Recap: My experience at #INBOUND16

Heading to the US during election week was an interesting experience, made even more interesting by the outcome on November 8.

While I was left flabbergasted at the election’s unexpected outcome, I was also soaking in a lot of marketing knowledge at this year’s INBOUND conference.

Here are some highlights and takeaways I came away with:

They had me at ‘smarketing’

I loved the presentation by HubSpot’s Dan Tyre and Leslie Ye on how their blogging collaboration (which took a cumulative 86 hours) netted 1,316 prospects (15 new prospects per hour!)

Dan coined the term ‘smarketing,’ the alignment of marketing and sales teams.

Their approach was simple: Leslie picked Dan’s brain over sales topics during brainstorming sessions and she would in turn spin out a piece.

While Dan provided the subject matter expertise on sales, Leslie shaped their conversations into blog posts and then packaged them for posting and distribution.

While it takes a lot of discipline and effort to get this type of routine going, it’s definitely worth the pay off in the end.

Balancing the deluge of data with creativity

I appreciated a talk by Jenifer Kern, CMO at Tracx, in which she explained that collecting every single metric can be a serious threat to creativity.

Jenifer didn’t undermine the value of data, but instead pointed out that consistently focusing on reporting can leave little time for marketers to step back and examine their efforts.

Citing the Muppet Theory, Jenifer has surmised that marketing teams should be equal parts creative (chaos) and analytical (order).

Another thing that I loved from Jenifer:

“Use data as a servant, not a master.”

I like the emphasis on not letting numbers and stats take control over creative impulses.

HubSpot for Startups releases new price tiers

I work at L-SPARK, a Canadian SaaS-focused Accelerator. As a HubSpot for Startups partner I was psyched to see the team launch a 90% scholarship for seed stage startups.

I’m glad to see that HubSpot is making their growth stack more accessible to companies whose business needs might not yet necessitate the full gamut in terms of features and tools.

Insights from the Wizard of Moz

Rand Fishkin provided a very in-depth look at what to expect in terms of SEO, search trends and how to navigate Google’s changes in 2017.

Gratefully, Rand stuck around for a while after his session to answer all sorts of questions from attendees.

I asked Rand what startups can do to boost their SEO efforts with little time and resources.

Watch below:

(Editor’s note: Yes, his moustache is even more epic in person)