By: Jacob Hanson
Have you heard of Inbound? Were you there this year? If you answered no to either of these questions…keep reading! (Well, keep reading if you said yes, too, please!)
A few weeks ago, nearly all of PRP’s marketing team descended on Boston to attend Inbound. It was four days of jam-packed awesome! Regardless of whether you use HubSpot, another automation platform, or none at all, this conference should be on every marketer’s must-attend list moving forward.
While there weren’t any sessions dedicated to the education or ed tech markets, nearly everything discussed was absolutely relevant for our industry. As we have said many times before, it’s almost like Inbound was made for education marketers!
Here are five takeaways that my team and I wanted to share with you after coming back from Inbound:
- Analyze your data regularly (then actually do something with it). Too often, we get so caught in the cycle of doing, doing, doing, creating, creating, creating that we just bounce from one thing to the next. While we shouldn’t need to spend as much time analyzing data on campaigns as we should creating the campaigns, investing some time to look over data will pay off immensely. When building anything, whether it’s a full-blown campaign or the addition of leadflows to your site, don’t forget to schedule time to analyze once your efforts have had ample time to breathe. Don’t forget to leverage that older content, as well!
- Get your sales and marketing teams on the same page (or else!). In a recent blog post, Let’s Get Married Said No Sales Rep to Marketing Ever, we shared ideas to help get your sales and marketing teams collaborating rather than being at odds with each other. At the end of the day, we all get paid from the same pot: sales revenue!
- Search is changing, so get on top of SEO! Just before Inbound, HubSpot unveiled its new content cluster tools, which were created in response to Google’s continual changes in how they measure SEO. We already know that, in the sales process, buyers have the power. The same goes with search: Google will continue to cater to searchers, so we need to keep up!
- Social media needs the right look if you expect people to notice. For social media, a picture is worth more than a thousand words; it’s often the primary reason that people click on any piece of content. You’ve spent time creating killer content. Up the chances that your audience will interact with that work by reeling them in with engaging images and graphics.
- To build a truly memorable brand, you need a Marketing Content Style Guide. I think most companies have fallen into this trap: you have a company mission and purpose, and a superior team with personality, so of course you assume that’s going to magically translate into a cohesive marketing brand. That won’t be enough. To create a strong, clear brand presence—one that your audience will recognize and trust—your team needs to workshop, define, clarify, and revise a Marketing Content Style Guide. This will be the heart of your content strategy, not just what gives it power, but also what makes it wholly unique.
There is so much that inbound marketing offers that we could literally go on for days talking about what we learned at the conference. Thankfully, we created our Inbound Marketing Resources page for education marketers so that you don’t have to listen to us babble.
Take a look, and find out the engaging power that this method can provide for your business! Have questions? Want to bounce some ideas off us? Get in touch!
Thanks for sharing!
