Recently, Napier took a trip to Boston to attend the HubSpot INBOUND conference held from the 25th-28th September 2017. As the biggest INBOUND conference HubSpot has held to date, we took full advantage of the advice and information which was offered to us throughout the event.
We returned home with an overload of information, inspiring us to write the top 15 things we learnt at Inbound 2017.
HubSpot Continues to Improve itself:
The value of look-alike campaigns. HubSpot has added Facebook advertising into the standard product, allowing you to target people who are like your website visitors, and we also had a great presentation about using look-alike audiences when advertising with Google. It’s all about building a sales funnel from the bottom, rather than the top. The next level of retargeting is here now!
Several new integrations were announced at Inbound 2017 one of which was a native integration with Shopify meaning it will be possible to sync products and purchases with HubSpot. They also announced there would be an ecommerce ‘bridge’ for those not using Shopify – HubSpot is aiming to become the platform for a bigger ecosystem.
HubSpot are now taking ‘Delight’ more seriously. A stage of the sales cycle that has been previously overlooked. They are doing this through introducing the ‘Customer Hub’ which was fleetingly introduced at Inbound 2017. Although they may not yet have the software to support this focus on ‘Delight’, the theme of the conference very much seemed to be based around account based marketing and essentially customer retention which again highlights the importance of delighting customers and leveraging this relationship to increase repeat business.
HubSpot’s not the perfect answer for all of our clients, but it’s a blooming good solution for many of them.
Paid channels tend to be more measurable than organic. Rand Fishkin gave a great presentation where he highlighted the fact that paid channels tend to be the most measurable. Because they are revenue-generating, the publishers are giving marketers more data. Marketers believe that the organic/unpaid channels are more effective, yet put more effort and money into paid channels because of the measurability.
The importance of a powerful trajectory. A talk by Rand Fishkin, yes the SEO expert himself, revealed that marketers make the mistake of shutting down blog channels or current marketing activities too early. We learnt that it is important to look over the long-term results of an activity, as often when looking at the estimated growth rate, success can be just around the corner.
Topic clusters are the new way to approach SEO. Not to say that traditional methods should be thrown out of the window – they definitely shouldn’t, but there was a lot of buzz around these topic clusters. The idea being that the clusters make it easier for Google to figure out the significance of the pages within a cluster – architect your site so it makes sense to Google.
Reddit is a great place to steal content ideas! Essentially, you can see what content is doing well and rip it off – I mean, use it to ‘inspire’ your own content ideas. Sub-Reddits get really granular on specific topics, up and down voting allows you to gage popularity and their in-depth search parameters means you can delve deep and gain insight into what is current and popular.
The benefits of a content style guide. HubSpot made the valued point of every business or agency having their own unique style guide, which can be showcased to future clients, whilst being used by our current clients almost immediately.
How to achieve success with content marketing on LinkedIn. From the right call to actions to cohesive and strong visuals, this great presentation revealed how Napier can use compelling content to help our LinkedIn page stand out.
Quality is everything: HubSpot investigated whether the 80/20 rule applies to their blog posts, and found the top 20% of blog posts didn’t produce 80% of the leads. They produced 93% of the leads. It’s the high-quality content that delivers almost all the results. Incidentally HubSpot is now focussing on writing fewer, higher quality posts.
ABM – The Importance of Personalization:
ABM is extremely important. HubSpot hosted many conferences surrounding the subject of ABM. There is a huge focus on nurturing accounts with the Inbound method, and it looks like it is around to stay. With the four main steps: Plan, Create, Nurture and Measure proving to be incredibly successful.
92% of companies recognize the value of ABM and see this strategy as a ‘must have’ and B2B organisations that align sales and marketing see a 24% faster growth in revenue. Remember, there are on average, 6.2 stakeholders in the purchasing decisions in B2B organisations – targeting key accounts and moving the account through the buying decision process by having a ‘conversation’ with all stakeholders – personalisation is key!
Personalized emails are a must. HubSpot was able to overhaul their lead nurturing and double their conversions by adding a personal touch to their emails. They pride themselves on creating a human persona who ‘sent’ the emails, in order to form a human connection with their audience.
There are many different things you can do to increase webinar registrations and attendance. The presentation from gotomeeting was great, and we will be using the data to help clients implement tactics that will make their webinar campaigns even more effective. Did you know that 33% of people register for a webinar on the day of the event?
So to End…
Americans and Europeans are different. I didn’t hear one European say they were “super stoked” to be at INBOUND. We were “pleased” to be there, even if we secretly were thinking to ourselves “this is AWESOME”.