Overlooking a couple beautiful hogs and a steamy Menomonee River, more than 150 attendees joined Stream Creative for the inaugural Experience Inbound conference on Thursday, January 9. With six dynamic speakers and a room full the brightest marketing & sales minds – we all had a lot to say about the event. Using Storify to help gather the best chatter from the day, we are able to share the event experience and comments that were posted throughout the day. Read them here...
Each year, our Stream Creative team heads to Boston for the annual Inbound conference hosted by HubSpot. The best part about attending the conference is the opportunity we have to meet and network with some of the most creative and talented individuals from around the world. This past November, we came away from the event inspired to bring a similar experience to the sales and marketing professionals of Southeastern Wisconsin. That was when Experience Inbound was born and to be honest, we weren’t sure if anyone would come. Thanks to our event speakers, sponsors and supporters, we were thrilled to have more than 150 attendees join us for the inaugural event. Here are a few of our favorite actionable takeaways our event speakers shared to help boost your inbound efforts in the year ahead.
Brian Halligan, Co-Founder & CEO of HubSpot
Brian kicked off the morning with a dynamic talk about the future of inbound marketing and sales. He began his discussion by mentioning the brisk walk to the Harley-Davidson® Museum from the Iron Horse Hotel – which in his compliments to the city of Milwaukee he mentioned was the “nicest place he has ever stayed.” He focused on many key inbound facts and areas of consideration including how to build your marketing assets.
Quick Tip: Marketing assets are thought of very differently today than they were 20 years ago, partly because of the way we now live and work. Instead of interrupting your way to get the attention of prospective buyers or clients through “renting space” on someone else’s assets (traditional advertising), how do you pull them in? That can be achieved through increasing webpages, links, keywords, followers, remarkable content, etc. Brian told us to think about building these assets as if you were building a moat around your business.
Watch a video of Brian Halligan’s Experience Inbound keynote presentation, view his slides and read his interview with Jeff Sherman of OnMilwaukee.com.
YouTube has been the most popular streaming site for videos on the Internet for quite some time, and its traffic shows no signs of slowing down. While YouTube is still facing the challenging of making a profit of the traffic to the site, Google revealed earlier this year in its earnings that 40% of its current traffic to YouTube comes from mobile users, an increase from 25% in 2012 and 6% in 2011.
As soon as 2014, YouTube may consider shifting its content so that users of mobile devices such as Smartphones and tablets have better access to the content. It’s no surprise that mobile usage of YouTube has increased; the trend goes hand-in-hand with other technological movements like the incorporation of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media networking sites. In fact, Facebook reported that it had 819 million monthly users or 73% of its total 1.15 billion users in the second quarter of 2013.
Looking for ways to expand your marketing knowledge and bring new ideas to your business? We’ve got just the thing!
We’ve compiled a list of Marketing Conferences all over the United States and around the world. These conferences cover a variety of marketing topics from internet marketing, mobile marketing, and social media marketing.
Find a conference in your area, or take a trip to attend one (or two).
**Be sure to check out our event too - Experience Inbound 2014 in Milwaukee, WI.**
Going from the old to the new HubSpot COS has been a learning process. BUT, I am getting the hang of things and am finding it to be very useful, and even simpler.
I will admit though, the change in how to add pages to your site map, previously known as the page manager, stumped me. If you’re familiar with WordPress, the new sitemap navigation is very similar.
On the new COS, when you create a new site page, it’s not automatically added to the site map - like on the old CMS. It’s more of a two-step process - creating a site page and then adding it to the site map, as opposed to adding a new page straight to the menu, like you did in the page manager.
Ever get used to how something works and have everything set up the way you like it, and then it updates and changes on you? You then have to relearn the new updates and steps and get used to a new platform.
The success of a company requires a strategic digital marketing plan to ensure brand advertising reaches as many potential customers, current customers, and loyal customers as possible. Achieving this degree of search campaign success depends on the diversity of your digital media. Employing all three types of digital media (paid, owned, and earned) will boost both the number of customers and consumers reached and vary the way in which they encounter your brand. When used together the Big Three act as a powerful tool, building brand awareness and increasing sales.
When our friends at Hubspot asked me to contribute as a guest “instructor” for their brand-new back-to-school e-book: “ABC’s of Inbound Marketing,” I jumped at the chance to cover “Y” – Youtube. I want to help marketing professionals understand how important and easy incorporating video into your marketing strategies can be and the success you will experience from increased lead generation and stronger customer loyalty.
Communication and efficiency are top of mind when making recommendations to our clients for internal marketing teams to best work with an agency team. So often, businesses will have multiple representatives from sales, marketing or other departments – and they all feel comfortable calling their favorite agency rep to make even the smallest of requests...can’t find logos, documents or other materials. From the agency side, we love talking with our clients and see value in the camaraderie established when working with representatives across multiple departments. However, when we sit down to evaluate a project or ongoing relationship, it is important to ensure that we are fostering efficient collaboration, strong communication and a streamlined operations process. Collaboration tools are imperative to the success of a marketing department and agency relationship. The following are just a few of the tools we use to make sure we bring more to the table than creative ideas and design.
In a recent post announcing HubSpot’s launch of their new inbound experience and content optimization system, we gave a brief overview of a tool called Social Inbox. It’s a resource we’ve been testing out with some of our clients and have found that it has an incredible ability to allow sales and marketing representatives to make social initiatives what they always intended to be – a way to personally connect with and address prospects and customers’ needs. While weeding through the clutter can be a challenge, social media and email marketing are highly recognized by company executives, marketing and sales leads as a way to grow business. Social inbox incorporates functionality that allows for social conversations to be organized and prioritized in a way that better examines marketing analytics and represents ROI.
