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I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to attend INBOUND 2022 in person, located in Boston, MA. It was a fantastic few days and I'm now going to try and condense the amazing time I had into a single blog post!
For anyone that isn't aware, INBOUND is an annual event hosted by HubSpot, featuring thought-leaders from various organisations that host a whole range of educational & informative talks. The overarching theme of this year's INBOUND was community & connectivity, which I'll speak more about next...
This year's theme: community & connectivity
HubSpot laid special focus on community & connectivity this year; one of the initial stand outs for this theme was the badges that all attendees wore. The badges featured a little button you could click, allowing you to hold it up to another attendee's badge and have you're basic information (including your LinkedIn profile) shared with one another on HubSpot's INBOUND app that was developed for the event.
Yamini (HubSpot's CEO) also opened up the event talking about the crisis of disconnection, leading on to talk about the disconnect in people, systems and data. Yamini shared a statistic that disconnected data and systems was one of the biggest pain points for marketers in all industries, highlighting why the big focus this year was on connectivity & community!
Speaking of community, Dharmesh (co-founder of HubSpot) followed on from Yamini to talk about why community matters now more than ever, and whilst his talk was filled with great dad-jokes, the point he got across was really valuable. Dharmesh introduced the IDEAL framework for building community: Identity, Diversity, Engagement,Action and Learning and discussed its importance in value-led growth. Connect.com was also introduced, this being an online community for growth professionals with the goal to provide a platform for engaging discussions.
The final talk of the first spotlight was delivered by Stephanie (CPO), and she did a fantastic job at connecting the dots from the previous two talks but this time with specific relevance to HubSpot's CRM. Stephanie covered a whole range of new features, from customer journey analytics (my personal favourite) to data management, connected applications and platforms to marketing campaigns! Stephanie's talk was fantastic, and to see these features working within the CRM on the demos that were shared was a great insight into how these features can help a whole range of clients.
My personal favourite talks from INBOUND
I attended a whole load of talks over the 3 day event, so to save myself from writing a 50,000 word blog on all of the talks I attended, I'm going to condense this down to my top three. I'm going to exclude the first spotlight that I spoke about earlier as I've already covered it in some depth.. but that was definitely one of my favourite talks from the event!
'What's next: how to navigate marketing around search and social algorithms' - Neil Patel
Neil Patel's talk was so incredibly valuable, especially for those that work in Marketing, and specifically social media. Neil touched on the point that algorithms have got increasingly more complex over the year, whilst this is good for the consumer (seeing the content that is actually relevant to them), it has made it increasingly difficult for the marketers trying to keep up with the complicated algorithms.
Enter Neil Patel! Neil deconstructed the algorithms, and showed us all in layman's terms how we can increase engagement in our social activities. Neil opened with a simple formula to navigate the algorithm dilemma for marketers: Success =Algorithm signals x (learnings + what people can't ignore). Algorithm signals include what the platforms are telling us directly about how their algorithms work. Learnings include information that you continually pick up from your own audience, such as the best content to connect with them and what is it exactly your audience want? What people can't ignore are the aspects of your brand that don't have a direct link to social platforms, such as delivering free tools and winning awards to attract audiences.
Neil then jumped into the specifics, so I'll start with what he covered on YouTube...
Youtube
Within the first 24 hours a video goes live, the more views you get the better the video will do and the more people the video will be presented to. The best way to fit this algorithm within YouTube is with push notifications, and of course encouraging your audience to turn push notifications on. Outside of YouTube, this would look like a push across all other social channels, as well as email & SMS.
LinkedIn places large focus on comments. This means number of comments, and interactions with comments. Ideally within the first 4 hours of the post going live, you'd want as many engaging and thought provoking comments as possible. The best way to work with this algorithm is to have plenty of connections, and to encourage those connections to comment on your post (don't be afraid to get in touch with some of your friends on LinkedIn and ask them to leave some thought provoking & engaging comments!). The more traction you get in the comments section, the better the post will do!
TikTok
TikTok is similar to LinkedIn, in that it's very focused on the comment section. The advice for TikTok is very similar to that of LinkedIn; encourage people to comment, interact with your comments, & begin conversations in the comments section.
Facebook places focus on long-form content. This content keeps people on Facebook for longer, and for the most part this long-form content will be in the form of video. So the best way to win round the Facebook algorithm is to be posting high quality videos that are longer than 5 minutes in duration.
