INBOUND's 2015 conference saw five inspiring keynote speakers, over 170 educational sessions, and more than 14,000 passionate attendees from around the world… but 2016 topped that, yet again! This year's program included six keynote speakers and over 300 educational inbound sessions.
INBOUND 2016
NOVEMBER 8-11, 2016
BOSTON CONVENTION CENTER, MA
What is INBOUND 2016, you might ask. Well, the purpose of this conference is to offer inspiration and education to a network of industry professionals that are looking to transform their businesses for the digital era. This inspiration and education comes in the form of various sessions from keynote speakers, marketing, and sales specialists over the week.
Our three musketeers at Struto - Managing Director (Craig), Growth & Marketing Director (Jonathan), and Chief Operating Officer (Grant) - all managed to grab an invite and attended the INBOUND festivities… which means that we’re happy to provide you with a detailed report on the sessions that we found most intriguing.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s introduced the INBOUND conference on Tuesday evening. He’s an entrepreneur, who started out by growing his family wine business from a $3M to a $60M business in only five years. That’s right, Gary builds businesses. He opened the conference by introducing the ideas and strategies that we would be exploring more in the smaller educational conference sessions.
Throughout the conference there are several more keynote speakers planned, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Anna Kendrick, Alec Baldwin, and Reshma Saujani. Each will be bringing us their unique insights into using inbound strategies to transform businesses and brands.
Wow! The HubSpot partner and product launch announced some super support resources for partners. We’re excited to be HubSpot beta users and able to test out all these new features as they come forward. Have a look at what’s planned in the next evolution:
This session explored how we can better understand the path that our customers take toward conversion. It centred on answering the question: “Would you know if your customer’s journey was out of sync with your marketing?”
Perhaps the evergreen question on any businesses mind in the digital era is “What’s up with SEO?” and what's its future in creating great content. That’s why this session explored the differences between the US and Europe, and specifically the disparities between different European countries, for using SEO and content marketing.
With all of Hubspot's amazing new update announcements, there's such an opportunity to really double down on BoFu sales.That being said, it remains all important to mind the gap between sales & marketing. In this session, we looked into maximising this opportunity and taking inbound marketing to the next level by coupling it with sales enablement. We learnt how to help our sales team convert leads into sales, aligning our marketing and sales teams more than ever before by understanding the defined needs of each. This was an extremely important session for us, seeing as we'll be launching sales enablement services for our clients in the near future. SalesHub CEO Matt Cook led this break-out session and shared his ideas around sales enablement and why it needs to be part of our inbound strategies going forward.
To understand our customers, we actually need in-depth insight into our leads' online lives (including time spent on other sites). In this session, as masterfully creepy as it sounds, we explored how to do this. By using the data from the most popular data sites, we were taught how to trace the journey of users. Why dating sites? Because these sites are "the masters of using data to cater to their users and provide a good journey and experience, and marketers can learn from them how to apply the same principles to their funnel".
"Build a website! Do a blog post! Write a white paper! Marketers get caught up creating the tactics but are then disappointed when the results don't equal their efforts. To get great results, marketers should be spending more time on STRATEGY." That's how this session, presented by Eric Keiles of Square 2 Marketing, was marketed to us... and it didn't disappoint. Keiles took us through actual case studies, data and examples of how companies blew past their goals and objectives using Inbound Marketing - sharing their innermost secrets and strategies.
Need we say more? Every business owner and marketer wants the data to back up their marketing efforts. We want to know "What's the return-on-investment?", and this session sought to help us answer that. We dived into neuroscience, psychology and detailed strategies for creating inbound programs that attract, convert and delight prospects and customers. This included some exclusive software secrets that we're super excited to share with our clients.
On average, a mind-numbing 5000 ads bombard us every day. That's rough - both for consumers and businesses. It's because of this overload that nearly all will fail to inspire any action. But there is a better way that most companies haven’t discovered... yep! This breakout session applied storytelling to marketing. Storytelling is the future of marketing, we thinks. Many actionable techniques were shared to let us in on the power of a good story, and how we can use it to affect meaningful change.
This was one of the most awaited break-out sessions, because everyone wants to keep up with Google. They cut the fluff and provided an effective framework and a set of processes that will help to guide us through driving organic traffic to our content and website. While this presentation will be accessible to anyone, we're excited to see our SEO gurus apply themselves to it and make our client work shine as a result.
The INBOUND 2016 conference was a step above any before it. The sessions were jam-packed with industry professionals of all types: senior marketers, top business leaders, and rocketing entrepreneurs. Struto’s management team was lucky enough to crack the nod too, and discovered some amazing new inbound marketing insights for 2017. These are thoughts that the rest of the marketing world is yet to catch up on – innovation and data insights that are sure to boost business if taken advantage of.
That’s why we’ve outlined our 3 favourite presentations from the conference below, along with their take-away points.
By far, Gary Vaynerchuck’s opening keynote was our most valued presentation at INBOUND 2016.
Who is Gary? Well, he’s an entrepreneur, who started out by growing his family wine business from a $3M to a $60M business in only five years. That’s right, Gary builds businesses. He opened the conference by introducing the ideas and strategies that we would be exploring more in the smaller educational conference sessions.
Take-away points:
Gary’s presentation was on how we can make the most of ourselves and our experiences in today’s digital world, where opportunity is for the taking (but being ignored). These are our top three take-away points from his presentation:
Rand Fishkin, a.k.a Wizard of Moz, is the founder and former CEO of Moz. On top of this, he’s also co-authored of several SEO books, co-founded Inbound.org, and even served on the board of Haiku Deck (a presentation software startup).
Fishkin presented at INBOUND 2016 on a no fluff, no wild prognostications strategy to work with Google in 2017.
Take-away points:
Bob Gower is, basically, a business builder around the ‘agile leadership’ approach (which we at Struto follow). Gower is currently the Director of Process and Innovation
Management at Citrusbyte. But, previously he’s worked in a variety of industries and titles. In fact, he’s gone from taxi driver, to carpenter, to teacher, to designer, to manager, and then a consultant helping leaders at Fortune 500 companies create agile leadership structures.
Gower’s presentation at INBOUND 2016 is self-explained in its title: adopting the agile leadership approach, without compromising team collaboration.
Take-away points:
If you want to know more about how to use inbound marketing to differentiate your business, download our eBook below on Differentiating your Tech Company.