Inbound Leaders – The Inbound Event for Marketing Leaders

Last May 11th I had the pleasure of attending one of the events that is becoming more notorious in the world of digital marketing: the 6th edition of Inboud Leaders. The event organized by InboudCycle took place at the WTC Auditorium in Barcelona. As every year, the objective is to present a set of talks on inbound and marketing automation by some of the leaders in marketing in our country.

Program

The detail of the programme was promising:

We were welcomed by Pep Botey of Inbound Cycle and the entire event was animated by professional presenter Enric Company, CEO of Espectalium.

Gerard Compte: 5 Hacks to Generate 1,000 Leads per Month

We started with the presentation of Gerard Compte, CEO of FindThatLead and as a great growth hacker, the title of his presentation was: 5 hacks to generate 1,000 leads per month.

He began by talking about the importance of giving love to customers. ? For example, he advised us to include gifs in your emails to make your customers fall in love with you and mentioned the importance of including a chat on your website to be there at all times in case they need you.

He then went on to discuss different tools and tricks on how to to get leads and contact them.

He recommended that you download the list of speakers of any event or meetup that is of interest to you and send them an email as if you were attending it, such as: “Is it okay if we meet at 6:00?”. Then you don’t answer them until the event is over and finally you write them an email saying that your day was complicated and how it would be for them to talk another day.

He also recommended using different tools that allow you to download all the contacts that are in a Facebook group or other media. In addition to other techniques for how to contact them at first.

Leaving aside whether or not some of the tricks or practices he explained comply with the EU-GDPR, I suppose they must work to get customers, so at least it was interesting. But I’m afraid it’s not going to be these practices that will grow Nelio’s customer base ??‍♀️.

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José Facchin: How to Align SEO With Your Content Strategy to Optimize Conversion

Then we move on to the presentation by José Facchin, a great reference in the world of digital marketing in Spanish thanks to the great content of his blog, which receives more than 450,000 visits. He is also co-founder of webescuela.com. He was the creator of SEMrush‘s blog in Spanish and Italian and has been responsible for PrestaShop‘s marketing strategy for a year and a half.

He told us about SEO strategies to gain visibility on the blog. But he also stress that SEO is not enough. The key is that the content we create on the blog must be relevant to our customers:

Jose Facchin insisted that a SEO-oriented content strategy should not focus on creating content for Google, but for the user: the user is king. Content is not king. The authentic and unique content is user-centric.

Therefore, if we want to attract traffic to our website, any content strategy must focus on the user’s needs. Knowing that you can’t talk to everyone, identify well who your Buyer Person is and write content to capture them, increase conversion and create community.

The key according to him is to start with the content strategy in reverse of what your intuition tells you. Instead of starting with the goodness of your product, start by educating your visitors about what exists in the market, the problems, and the solutions. Then, when you’ve earned their trust, you’ll talk to them about your services or tools.

He discussed how to use some tools to describe the relevant needs of your customers. For example, facebook.com/ads/audience-insights, the Google Display Network or the traffic analytics SEMRush provides you with can be very useful to better understand your users’ search intent and adapt your content to it. Keywords are no longer terms, they must be thematic search intentions that respond to the needs of your users.

He also recommended tools such as Answerthepublic, Keywordtool, Metricool, Doopler, SEOQuake or SEOLyze, among others, to search for search intentions or keywords, understand when our community is most active, send emails or to improve SEO.

José’s presentation was definitely very interesting and complete. And at the coffee-break I had the pleasure of spending some time talking to him, his wife Mariela Quiroga, administrative manager of webescuela.com and his collaborator Josep González, which is also one of the great advantages of attending this type of event, which allows you to get in touch with people with whom you can establish the bases for possible future collaborations.

Álvaro Fontanela: The Importance of Offline Events for Your Reputation

And precisely this was the main topic of Álvaro Fontela’s presentation. Álvaro is one of the founders of Raiola Netwoks, a Spanish hosting company. Basically, he commented that they started the company in 2014 and currently he is dedicated almost full-time to the participation in WordPress events (they are the organizers of WordPress Meetups in Coruña and Lugo), Digital Marketing and Web Development. His participation can be as a speaker, sponsor or assistant. Every year, he can participate in around 70 events with very different dynamics:

• Major events or congresses are the ones that work the most for them to make themselves known,
• He recognized that seminars and workshops don’t work that well for them to reach potential clients,
• Afterworks and meetups serve as an easy way to meet potential customers.

From the point of view of profitability, he acknowledged that it is very difficult to do the numbers and know to what extent off-line events are profitable. For him, the most important aspects of an event or congress were:

• You de-virtualize the contacts you already have online. Seeing faces creates confidence.
• You humanize your brand to the public attending the event. You show there are people behind your company.
• Create new prospects: people who didn’t know you may already know who you are.
• Represent the brand in front of potential clients or those who already knew you (similar to humanizing but in a more corporate environment).
• Selling: although this is the ultimate goal, it should be the direct consequence of branding.
• Enjoying networking and interacting with other great professionals in the sector in order to create a network of contacts.

Nayara D’Alama: Inbound Marketing International, Breaking Borders.