The Instagram algorithm has moved to favour live video. As mentioned by Neil, Growthoid estimate that live video is expected to grow 15 times what it is in 2022. So the easiest way to grow your Instagram is to conduct live videos at least twice a week - with valuable content!
Neil's advise for Google was to try to generate more brand queries. The more brand searches you have on Google shows you are a recognised brand and are less likely to be a company pushing out false information and fake news. So this easiest way to do better on Google is to create a great brand presence by providing relevant content, tools & downloads!
'Mapping out the moonshot' - Emma Grede & Zinhle Essamuah
This conversational talk was fantastic, it came across as very relaxed and for me personally was very inspiring. Emma Grede is the CEO of Good American, founding partner of Skims, founder of Safely and is also a guest shark on the American tv show 'Shark Tank'. It's clear Emma is an incredibly successful businesswoman and hearing her talk about all the brands she's played a part in was so valuable.
Emma was asked about the difficulty she had in finding investors for Good American and she began to elaborate on the difficulty for women in finding investors. She said that Good American wasn't her 'first rodeo' so in that specific instance finding investors wasn't too difficult, but was tough when she first started out. Emma's advice was to put heavy focus on networking and building genuine relationships with people. Emma also went on to explain the primary reason she joined Shark Tank was to help women, and women of colour, to get funding for their entrepreneurial ventures.
Zinhle also asked Emma her advice on businesses looking to scale. Emma spoke about how she is customer-obsessed, and whilst not everyone can take this same level of obsession, Emma believe it should still be a core value within all companies. In regard to one of Emma's brands, Skims, she went on to elaborate on how all of their conversations are customer & product focused; what are the customers saying? What issues are they facing? What do they think of our brand? Emma rounded up this question by saying that having a customer centric approach, authenticity and taking accountability for mistake develops a 'two way street' with their customers, and helps to develop a community - I personally couldn't agree more!
One of my key takeaways from the talk was Emma's advise to not stay in your lane. Emma frequently referred to the fact that building businesses like she has is tough, and that many people will tell you no, and that it can't be done. Emma is living proof that you shouldn't stay in your lane, and she put special emphasis on having a great group of people surrounding you; not people that are going to shoot down your ambitions, and equally no 'yes-men', you need people with a similar vision and people with a similar take on the realities of building businesses.
'Hard-won lessons on starting and growing a community' - Sam Parrish and Dharmesh Shah
The final talk I'm going to cover was hosted by Sam Parrish and took a conversational format with Dharmesh Shah, Co Founder of HubSpot. Dharmesh is a really interesting person, and is a great advocate for being successful in business as an introvert.
This conversation, as the title may suggest, was based around building community. To which Dharmesh spoke about the different communities he's built, and how HubSpot practically started as a community. He elaborated that whilst at college, he had started up a community for his course-mates - this is what prompted Brian Halligan (the other HubSpot co-founder) to connect with Dharmesh... and the rest is history!
Dharmesh also touched on a skill that he feels is underrated but valuable for anyone to learn: copywriting. He spoke about how for some people copywriting comes naturally, but regardless of whether you're good or bad at it, it's a skill that everyone is able to learn. Dharmesh's advise was to read some books on it, as copywriting helps you in all sorts of aspects, as simple as the emails you're sending and promoting yourself on LinkedIn. Aside from copywriting specifically, the take away was to identify the skills you need to learn, how Dharmesh did with copywriting.
The key takeaways from this conversation were, as mentioned above, to identify the skills you need to learn, to make the connections you need to make (regardless of whether you're introverted or extroverted), and that life is short so we all need to find ways to really get stuck in! For me personally I enjoyed this talk a lot as it gave an insight into the great mind of Dharmesh, and how he always thinks logically and is persistent in his journey to improve, whether it be improving himself, improving people's lives, or improving products.. namely HubSpot!
INBOUND 2022 was an incredibly experience, and I feel so lucky to have been given the chance to attend in person! I've only touched on the tip of the iceberg in terms of talks throughout the few days - if you've not managed to watch any as of yet, I'd get started with Yamini's initial spotlight of the event here. And if you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend attending INBOUND in person, whilst the online event is still amazing, being there in person just adds an extra level of inspiration to it all!
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