Key takeaways from #INBOUND2016

During an intensive week in Boston, Zooma along with some of our friends and 19,000 others from 92 countries attended sessions on a broad spectra of subjects related to the inbound methodology. Here are our key takeaways from what was said at INBOUND2016. 

1. Make sure to always make bets

In the welcome keynote for the week, entrepreneur and evangelist Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) emphasised the need to dare to make bets and sometimes be wrong. The reasoning? If you’re late to the table you’re up against much tougher competition. His examples were among others that Uber really should have been invented by ‘the guy in New York with the most medallions’, and Airbnb should have been invented by Marriott Hotels. Simply put:

‘If you don’t wake up every day and try to put yourself out of business, someone else will’

– Gary Vaynerchuk

2. Today’s opportunities won’t exist in 36 months

Related to above, Gary also pointed out his favourite mantra ‘Marketers ruin everything’. Just like bulk email worked great in 1996 (he had a 91% open rate on his own emails!) it doesn’t work in 2016. Before marketers ruin it and people move on to other things, there are opportunities to seize. Mentioned was Facebook ads—an opportunity that he pledged won’t exist in 36 months because it will be way more expensive when the global consumer brands move in. Another one was Facebook video, because it combines opportunities for branding with marketing in an under-priced environment (compared to Google who enables zero branding). Bonus, and one to judge for yourself by measuring activities for your business: According to Gary paid Twitter ads and programmatic advertising is over-priced.

3. Go and learn the sh*t yourself

In classic Gary style, he made the point that it’s not an excuse to outsource work to younger people with the argument that you don’t know the ins and outs of a certain topic. You can learn almost anything today thanks to online.

‘I didn’t grow up with this, I simply figured it out’

– Gary Vaynerchuk

4. Look at these 6 signals when optimising conversion rate

When optimising a page for conversion, there are 6 things you should be looking for;

• Message clarity; what do users get? What is the next step?
• Friction; anything that would lower trust, add uncertainty/doubt or steps not necessary
• Distractions; anything on the page that distracts from taking the main action you want the user to take
• Urgency; is there anything that compels people to take action right now?
• User intent; does the page match what those coming to the page are seeking?
• Buying phase; what buying stage are they in when coming to this page? Are we asking for too much too soon?

And remember: Start with your low handing fruits, meaning high traffic pages with low conversion rates. 

5. Use MQLs for your Marketing + Sales Service Level Agreement