The 2021 INBOUND conference took place last week and we were busy absorbing knowledge from inbound marketing experts (along with sales gurus, customer service stars, and other impressive speakers). The annual conference is hosted by HubSpot and brings together some of the biggest names in the inbound marketing industry. There were dozens of presentations, and everyone on our team was in attendance. With a diverse range of skills and interests, we covered a lot of ground at INBOUND, and we want to share some of our big takeaways.
Use the links below to jump to the topic section you’re interested in or read at your own pace.
Content Marketing & Oprah | Customer-Centric Marketing, Buyer Personas, and Recycling Content
Lead Generation with Google and Social vs. Paid Advertising | HubSpot Payments | Cyclical Lead Nurturing
Maintaining a Customer Focus | Creativity and Behavioral Science | SEO and Google Preferences
Content vs. Community and Email Marketing
This year, a couple speakers really stood out to me. Marcus Sheridan is one of my favorite speakers each year at INBOUND. He’s engaging, fun, and over-the-top animated. While I would much rather see Marcus in person, his actionable tips on becoming a trusted voice were impactful. He always does a great job of introducing a concept and then making it actionable.
Want to learn more about content marketing? Here are 10 tips to be effective
The other speaker that absolutely blew me away was Oprah Winfrey. I, as you could probably guess, was never a dedicated viewer of the Oprah show, but we all know what an extraordinary woman she is. I did not, however, grasp just how powerful, eloquent, and motivating she is. Her talk was about making decisions that support who you are, what you believe, and being unapologetic in doing so. She had every single person at HIVE absolutely glued to their screen and it is possible that at least one person on the team shed a tear or two (not mentioning any names, *cough* Yvonne). She was by far the most impactful speaker that I’ve ever seen at INBOUND (and that includes Michelle Obama, Gary Vaynerchuck, Jada Pinket-Smith, Brene Brown, John Cena, Deepak Chopra, and a host of others). I was absolutely blown away, and it’s not hard to see why she’s one of the most successful people in the world. I was ready to run through a brick wall after Oprah’s talk!
Here’s why buyer personas are still important for your business
Marcus Sheridan has been speaking to the importance of customer-centric marketing for years. His INBOUND session this year continued his They Ask You Answer model of listening to prospect’s questions and creating content around those questions, especially if no one else in your space is talking about the answer. Not only did he reiterate to share pricing on your website — yes, even for B2B companies — but also to compare your company to your competitors (without negativity). This is content that your prospects are looking for and the unbiased transparency of this content not only builds trust but will also organically attract buyers that are most aligned.
I also really enjoyed a tip from Tess Needham, who encouraged a way to recycle and optimize internal expertise to be used externally. She mentioned the expert knowledge that is shared on internal communication channels on hybrid and remote teams that can be pulled out for marketing content — blog posts, social media content, vlog ideas, FAQ content, and even pillar page content. This information can be shared in a way that you can attract and nurture leads interested in your expertise with these content pieces.
The second session I found interesting covered LinkedIn organic vs. paid advertising. It was a debate on which tactic worked better. Ultimately, you need larger budgets to advertise on LinkedIn ($5k-$10k per month). You can advertise with smaller budgets but your sales cycle will likely be very long as a result. To get measurable results, you really have to spend at least $2k-$3k over a campaign.
The top mistakes for paid advertising are:
When trying for organic reach for your company, you always start out with personal outreach to a prospect to gain interest. The next step comes after your lead has shown some interest when you ask them to follow your company page for additional content. Push valuable industry or company-specific content out from your company page, but don’t forget to be sharing valuable content on your personal LinkedIn as well.
Interested in Pay-Per-Click best practices? Here are 6 Pay-Per-Click Management Myths to Avoid
Through his talk, I learned about two different types of lead nurturing workflows: campaign-based and re-engagement.
Campaign workflows are typically attached to a specific piece of content or a specific topic and are triggered by actions like a form fill or ad click. The purpose of these workflows is to move your lead a little farther down your sales funnel. As they show interest in a specific topic, you lean into that interest and provide related content to answer any questions they may have. This can continue until they reach the final stage of your workflow (engaging with a content piece lower in your funnel and moving into that associated workflow or that lead disengages and stops showing interest or engagement in your offers).
This is where a re-engagement workflow comes into play. A re-engagement workflow aims to reconnect with a lead at the same funnel stage where they first expressed interest. As a marketer, this was mind-blowing. So often, we’re trying to move leads down the funnel with little awareness of whether our lead wants to be moved! A re-engagement campaign offers similar or related perspectives on whatever content or topic a lead first expresses interest in so that they can continue to engage with your company without the external pressure pushing them towards a decision they’re not ready for. And once they’re ready, they’ll know you as the expert to talk to.
