An energising week at INBOUND15

Zooma and a group of friends spent an energising last week in Boston (Sept 7-11) at the INBOUND15 event. It was four days surrounded by enthusiasts and experts on Inbound Marketing, where we could improve our skills, connect with people and ideas and gain more insights on shifts and advances in inbound marketing. This is a summary of our impressions from INBOUND15.

Realising the potential of Inbound Methodology

More and more companies now realise the potential of Inbound Marketing and the methodology as a non-interruptive marketing method. This year the event INBOUND15 was attended by 14,000+ people, with a mix of marketing agencies and marketing teams. Many of these have come to realise that their roles are to prove ROI and to attract new contacts, convert them to leads and turn them into delighted customers. An overall impression was summarised in a quote by Chris Brogan’s from his keynote; ‘My advice to marketeers is, You can blame sales or be sales’. 

Topics and event overall

The event meant busy days with many inspiring presenters. If a session was full, which often happened, a new occasion the next day was usually arranged. Many keynote presentations can be accessed online and read-more-notes will be published on Inbound.org.

A few key notes to highlight:

Brené Brown talked about how to rise and fall. Her talk from INBOUND15 is not available online but you can watch her similar talk from the TED stage.

Seth Godin talked about the importance to connect and gain authority. 

Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, talked about making content that people love and let it be viewed in various places.

Marc Maron, talked about how he has managed to expand his role as a comedian and influence far beyond this sector.

Working on valuable and important projects Meighan Stone at Malala fund shared aspects beyond business.

Chelsea Clinton at the Clinton foundation featured a strong voice on women’s rights.

And a lot more...

Direction for HubSpot

Hubspot is hosting the INBOUND15 conference. The HubSpot platform is used by over 15,000 companies. To serve customers, a list of new features and improvements to the platform was announced:

• A new advertising module to include inbound ads was presented to manage paid channels, the HubSpot Ads add-on tool. It helps you create ads, calculate returns and to promote engaging content through LinkedIn and Adwords.
• Predictive Lead Scoring, a new feature that sees through your data to calculate your lead scoring based on previous behaviour.
• Other improvements include functionality for advanced and customized reporting.
• Leadin is a free version of HubSpot coming out soon.
• The platform is now localized to five languages.

All announcements can be viewed in the HubSpot keynote presentation. In a number of sessions tools aimed at integrating and aligning the marketing and sales processes were discussed. This is also supported by HubSpot’s new lead scoring functionality.

We will follow up with more blog post on specific things from INBOUND15 that we found interesting and useful.

If you want to find out more about the Inbound Methodology or Hubspot;