Key Takeaways from Inbound 2016: The State of Inbound Marketing
We’ve just wrapped up HubSpot’s Inbound 2016, and the events were fantastic. I’ve had the opportunity to talk shop with fellow marketers, check out the vendor offerings, and attend some great keynotes with speakers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Halligan, and Dharmesh Shah, who all shared their illuminating insights on how the marketing industry is transforming in light of new technology and standards. They gave their advice on where marketing efforts and dollars should be spent now, and about how bots and machine learning will affect the long-term future of the industry. Here are some of my key takeaways.
All stats and references in this article come from my interpretation and takeaways from presentations at Inbound 2016.
Search
Search is changing. Once the undisputed king of the virtually everything, Google no longer owns all types of search. While they still have a strong foothold in the “link graph” between websites and web engagement, other entities like Facebook and Amazon are dominating other niches with their own search engines. As the world’s largest social network, Facebook is the leader of the “people graph” with 2 billion searches a day inside the their platform, giving them an incredible amount of data about the relationships and connections between the hundreds of millions of people who use their site.
With people buying everything from groceries and clothing to video games and power tools from the massive online retailer, it should come as no surprise that Amazon owns the “product graph”. When searching for a product, most people will actually begin their search on the Amazon search engine — not Google. Shopping data is powerful data to own, because Amazon knows what kind of products different kinds of people buy and when, helping them sell more products by making better recommendations. But maybe even more important is the data they have about the people who use Amazon, and the ability to analyze this data to create highly accurate consumer profiles, which have enormous value to external advertisers.
Another hot topic in search at Inbound 2016 was the way SEO is changing, with many people speculating that SEO as we know it is dying. One of my takeaways from Inbound was that SEO is drastically changing, but it’s not dying yet. As marketers and SEOs, we have to make sure we are ranking for only highly relevant keywords. We want to add value and delight visitors when they come to our website, and consequently lower bounce rates by creating a better experience overall. We can do this by practicing HEO (human engagement optimization). HEO can be put into practice by making sure that you are only sending relevant traffic to your landing or homepage, instead of just grabbing everyone that you can. When a visitor lands on your page, you need to show them what they want to see in an intuitive way. It’s time to start treating searchers, visitors, leads, and customers like humans. It’s not B2B or B2C, it’s B2H (humans).
Mobile, Social, & Video
“If you’re not marketing on social, you might as well be marketing in a trash can” — Brian Halligan
Your customers live in social, which means marketers need to live there too. Of course, you probably already know that; it’s no secret that social media dominates our internet time. What’s perhaps more fascinating is that almost all the time spent in social is on a mobile device. In my opinion, Gary Vaynerchuk put it best by making the comparison of the television replacing radio in the 1960s. Now, the mobile device is replacing television in a similar way.
However, there is over $80B spent on commercials a year by big brands who still don’t understand that digital is superior in terms of ROI and analytics. Billions of dollars are wasted a year on commercials that no one watches because people are watching shows, videos, and content on their own time. With options like Netflix, Hulu, On-demand, and DVRs, people no longer have to watch commercials. This $80B of commercial ad budget will surely be flooding into digital in the next few years as companies realize they are marketing in a trash can.
Seemingly contradicting his own point, Gary shocked the audience when he followed this saying that he thinks a Super Bowl commercial has the best value of any ad. He was pretty adamant in his belief that the attention of the entire United States for 30 seconds is a bargain at five million dollars, as long as you use the time to get a real message across, not a meaningless shock humor video that is forgotten a week later. That said, it’s important to remember that there is nothing else on TV even comparable to the Super Bowl in terms of viewership. The only program apart from the Super Bowl to break into the top 20 most viewed broadcasts of all time was the 1983 M*A*S*H series finale. With live viewership numbers broadly decreasing, you’ll usually be better off advertising digitally.