Lead generation and workflows play an important role in how you use marketing automation to support your inbound marketing efforts.
The future of any kind of service lies in how well we can interpret customer-focused data and how well we can fill their needs. Particularly in this digital era, it is imperative to create and develop technologies that address specific needs and problems that customers are having.
This customer-centric philosophy for products and services, means that marketing strategy must also be in line with the rest of a company's identity. Effective customer-centric marketing must not only speak directly to the customer’s needs, it must also educate the customer and guide them towards becoming smarter and ultimately better at their job.
In her Customer-Centric Content presentation, Tess Needham talks about a “Love Story” between content marketing and customer success. The idea behind this love story is the seamless transition between a prospect becoming a customer and staying a customer. Any kind of interaction a customer has with your company should be focused on making it as pleasant as possible to create trust and loyalty. In B2B, it’s not just about your customers, but also about your customers' customers.
Tess Needham touched on a few key points that will make for a better CX (Customer Experience):
Constraining creativity may seem counterintuitive because in theory, we want to be open to any possibilities or new ideas. However in practice, there are logical boundaries to your ideas that will be most effective. These constraints can actually be used to your advantage by providing your creative brain with guardrails. To illustrate, you probably have 1-2 seconds to capture a user’s attention when they land on your website, so your creative efforts are best spent trying to grab and keep that attention.
This is where behavioral science can take your ability to create effective marketing content to the next level. Every person is subject to their cognitive biases, whether conscious or subconscious. For example, a person is more likely to read content if there is an image of a person on the screen looking at that content. Continuing our illustration, now we know that to grab the user’s attention we could use a specific type of imagery showing people looking at our content and test whether that change increases our actual user’s time spent on a page or associated links clicked.
The common thread in these two sessions was that understanding how your brain works can give you a significant advantage in creative marketing. Taken together, I learned that when you use data to create guardrails, you can unlock your brain’s creative potential. I plan on incorporating this framework into my creative problem solving from now on.
Want to learn more about cognitive biases and how they impact your marketing effectiveness? Let’s talk about Psychology & Inbound Marketing.
Since 2013 Google has made a number of changes to the way SEO impacts search results. The search engine has transitioned from keywords and phrases and now has the ability to read between the lines, interpreting semantic search terms and more holistic content in order to populate more relevant answers to questions.
Think of SEO as a Strings-to-Things approach. Google is looking at the main topics and categories and determining what is connected to those main categories. The search engine is keeping consumer intent in mind by understanding whether content is informational, navigational, or transactional.
Advertisers primary focus should be to create high quality content that answers users queries with focused, authoritative, and expert information. It is helpful to use the acronym EAT. What is EAT? Search engines consider three things when crawling website content:
Search engines are smart. Therefore, it is essential to keep the user's needs and pain points at the center of your content, not the keywords. Provide trusted content that answers people's questions and problems. The faster the user experience to provide a relevant answer, the better your page performs.
How do you know what users need? You create customer marketing personas and use search need states as a means to map and understand the needs, behaviors, and intents of consumers searching for a product or service. Why do search-need-states work? No one lies to Google.
Now that you have an idea of some SEO strategies moving forward, it’s time for you to create content. But how does one go about doing that with best practices in mind?
The first step is to pick a single phrase and focus on the problem that is being solved. This helps to keep user intent in mind. Google is rewriting titles with the new updates, which can lead to fluctuations in data. Advertisers should aim to add your brand to every title, because if you don’t Google will add it automatically.
Remember, Google and other search engines are smart. Keep the user intent front of mind as you develop content aimed towards helping website visitors. And update your SEO with the basics to ensure that you’re not getting dinged online.
Kristen LaFrance, Director of Community at Repeat, and Con Citillo, Head of Customer Experience at Carro, shared their experiences in their breakout session Debate: Should Brands Focus on Content or Community First? The main takeaways were:
We shouldn't think of it as content OR community. Instead, think of it as: is your content FOR your community or is it community FOR content, and how are they helping each other.
I also found a lot of good tips for email marketing in Jay Schwedleson's Email Myths Busted! What's Really Working Now session. He shared these subject line tips to use to increase open rates:
He warned that vague subject lines are annoying and quickly find their way to the trash folder. Jay also pointed out that these tactics might not work six months down the road, so don't wait to try his tips.
Whew, that was a lot of info! We won’t keep you any longer, and we’ll leave you with two final links to explore: bookmark this link to stay up-to-date with INBOUND 2022 (we’ll see you there!) and use the button below to keep learning about inbound marketing and see how it compares to outbound.