INBOUND 2018: Wrap Up of Quotes, Insights, and More

As we've shared here and here, the entire LeadG2 team is currently in Boston at INBOUND, an annual marketing and business conference hosted by HubSpot. Tuesday was opening night kicking us off with a keynote speech from Deepak Chopra, yesterday was day two of sessions and keynotes, and today, we're wrapping up the last day at #INBOUND18. We've put together a few key takeaways that our staff found interesting, inspiring, or helpful from Thursday and Friday's sessions in this post. 

LeadG2’s SHAYE SMITH shares some insights on SEO Strategy in 2018:

READ ON FOR key takeaways and insights:

We kicked off day two with Shonda Rhimes (tv producer, screenwriter, and author) challenging us all in her keynote presentation. She shared insights on overcoming fear, her "year of yes", and her role as an industry leader. 

"You push through fear by just doing."
- Shonda Rhimes

Day three started off with Scott Harrison, charity: water's founder. And wow, what a start it was. His inspiring story, unique approach to charity, and passion to help others left us in tears and ready to save the world.

"No one is beyond redemption. It’s never too late.”
- Scott Harrison

Dan Waldschmidt (business strategist and author) shared in a session on eliminating friction in the sales process, "A sales process should be produced like a theater production - script, practice, execute." If you’re putting on a play, you rehearse. To produce a sale you must role play. This challenged us that companies should be incredibly easy to do business with. 

Gray MacKenzie (of ZenPilot) said sequencing is the hidden art of the best salespeople. Simplify the journey. Give your prospect clarity. Building trust with prospects comes from consistently meeting expectations. We'd like to give an extra round of applause to these statements {insert extra clap emojis here}.

In a session by Influence & Co.'s Kelsey Meyer, we explored some of their tips for creating sales enablement content that drives results for both marketing and sales. As sales enablement experts ourselves, we agreed with all the great tips provided and especially loved the reminder to ensure your sales and marketing teams are aligned in order to be creating the best content for sales. 

We value analytics and analyzing our conversions, and throughout the day, our team sat in some informative sessions about conversions. Some top quotes included:

• "CTR is just a micro-conversion on the way to your bigger goal." -Madison Hajeb 
• "A good CTA is more than just a button color." -Lucky Orange on the topic of website conversion optimization

Lucky Orange's presentation on conversion optimization compared websites to cheeseburgers (queue the lunch bell after this session). After looking at reasons websites get a lot of traffic but don't convert, they posed the question, "Do you need to put your site on a diet to increase conversions?"

Here were their recommendations on simplifying your site to enhance conversions (again in reference to food and cheeseburgers):

1. Clear the traffic jam. Uncover what's holding your website back and preventing conversions. 
2. Slim down your website. 
3. Smooth out the bumps in the visitor's journey. Dig into how traffic from different sources and device types interact with your website. 
4. Get your extrovert on. Use landing pages to your advantage.
5. Find your cheerleaders and start evangelizing. Remember that you're not dictating to your visitors. You're catering to their needs and wants. 

A big focus in inbound marketing is obviously content. But what do you do with content you created years ago? Just keep creating more content? No. Remix it. In a session with Brittany Berger (writer and content strategist), we received insight on re-purposing content across time and channels. Her 4-Step Content Remix Process looks like this:

STEP 1: Identify Your Goals
STEP 2: Complete a Content Audit
STEP 3: Find Your Best Remix Opportunities
STEP 4: Work it Into Your Marketing Calendar

Kim Orlesky (sales coach and speaker) recommended that, "in sales be a tour guide. Don’t be like someone taking a cat for a walk on a leash." And when comparing marketing and sales, she said, "Marketing is like flirting, and sales is like dating."