It’s been over a month since INBOUND 2018. Our team has had time to truly digest the experience, pull together our key takeaways, and make actions plans for implementing some of the new ideas that inspired us from the sessions and keynotes. This is Diagram's fifth year attending, and each year, INBOUND gets bigger and bigger offering more content than just marketing topics.
My team and I would like to share our thoughts and “big takeaways” from this year’s conference. Enjoy!
AJ
As a first-time inbound attendee and HubSpot Developer, I wasn't sure what to expect when I arrived or how much of the Inbound content was going to apply to what I did. Inbound surpassed my expectations by leaps and bounds! The developer track at Partner Day was jam-packed with tons of information and exciting new features/updates about where HubSpot is heading in the future. The rest of INBOUND also had highly relevant sessions for developers that focused on SEO practices, AI/bots, and even a developer showcase where you were able to see some of the cool things being built by other agencies on the HubSpot platform. I loved being able to talk with product vendors, meet other developers, and gain valuable insight into best practices and processes other agencies follow.
Sarah
How do you sum up a week of learning and growing while surrounded by 21,000 other phenomenal marketers, sales and design professionals? It’s pretty dang hard. INBOUND is incredibly high energy conference that leaves you with constant doses FOMO because of all the high-quality sessions, celebrity spotlights and networking events that happen at all hours of the day. Since there is so much going on, it’s best if you create a goal around what you’d like to get out of the conference. This year, I focused on sessions around storytelling, creating better social videos and analytics.
Some key quotes from the conference that really spoke to me:
- The best stories evoke emotional responses.
- Strategy is a story well told.
- In multi-generational teams, empathy is your translation tool.
- If failure is not an option than neither is success.
I’m looking forward to implementing some of my more technical takeaways internally and externally for clients.
Allison
As an INBOUND veteran, I’ve seen this conference double in size over the past years. In some ways it’s hard not to feel a bit “lost in the crowd” when walking through the convention center. They key for me is to spend time planning my agenda ahead of time and picking a topic focus. This year, with so many product changes, I opted to spend most of my time in sessions that talked about product changes.
While Diagram is a Platinum HubSpot partner and while HubSpot offers sneak peeks of the upcoming changes, I still feel it’s helpful to review my understanding of the product. This helps us support our clients more effectively. Diagram's goal is to help clients make the most out of what is now a very robust marketing, sales and customer service platform. To do so, we need to stay on top of the platform changes.
HubSpot released a video with a quick explanation of all of the platform updates announced at INBOUND. I encourage you to check it out! https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/inbound-2018-hubspot-updates-in-less-time-than-a-coffee-break
For more details about Inbound 2019, which will be held in Boston from September 3-6th, visit their official site. Be sure to sign up for the email updates as sometimes they will send out special offers for discounted tickets! See you there.
