Key Takeaways from INBOUND 2018

Members of the Innovation Visual team were delighted to attend INBOUND 2018 in Boston, MA this week. This year INBOUND brought together a community of over 24,000 people who all have a passion for digital marketing, sales and delighting their customers through the inbound methodology.

The event is organised by marketing and sales technology provider HubSpot and features a great, diverse range of talks from inbound marketing experts, HubSpot employees and thought leaders.

Let’s take a look at the highlights and key takeaways from INBOUND 2018.

Partner Day at INBOUND 2018: An Event to Remember

Innovation Visual are a HubSpot Partner, and this meant that the team were invited to take part in Partner Day on Tuesday 4^th September. The team joined over 2000 other partners at the event and were treated to a number of talks revealing the latest product releases from HubSpot and a number of spotlight sessions from marketing experts. Partner Day provided a great introduction to what was to come at INBOUND 2018.

There were a number of important announcements during this years’ INBOUND. HubSpot will be introducing a standalone CMS, enabling more people to take advantage of the power of inbound marketing without having to purchase a full license. This opens up the HubSpot CMS to a range of businesses who can use the platform to grow.

Video marketing is on the rise, with video becoming an increasingly important marketing tool. It was therefore great to hear that HubSpot will be introducing video to the platform, making it easier to integrate video on your website and across the marketing, sales and service hubs.

In addition, the ever evolving HubSpot platform ecosystem continues to grow and now contains more than 200 apps from HubSpot Connect Partners, covering everything from events to content creation. Essentially, if you need some functionality that HubSpot doesn’t provide then chances are there’s a Connect Partner who can, and it’ll be integrated seamlessly into HubSpot. The possibilities are truly endless.

Grow better with Inbound Marketing

The central theme of INBOUND 18 was how businesses need to “Grow Better” with an integral component of this being to put the customer at the centre of everything a business does. By focusing on reducing friction in your business’ buyer’s journey you not only increase efficiency but also improve the overall customer experience. And as Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, pointed out in his keynote address it’s easier to improve your customer experience by ‘10x’ than it is to improve your product by that extent.

Halligan believes the future of Inbound marketing lies in creating a “Better Experience Era” as opposed to a “Better Product Era” that has been the focus until now. As an illustration of just how seriously HubSpot are foreseeing this evolution they revealed that they have made the dramatic step of overhauling their famous sales funnel, the backbone of their success to date. In its place is the “Flywheel” which, in HubSpot’s opinion, better reflects how customers progress through the sales cycle, from the initial “Attract” stage, through an “Engage” stage when the prospect becomes a customer and finally a “Delight” stage which leads to customers becoming promoters of the business.

By continually improving the customer experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey a business will improve the efficiency of the Flywheel and continue its growth, the reason that “Growth” sits at the very centre of this Flywheel. These improvements should focus on reducing “friction” in the flywheel – through faster, more effective interactions with the customer. As Brian Halligan put it, “it’s no longer what you sell, but more about how you sell it”.

Putting knowledge into action

INBOUND 18 was a fantastic experience. The scale of the event was truly incredible with over 24,000 attendees and speakers from around the globe. The talks and information provided certainly contributed to furthering the team’s knowledge on inbound marketing and there are a number of actions the team are looking forward to acting on when they return to the office, which will be sure to have benefits for our clients.

One thing is for sure from INBOUND 2018. The power of inbound marketing will only continue to grow.

If you would like to find out more about how inbound marketing can benefit your business, then contact our team.