Earlier this month I was out of the office attending HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference to learn from top B2B marketers and meet some Uberflippers IRL.
Since my focus is demand generation, most of the sessions I attended were about lead gen, conversion rate optimization, or email marketing. I took a bunch of notes to fill my team in on the sessions I attended and compiled my key takeaways here.
Couldn’t make it to INBOUND this year? Read on for my top takeaways for demand gen marketers.
Anyone else getting pumped right now? #INBOUND16 pic.twitter.com/uGvhZBt6Ue
— INBOUND (@INBOUND) November 9, 2016
Treat your content like your product
Anum Hussain learned a lot about marketing new products and growing a subscriber list during her time at HubSpot. In her session Applying a Product Mindset to Content: The Growth Playbook You Haven’t Heard Yet, she shared insights her team learned marketing HubSpot’s Sidekick product to sales teams.
One of the key takeaways from Anum’s session was to measure subscribers more like the way your product or customer success team measure users:
Monthly Active User = Monthly Active Subscriber [someone who actually clicks your emails]
By unsubscribing inactive contacts, you’ll allow inactive subscribers to churn like users do. This makes the email marketer’s job easier because you can focus your efforts on the subset of contacts who are engaged and interested in your content, versus trying to create content that appeals to a large list of contacts.
It’s time to be more strategic about the way we treat content and email, one way to start is by experimenting with onboarding new subscribers.
SEO isn’t just about Google
One of the most popular sessions of the week was Rand Fishkin’s session on How Marketers Can Keep Up With Google in 2017 and Beyond. Most digital marketers are familiar with Rand’s popular Whiteboard Friday videos, where he dives into an SEO topic each week.
During the session, Rand mentioned that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, something that surprised a lot of people in the room, and got me thinking about how we could start optimizing our video content for SEO.
At Uberflip we use video quite a bit thanks to our bimonthly webinars, but other than uploading them to Wistia and gating them in our Hub, we aren’t doing much to increase the organic visits to these awesome assets.
A key takeaway from the session is to always post original content to your website first, then set up a reminder for a few months from now to republish to other channels like YouTube (or Medium, or SlideShare, or LinkedIn, depending on the content) to maximize the SEO potential.
Find and optimize your high performers
Most marketers I know are feeling more pressure than ever to constantly pump out blog posts. In Actionable Tips to Increase Lead Gen by 100% in 12 Months, HubSpot’s Amanda Sibley shared the tactics and tests her team tried to increase lead gen without creating tons of new content.
One of Amanda’s tips is to dig into your conversion data to find your highest-converting posts, then update and re-promote them to your database via email, social, and paid channels. This idea started when her team realized that 92% of HubSpot’s blog leads are generated on blog posts that are over 3 months old.
A couple months ago the content team here at Uberflip started optimizing and re-promoting one ‘old’ blog post a week. We’ll keep you posted on how that impacts our content and lead gen targets.
Crappy content kills conversions
Demand marketers like to think we can A/B test and optimize our way out of any problem, but that’s just not true. Without quality content, all the conversion optimization in the world won’t magically make you hit your lead gen goals.
In her session Creating Ridiculously Good Looking Websites That Convert, InVision’s Jessica Meher hammered this point home using real examples from her time at HubSpot and InVision.
Scroll jacking, homepage carousels, too many pop-ups, and other tricks can have a negative impact on conversions, but great content is the one thing all successful lead-generating websites have in common.
Your website is not a brochure. If leads get to your homepage and see too much sales-y content with no substance or a lack of helpful content, they’ll move on.
Demand gen and marketing ops managers are the next CMOs
Martech budgets are growing every year, and this trend continues to place more emphasis on tracking and metrics than ever before, setting up Marketing Ops and Demand Gen marketers to take on the role of CMO in the coming years.
In his session, AdStage CEO, Sahil Jain, touched on how new platforms and tools are empowering marketing teams to prove their results on campaigns with multi-touch attribution.
If you don’t already have a way to track multi-touch attribution, look into investing in a tool like Bizible to make sure you’re tracking the impact of marketing campaigns throughout your funnel.
Are you planning on attending any content marketing conferences next year? Let us know in the comments!
For more B2B insights and tips from influencers check out The Uberflip Experience Encore.
