The Inbound Rundown: Hubspot Conference Highlights
Every year, Hubspot hosts the INBOUND marketing event. This year, more than 25,000 people gathered in Boston to learn about the latest and greatest in marketing, sales, and design. This year’s theme was Grow Better — a reference to your company’s ability to get bigger while staying focused on current and future customers.
Did you miss this year’s conference? Don’t worry about it! We’ve put together this handy guide to the newest developments in the inbound marketing world.
The Importance of Live Chat and Chatbots
Customers need to be able to communicate with your business, and they can be very particular about the way they do it. Twitter is too impersonal. Phone calls are annoying, and hard to plan outside business hours. Email takes too long.
That’s why your business needs a chat strategy. It starts with a chatbot — chatbots can answer a lot of basic questions, provide relevant information, and push visitors in the right direction along the buyer’s journey. If their requests are too complex for an automated response, a live chat can pick up the slack.
You’ll need to identify where to put the chatbot, make sure that your messaging lines up with the branding of the rest of the site, and commit the time and resources to responding quickly and helpfully.
SEO for B2B
In theory, selling to a business is very different than selling to a person — a business decision is based much more on numbers, statistics, and rational arguments and less on emotion. In reality, all business decisions are made by people, and those people are susceptible to the same strategies that you’d normally use in a B2C marketing strategy.
That includes SEO. Whoever’s making the decisions at the businesses you’re selling to, they’ll be using organic search to find their solutions. Dominic Woodman, founder of teflSearch, posted his presentation online, so you can get the best of his advice even if you couldn’t make the conference.
Updates to HubSpot Itself
INBOUND is also the time that HubSpot announces the newest developments to its world-famous software. This year, there’s no new Hub. Instead, HubSpot has spent the year since the last INBOUND focusing on incorporating the feedback from their customers and users.
New improvements include smart content reporting for Enterprise and CMS customers, kickback emails in forms for all customers, two-factor authentication, Buy Now buttons for Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise customers, and Facebook messenger in Conversations.
For more from Hubspot on their product updates, check out their video: INBOUND 2019 HubSpot Updates in Less Time Than a Coffee Break
The INBOUND conference is designed to help marketers and salespeople meet customer expectations, and in the constantly shifting world of digital marketing, that’s a lot more interesting than it sounds.
INBOUND is the top destination for marketers across the country looking to keep pace with their industry, and its three days and 250 speakers make for the greatest exchange of knowledge in our industry. We’ll see you next year!
