Last week HubSpot hosted INBOUND15, its annual inbound marketing conference, which was overflowing with more than 14,000 energized marketers, salespeople, project managers, product managers, and HubSpot aficionados! All of us on the Intechnic team had a great time and learned a ton! Here are 6 of our favorite Inbound15 takeaways:
1. Write Great Content
This goes without saying: If you want to get great results from your SEO efforts, you need to do more than throw a bunch of individual keywords together into your content. Bill King, Senior Customer Success Manager at HubSpot, and Tyler Richer, Principle Implementation Specialist at HubSpot, say that in order to rank well in search engines, you have to write the “definitive” guide on a given subject. Google doesn’t want to serve up a bunch of answers, it wants the one, best answer. So make sure your content is super focused!
Inbound - Changing Face of SEO 9-8 from Bill King™
2. Target Your Blog Posts
If you have a blog, you need to understand your target reader and what they want to learn. Then use each blog post to answer their questions. HubSpot’s Angela Defranco recommends the following strategy: if you don’t know what to write about, start with the content you post on your FAQ page or present in your in-person consultations. This is going to be your best content—the information that visitors want to learn from you. And don't forget to promote your content. Remember, 8% of the time you spend on your blog post should be spent on promotion!
3. Only Support Your Best Content with Paid Ads
Promoting your content through paid ads on social networks can give you a huge boost—but only if you do it strategically! Wordstream founder Larry Kim recommends posting regularly on social media, but promoting only the content that performs well. If your content didn’t do well organically, it won’t do well when you broadcast it with paid ads. Since social networks want relevant, engaging content, you’ll pay a much cheaper ad price if your content is good.
The Top 10 Facebook and Twitter Advertising Hacks of All Time - Larry Kim's Presentation at Hubspot's INBOUND 2015 Marketing Conference from Internet Marketing Software - WordStream
4. Analyze Your Content Regularly
To get the most "bang for your buck" with inbound marketing, you need to analyze your content periodically and look for ways to improve it. Even HubSpot, the master of inbound marketing and content strategy, realized that it needed to rethink the type of content it produced and promoted. Ginny Soskey, the Section Editor for HubSpot’s Marketing Blog, was surprised to learn that by changing the types of content published in the HubSpot Marketing blog, her team could attract significantly more views, subscribers and leads. Needless to say, HubSpot made the change. She discusses how her team measured their content’s performance below.
5. Define Your Strategy
Inbound marketing is a powerful model, but it’s not enough to guarantee success on its own. Eric Keiles, Chief Marketing Officer of Square 2 Marketing, says that two of the biggest mistakes marketers make with inbound marketing are 1) not having a defined strategy and 2) not having an integrated approach. Everything you do, from the strategy you follow, to the content you write, to the outreach you do, needs to be directed toward the same goal.
6. Enjoy the Journey!
Remember to have fun with everything you do! With all of the tools, resources, and networks, now is a great time to be a marketer—so enjoy it! HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan is obviously having a great time during his keynote address!
The feeling during today's keynote...@HubSpot pic.twitter.com/3su10QGhB7
— Sidekick (@sidekick) September 9, 2015
You can watch the full keynote featuring Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah here! Feeling down about missing INBOUND15? Don’t worry, INOUND16 has already been scheduled for November 8-11, 2016. We’ll definitely be there!
