INBOUND is HubSpot’s annual marketing conference, and I am in Boston this week for INBOUND take two! The conference kicked off last night with an inspirational keynote featuring best-selling author Brenē Brown. She spoke about her new book, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. She also talked about how true belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are – it requires us to be who we are.
This morning the inspiration continued with a keynote from Piera Gelardi, Executive Creative Director and Co-Founder at Refinery29.
She kicked the day off with a talk about courageous creativity. She shared her approach to create a safe creative environment for her team, and how she encourages them to leave their inhibitions “at the door”. The key takeaways from her keynote were:
- Be the most “you”
- Utilize your unique talents and qualities to bring strength to what you do.
- Create conditions for creativity
- Bring play and joy into your brainstorming. Find what inspires you to create and be sure to build that into your environment.
- Friction creates sparks
- Combat frustration with imagination, and embrace the uncomfortable.
After the keynote, I spent the majority of my afternoon at breakout sessions. I chose breakouts today highlighting email personalization, SEO, and LinkedIn content success. I could write an entire blog about each of the sessions I attended, but for the sake of today’s INBOUND recap I will simply highlight my key takeaways:
- It is essential to help your customers through email, not try and sell them.
- Personalization is essential in today’s age of content bombardment.
- Long form content (3,000-10,000 words) performs higher on LinkedIn than short form content (500 words).
- The top types of content shared on LinkedIn are how to’s, posts with tips, and guides.
- SEO is going back to its technical roots, and now more than ever SEOs & marketers have to be technical masters.
The afternoon highlight was the keynote presentation with HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shah.
Brian Halligan shared the growth struggles companies face as they transition from startup to scale-up. He categorized the three areas of focus to build up for scale-up:
- Scaling and management: focus your business, and learn to do less things well, and focus on the hierarchy of needs (customer > company > department > individual)
- Scaling and hiring: focus on company culture, the voice of the employees, and a mission you believe in.
- Scaling and customer experience: focus on how you sell not what you sell, light touch and automation, and building a word of mouth culture.
Darmesh shared tips about how to grow your business better. He noted that to make optimal impact your team must be moving in the same direction. He also emphasized the importance of helping your customers and focusing on quality over quantity. To conclude the keynote Darmesh revealed some very exciting HubSpot platform releases coming in 2018: HubSpot Conversion and Customer Hub!
Day 1 is in the books, and I am feeling inspired, excited and ready for two more inspiring days here in Boston!
Written By: Eden Penman, LookingPoint Marketing Manager