I was lucky enough to be one of the 2712 people who were able to attend this years Inbound 2012 Conference presented by HubSpot. It was a phenomenal conference, full of informative presentations and a great list of keynote speakers. The one thing you walked away with when you left, other than the 100 new applications being released as part of HubSpot3, was that there is a monumental shift in marketing and the way we need to approach prospects. As marketers continue to collect data at an alarming rate, we are able to develop a persona for our prospects and market to them based on what they need, not what we want them to hear. More on this seismic shift in another post, but for now, here are some great takeaways from this years conference. 
- “If Content is King, then Context is God” from Gary Vaynerchuk
- Gary V is one of the better speakers you will ever see!
- Context= pulling contacts through the sales funnel with personalized content
- Relevant Emails drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails
- Use content during the sales process to build trust and credibility
- Base your content on business challenges your prospects are experiencing
- You can’t market to all your leads the same way
- To be an accountable marketer, you must create SMART goals
Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timeframe - Marketing offers are the foundation of your lead generation efforts
- Content decisions should be based on and backed up by data
- Content can and should be repackaged or curated
- Include secondary CTA’s in your content
- Marketers should always be testing
- Publish content often and iterate later
- 3-D covers for ebooks get more submissions then flat covers
- Leaders are the people who have something to say, not the most vocal
- Check out Susan Cain’s blog, great keynote speaker!
- Use meme’s for Pinterest, stock photo + quotes, slogans, tips, tweets, etc…
- Blogging frequency matters and must be consistent
- Create Blog Subscriptions CTA’s and place on blog posts as secondary CTA’s
- On Twitter, be useful and helpful, respect your followers
These are just a few of the many concepts that were discussed this week at Inbound12. It was a great conference that promises to be even better next year. HubSpot did a great job with production and content for the conference and made some very big announcements regarding their product. Hope to see you all at Inbound 2013.
Side Note, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah opened the conference with a video of them entering via helicopter in bright orange polyester jump suits. It was very Olympic ‘esh and reminded everyone of the Queen!
