has a bad reputation because of bureaucracy and the economic scenario – Brazil occupies one of the last positions on the “Best Countries for Entrepreneurship” list.

 

The problem

Despite having a web portal, Endeavor had a very traditional Marketing area, isolated from the rest of the company. The few marketing tools the team managed weren’t integrated with each other.

All the knowledge about entrepreneurship the company had was restricted to the mentoring given by business leaders connected to Endeavor’s network and some articles in the web portal – until 2012, when Eric Santos, CEO of Resultados Digitais, in a visit to Endeavor, questioned the group:

You have a tremendous hidden potential, have you ever considered working with Inbound Marketing?

At that time, the team didn’t have the slightest clue of what Inbound Marketing might be. Listening to Eric’s explanation about how Inbound and the software RD Station worked, they started to connect the dots.

“We dedicated ourselves to study and comprehend what Inbound Marketing was. We realized we had all this expertise in-house, and that if we could pass it along to the market we’d have the potential to reach a lot more people. We realized digital marketing was our main tool”, said Grecco.

The first step was to understand what was the profile of the entrepreneurs who visited Endeavor’s website. The team needed to find out what challenges they were facing and what obstacles they were trying to overcome so they could turn all that into content.

The next step was to explore different ways of offering this content. eBooks, videos, courses, tools and a series of other formats made possible for Endeavor to spread the knowledge about entrepreneurship and to increase the website reach.

As the website numbers went up and more entrepreneurs were impacted, the Marketing team also changed its working process. After realizing they could do marketing in a more organized way, they stopped being an isolated area of the organization and became a core area, related to everything that happens in the company.

We were no longer the internet guys who used to build the web portal and fix the printer. Suddenly, we became a core area to Endeavor

– Rodrigo Grecco, product manager

With a solid area and growing audience, Endeavor embraced another challenge: more than finding new great entrepreneurs, they now seek to engage the ones connected to the organization and help them grow their businesses.

The goal is for entrepreneurs to keep consuming new content, taking online courses e facing less obstacles to grow – much of what happened to Resultados Digitais.

The relationship between Endeavor and RD goes beyond the software. Besides being a client, the organization also supports RD’s business leaders. The eBook Digital Marketing for Entrepreneurs, created in partnership with RD, is, to this day, one of the most downloaded materials of all times.

Our experience with RD is great. The company is for us not only a benchmark in Marketing but also a benchmark in team management. We have a super close relationship with them and the admiration is mutual.

– Rodrigo Grecco, product manager

 

The results

A little over 4 years working with Inbound Marketing, Endeavor’s portal went from 400,000 unique visitors to 6.5 million. From zero Leads they had – for they didn’t retain any visitors -, their database now holds more than 800,000, 400,000 of which are entrepreneurs.

Way beyond numbers, Endeavor now has more than 30,000 entrepreneurs engaged with the organization. These people are avid consumers of the web portal’s content and are evolving their businesses.

We have real cases of companies that were going bankrupt and owners who told us: look, I was going to shut my business down, but I read an eBook and took a finance course online and instead of closing my store I opened 3 more. So way more than numbers, we feel grateful for learning about these success stories.

– Rodrigo Grecco, product manager

Endeavor’s goal is to make positive changes in Brazil through entrepreneurship. It’s to capacitate the entrepreneurs so that they can face the challenges of their companies and make the country a better place for entrepreneurship, with less obstacles and more incentives for businesses.

The day that happens, says Grecco, Endeavor won’t  have to exist anymore. “Every day we work so we won’t have to exist anymore, so that business leaders have tools and conditions to work better. Our work with RD Station helps entrepreneurs build thriving companies.”

It’s hard work – everyone at Endeavor works hard to help build a better country. People are close and the atmosphere is very friendly. The dedication they put into their work is outstanding. There’s a feeling of privilege for being able to help entrepreneurs and their companies.

“There’s a saying: find a job you love and you won’t have to work a day in your life” – that’s how Grecco describes his daily work at Endeavor. And when the job is to help make the country a better place, with opportunities for all, passion is something that simply comes along as part of the package.

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