Awareness Tweetup at Inbound Marketing Summit Boston
If the promise of Inbound Marketing Summit was to provide actionable, tactical information to attendees on how to market their businesses online, the second day definitely delivered. Highlights:
Jason Falls: Rabid Kentuckyite Jason Falls began his talk by asking us: “How many of you put your website on your traditional ads? How many of you have ensured that your website doesn’t suck?” Very nice – and a perfect lead into the his message of making your website content-centric as opposed to product-centric, and left us with some immediate action items to start the wheels turning. His slides on Slideshare.
Brian Solis: If you don’t know Brian, check him out. He created the excellent Conversation Prism and freshly unveiled Social Compass. I’ll say the same thing about Brian that I did about Valeria Maltoni yesterday – this cat know his stuff. Brian riffed tactical on social media optimization and public relations, with gold like “Social Objects [the cool stuff you make available online] are the catalysts for conversations and occurrences,” and “the more you engage the bigger your digital footprint.” Check out Brian’s blog, PR 2.0
Dharmesh Shah: Probably one of my favorite sessions from the entire event. The author of On Startups and another member of the Hubspot team, Dharmesh gave a killer talk on getting found online, smacking us in the face with a goal for everyone to take back to the office – raise your traffic 6x in the next 12 months.
Dharmesh crammed an impossible amount of information into his half-hour marketing tornado, ranging from the very tactical to the very strategic. Some examples:
- Google Ranking = Context + Authority (with context being the low-hanging fruit)
- Make a list of all the possible keywords you could rank #1 for and describe your business – these will inform your SEO strategy
- Page title is undisputably the #1 on-page search factor for SEO, with earlier words send a stronger signal to Google.
- Free is powerful. “We strongly advocate coming up with something that’s free,” giving HubSpot’s website grader as an example.
- Don’t pick a fight with a Ninja.
In the process of telling us not to forget humans, to write for people, and to polarize an audience, he also gave us one of IMS’s most-tweeted memes: Outbound Marketing Harms Kittens. (To which I clearly must add – open-source content management systems eat babies.)
The Bigger Picture
In the midst of such an avalanche of tactical takeaways and action items, it’s easy to lose sight of the central point of IMS. Two presenters, Dharmesh (see above) and Shiv Sing of Razorfish, framed the same central theme elegantly.
Marketing = convincing people to buy your product.
Great Marketing = convincing people to sell your product [for you].
and
Old Thinking: The purpose of a business is to create customers.
New Thinking: The purpose of a business is to create customers who create customers.
It’s a powerful train of thought. And one that reflected upon begins fleshing out the important of a killer content strategy and using social media to activate and amplify it. Above all, it confirms what we all still know is true: Content is King.
See you next time.
Free is powerful. “We strongly advocate coming up with something that’s free,” giving HubSpot’s website grader as an example.
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Thanks for the recap and all the notes you’ve gathered. It’s really helpful for me as I’ve realized I missed some good notes.
Check out my blog too if you can, leave a comment and follow so I can improve! Thanks!
Jonathan´s last blog ..Ok, so we should do inbound marketing, but what about security?
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the comment – glad you could glean some of the insights through these posts. Most of the really good presenters have made their decks available on slideshare or their blogs – if you can track them down you should! Great learning.
I’ll stop by Impact Social Media and give it a look.