Both Gary Vee and the HubSpot leadership are betting hard on social, particularly Facebook and Instagram. As Brian Halligan put it, Mark Zuckerberg is “eating the world”. He’s winning. He has everyone’s attention, with the average person spending 15% of their day inside his social platforms. A common thread throughout the two days was that Facebook advertising is undervalued. The sophisticated targeting based on machine learning and Likes, lets you get your ad in front of the right affinity audiences at a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of just $5; probably cheaper than the green smoothie you had for lunch. It’s about as close as you can get to asking Zuckerberg himself for a list of qualified leads.
Building on the theme of finding the most bang for your advertising buck, many at Inbound 2016 felt that, much like Facebook ads, Influencer marketing has been undervalued. It’s extremely underpriced when compared to the awareness and engagement influencers can give to a brand. People tend to like and trust the influencers they follow, so when the influencer recommends a product or service, followers are likely to treat this like a recommendation from a close, trusted friend.
Regardless of the platform you’re using, there’s no doubt that video is the new king. At AdWeek 2016, there was a lot of talk about video being the next wave for marketing and content teams to ride all the way to down the inbound funnel, and this was confirmed at Inbound 2016. If this news has you worried about funding expensive video shoots, fret not; HubSpot research showed that people are actually favoring shorter videos with lower production costs.
What we’re seeing is that value comes from the information or entertainment the content provides, not the production around it. People would rather watch a live video with almost no production, which gives a more organic feel and creates trust between people and brands. Both Brian and Gary were singing the praises of Facebook Live, and the way it allows marketers to easily put out organic, engaging content. There’s no need to try to make something perfect; sometimes a blooper in a Live video makes it feel more real. After all, seeing an actor trying to hold in their laughter is the charm of Saturday Night Live.
Creative
“I didn’t buy this shoe because Nike fucking cookied me and showed me a banner ad. I bought it because of the brand.” — Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vee spoke a lot about the role of creative and branding in marketing. He spoke about the shift from the creative-focused Madison Ave era to the modern data-driven marketing era. Of course, data and analytics have revolutionized our industry. But this data has made creative suffer. With endless amounts of data, we are spending almost all of our time sifting through numbers and metrics to decide which channels to advertise on. Consequently, many of us treat creative as secondary to data, giving it less attention than it deserves. It’s a shame, because well-done creative is what makes good brands into great brands. While Gary was making his point about the power of creative and branding, he took off his Nike sneaker and put it over his head. He said something along the lines of “I didn’t buy this shoe because Nike fucking cookied me and showed me a banner ad. I bought it because of the brand.” He’s got a point. All the data in the world won’t make ads like the powerful, compelling content that Nike produces.
The Future — Chatbots
Dharmesh Shah, CTO and co-founder of HubSpot spoke about how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are going to change the marketing landscape, and will be doing it sooner than we think. He made a bold statement predicting that chatbots will eventually replace websites. His theory is built on the idea that websites are a place for communicating information and answering questions. Chatbots that can understand natural spoken language and reply with natural spoken languages are more efficient for communication than a website, which needs UI/UX and text. Dharmesh also showed a quick demo of the chatbot he has been working on, Growthbot. It’s a beta version of a chatbot for marketers that can understand natural text language and pull information from all over the web into brief reports in a matter of seconds. The natural language process is still a bit clunky, but the foundation is there. I’m excited to see where the bot will be in the next few years.
As technology advances, marketing must always keep pace with it. Over the years, our industry has repeatedly transformed to adapt to changes in popular media. In the transitions from print to radio, radio to television, and television to the internet, we’ve shifted our strategies and developed new techniques for reaching target audiences. At Inbound 2016, some of the greatest minds in marketing showed us just how important it is that we lead the way in the shift now to an internet that is growing increasingly social media-centric and is seeing the rise of AI and machine learning.
What do you think? Will websites as we know them be dead in a few years? Is it worth it at all to advertise on TV anymore? Leave a comment below!
Steven Rado is a marketer at Checkmate Creations, a digital agency in CT.
