AE Marketing Group CEO, Brian Walker, spent last week alongside fellow industry leaders at INBOUND15. What was all the marketing buzz about? We asked Brian to share his key takeaways.
Hubspot’s CMO, Kipp Bodnar, noted the inbound marketing mindset has experienced rapid growth. This was clearly evident by the 14,000 attendees in Boston, but why such growth? Because gone are the days of relying on legacy thinking, tactics and technology to market your brand and drive lead generation.
You must evolve your organization, then grow the hell out of it, or die.
Somehow Kieran Flanagan magically kept the audience engaged throughout his 100+ PPT presentation. That’s no small feat considering I won’t read a PPT deck over 20 slides. Kieran’s terrific “Marketers Guide to Growth Spurts” reminded us all that you have to work smarter, not harder to compete today.
Download his helpful guide here.
With rapid growth come new challenges and Hubspot learned this the hard way. Long lines and full sessions frustrated many attendees. To their credit, Hubspot tried to pivot as best as possible with encore presentations and making frequent content updates on the conference mobile app.
Either way, the chaos served as a good reminder for all that successful marketing does not equal a strong customer experience.
One strategy seldom mentioned last week that can improve customer experience and drive brand growth is co-creation. Too often inbound marketers think of user-generated content as “co-creation.” Meaningful co-creation involves designing better products, services and business models together with employees and consumers.
If you can marry co-creation with an inbound mindset you just may become a market leader.
Hubspot kept everyone well fed with a fabulous line-up of 17 local food trucks. The concept was a fun way to give people a taste of Boston without ever leaving the convention center.
One favorite was “The Green Muenster” at Roxy’s Gourmet Grilled Cheese.
The speaker lineup was loaded with all-stars and most of them lived up to their billing. Brene Brown made us cry, Aziz Ansari made us laugh and Seth Godin said it best – “You’re brand is either remarkable, or you’re irrelevant.” Unfortunately, a handful of the speakers were also the latter.
Remember, never start a presentation by selling us on your company, remind us constantly that you were on Mashable, or just read bullet after bullet, slide after slide.
You might create the best product, website, mobile app, offer – you name it – yet everyone knows the “If you build it – They will come” strategy NEVER works. Content is NOT king unless it is seen by the right audience, at the right time and in the right context. All of this requires promotion, promotion and more promotion.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s the real reason the inbound mindset is growing like crazy.