Struto's Tour of the INBOUND16 conference

Brad Harris | 10 November 2016

Struto at the INBOUND 2016 ConferenceThe second week of November saw the INBOUND Conference once again come to life in Boston, MA. We were lucky enough to attend it, and fuelled our passion to drive innovative marketing strategies and successful content marketing services around the world. 

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.

The Struto Tour of INBOUND 2016 

 Tuesday, 8 November 2016 

1. Welcome Keynote with Gary Vaynerchuk & Guest Speakers 

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.

 Wednesday, 9 November 2016 

1. HubSpot Product Launch & Breakout Sessions 

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: 

  • The HubSpot Community will be a new resource for marketers, 
  • A new HubSpot partner directory, 
  • New HubSpot Sales certifications, 
  • New marketing resources to drive demand for sales enablement services, 
  • New sales commissions for partners, 
  • Improved partner access to clients’ HubSpot sales portals, 
  • A HubSpot test portal to allow partners to learn Enterprise, 
  • Special Partner Promotions (the first one includes free ads and reporting for one year), 
  • A new Client Management Dashboard, 
  • Priority support for partners (with call support – supposedly you just hit 5 for a special partner support line now), 
  • New connect partnerships, including Panda doc and Wistia, 
  • New HubSpot Academy App, 
  • Academy Team Tracking, allowing you to track certifications in your team and your clients, and
  • Partner role based training aligned to staff roles. 

2. Building the Data-Driven Customer Journey

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?”

3. The State of SEO and Content Marketing in Europe

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.

4. It All Comes Down to Sales: Sales Enablement to Drive Revenue & Account Growth

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.

 Thursday, 10 November 2016

1. It’s a Match: How Online Dating Service Uses Data to Map the Customer Journey

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".

2. Strategy Before Tactics: The Secret to Achieving Amazing Inbound Marketing Results

"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.

Friday, 11 November 2016 

1. Data-driven marketing: The science, strategy and software for success

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.

2. Scientific Secrets of Superpowerful Storytellers: Techniques to Spur Action

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.

3. How Marketers Can Keep Up with Google in 2017 and Beyond

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.

struto-our-top-3-presentations-from-inbound-2016-facebook.pngWant to know what the most innovative minds of inbound have to say about 2017? We were lucky enough to attend the INBOUND 2016 conference and find out. 

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. 

Our 3 Top INBOUND 2016 Presentations

1. Opening Keynote by Gary Vaynerchuck 

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: 

  • “Thank you, mom,” he says. Because moms encourage us to be self-aware. Self-awareness is knowing who you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are, what you’re trying to achieve, so that you don’t have to be distracted by the world. 
  • “Marketers ruin everything!” Email marketing once worked brilliantly, but because it hadn’t existed yet, and the same goes with bulk LinkedIn group messaging, or cold calling, or any outdated form of marketing. The issue is that eventually the mass of world marketers jump onto a trend, taking the discovery moment away from the customer. As soon as customers are aware of your marketing tactic… you’ve lost the battle. At least, most of the time. Change with the times. 
  • How to use Facebook: If you’re in the B2B market, “you have to run Facebook ads and you have to do it now,” insists Vaynerchuk. The accuracy of Facebook’s targeting tools are ignored by most marketers… but did you know that you can get so deep with Facebook’s targeting that you can target specific employees of a business. That means you can introduce your ad with “Your CEO/CTO/CIO needs to know…” and your budget will end up meaning that your buyer persona will get their employees forwarding your content to them endlessly. That’s what you want. It’s a direct link from their network to you, cutting out a lot of the ZMOT worries that have soared with the digital native. “If you’re not producing content on the five to six major social network platforms today, you’re creating an enormous vulnerability for whatever you want to happen in life. For the person you want elected, getting money for your kid’s charity, selling [stuff],’ insists Vaynerchuck. ‘Communication has shifted forever.” In 10 years time, this is going to really be realised, and the cost is going to soar. Get into it now – we’re definitely taking this advice on. 

2. How to keep up with Google by Rand Fishkin 

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: 

  • Google knows people learn, and we need to be aware of that too. Things don’t stay the same. This should remind us of Vaynerchuk’s take-away point: Change with the times. What worked last year, won’t work this year. And certainly what worked in the 90’s won’t work in 2017. Be aware that Google’s algorithm is smart, and not a static code. 
  • Then there’s the personalisation of search that we all imagine isn’t true. Moz uses clickstream data, which tracks ALL of EVERYONE’s website visits, anonymises it and then aggregates it, to investigate this. “What unique weird snowflakes we all are when we get in front that search-box and start typing,” humours Fishkin in response to this data that they’ve seen. The data points out that the top 1 billion keywords in Google only account for 35% of all searches. That means there’s so much opportunity! Us marketers and business owners go into the big bad Google world thinking that we’re always competing with giants, guaranteed of very little success. How wrong we are! We only need to be aware of what kind of opportunity is out there – the unique and weird keyword opportunities, not the top 35%. 
  • Let’s evolve our keyword optimisation. Don’t just use keywords that have good traffic numbers, but look at tools that allow you to look at the relative strength of these keywords. What’s the competition like? What’s the opportunity like? What you’re really looking for is low competition, high opportunity, with volume numbers at least above 100. If you’re not using a keyword explorer tool to discover the relative strength of your terms… you’re living in the dark age. (rarely trust the keyword search volumes that Google Suggestions offers – rather use a third party tool to find these out volumes). 

3. Adopting Agile Leadership Without Compromising Collaboration by Bob Gower 

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: 

  • Whether we like it or not, we’re affected by what our friends and colleagues do. In fact, “If your friend’s friend gets divorced, your likelihood of getting divorced increases,” explains Gower “And the same is true of a wide variety of human traits and characteristics and outcomes”. This means that when you hire someone or when you’re getting hired, always think “Am I happy becoming like this person?” If the answer to that question is “Yes!”, then you’re likely to have a functional and collaborative team. This is because the context that leadership exists in matters – you could have wonderfully good people working in a terribly evil company. But, the bad leadership changes the culture of the employee. 
  • An endless array of dynamic change based on a few very simple rules – that’s what our organisations need to move towards. That’s where Agile is going. You want the rules that your company operates by not to limit your employees, but to free them to be innovative, creative, and to produce quality work. Overbearing leadership is the killer of creativity and innovation. Help people become the best versions of themselves, rather than micro-managing and directing. 
  • Personal success needs to change into group outcomes. Create incentive and accountability systems that reward and encourage group behaviour. 
  • Change your company’s default action from “doing” to “thinking then doing”. Expect, encourage, and reward strategic thinking at all levels of your company, but most especially your “front-line”. 

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.

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