Nayara D’Alama has been responsible for the international expansion of RD Station, a company that offers an inbound marketing platform and consulting services.

Her talk focused on explaining the different difficulties and some tips when you want to open a market in a new country. Entering an international market is not only about using Google Translate, but also about understanding the culture. Therefore any inbound marketing strategy should take into account that:

1. The buyer persons and buyer’s journey can be totally different between countries. It is a research work to be carried out by region or country, never by language.
2. Content production: For example, the term “inbound marketing” is rooted in Spain but is absolutely unknown in many other countries including Spanish-speaking countries.
3. Translation: remember what translation, adaptation, and localization means. To translate is to interpret.
4. Calendar of contents: it is important to know the holiday calendars. Do not run promotions on holidays, and in turn, take advantage of special days for certain campaigns that demonstrate knowledge of the local market.
5. Sales funnel: if you want to know what’s working for you, analyze the results separately by country.
6. Participate in local events: it is a good opportunity to understand the market, branding (stand), position yourself as a reference (presentations), generate leads and sales opportunities.

Nayara commented that following an inbound marketing expansion strategy they have achieved +50K leads in the first year and +25K followers in Spanish speaking social media.

After the Nayara talk, we had lunch in a very nice room with great sea views.

I also had a chat with Pau Valdés, CEO of InboundCycle and his IT & Development Manager, Marina Mele. And I agree with Álvaro when he insists that this type of event serves to look for possible collaborations.

Álex López: Digital Selling, Active Listening to Your Potential Customers

We started the afternoon with a great presentation by Álex López, Director of Sartia and Top 20 Social Selling Worldwide. In case you are not familiar with this concept, it basically refers to when marketers use social networks to interact directly with their potential customers. Sellers provide value by answering leads’ questions and offering detailed content until the lead is ready to buy.

Alex presented himself as an adapted salesman: starting as a sales representative, passing through Sales Director of several companies, today he is Director of Sartia and professional lecturer in several business schools.

Her presentation was very lively and I personally liked the example of the process a professional should follow to select a supplier, a customer or an employee.

He explained in detail the information you can find about the companies by looking at the product reviews on social networks, seeing the reputation that the company has among its employees (looking at Glassdoor), analyzing the company’s own website or the management positions and information you will find on LinkedIn. You can also take a look at their Likes on Facebook (watch out! a person’s likes are public, whatever the security level they have set), and of course Twitter and Instagram. In the end, you have so much information at your disposal that if you don’t want to know someone’s details, it’s because you really don’t want to.

He also presented an applied example of the use of the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Application Platform, a LinkedIn application fully integrated with SalesForce and Microsoft, among other partners, that provides you with a detail of anyone and their contacts on LinkedIn, allowing you to view this segmented information in all possible ways.

He told us about the use we could make of PointDrive with LinkedIn, Profinder, Likegram, etc., and he also took the opportunity to propose to the audience to use the “Nearby” feature provided by the LinkedIn app so that we could get in touch with all the attendees. I thought it was a great idea.

Dana Camps and Mireia Reixach: 2018 The Year of Chatbots

Dana Camps and Mireia Reixach, specialist and director of InboundCycle respectively, spoke to us about the importance of chatbots. The chatbots are here to stay.

They explained their usefulness and the types of chatbots that exist differentiating between rules-based, smart machines and general AI. They also showed us examples of the different existing tools including a video where we saw two chatbots chatting with each other.

They also talked about the different tools. But I’d rather leave you with two interesting links to two spreadsheets with a detailed comparison of the chatbots tools that exist and how much they cost:
DataMonsters – Chatbots Comparative Table and Building a Bot: Chatbot Building Platforms Comparison.

It was clear to us that a lot of progress has been made on this subject but there are still challenges for the future of chatbots such as understanding slangs, abbreviations, emotions, sarcasms…

After this presentation there was the award ceremony for the best blog by David Ayala, SEO expert, owner of the SEO forum soywebmaster.com. I invite you to take a look at it and you will find information that will surely be very useful.

Noemí Arjona: Inboud Marketing Success Story

Finally, the last session was given by Noemi Arjona, E-commerce & Marketing Manager of Europe and Asia of Australis. Australis is an ecommerce company that sells expedition cruises through Patagonia. They started an inbound marketing project with Inbound Cycle and it was their first international project.

Noemi presented the company, the inbound project that was proposed, how they implemented the strategy and the results obtained. In one year they have achieved more than 30,000 visits to the website, 150 customers generated by direct sales and 450 by indirect sales. Their conclusion is that inbound marketing is a profitable investment.

Conclusion

First of all I’d like to congratulate the InboundCycle team on the Inbound Leaders event. Everything was very well organized and from my point of view it was a very productive day, not only because of the content of the talks, but also for offering us an environment in which to share and exchange impressions with other professionals in the sector.

And if I may make a suggestion to improve the event for next year’s session, it would be great to provide badgets to all attendees. For those of us who are a little shy, badgets make it easier for us to start a conversation with strangers knowing who they are beforehand ?

We’ll see you for sure next year!

Featured Image by Alice Wiegand in Creative Commons.