Customer delight is such an underrated business strategy. And that's one thing HubSpot has learnt to do well – really, really well. The result is many happy customers and 19,000 attendees from 92 countries at INBOUND 2016.
I'm writing this little update from a fantastic coffee joint on Harvard Avenue and all I can think of is how inspiring the Inbound movement has become and how much it has grown. I'm also sipping on an excellent cortado, which is as close to a Melbourne-style latte as you can get in the States.
19,000 attendees from 92 countries! Such a crazy statistic. HubSpot has really found the secret sauce of focusing on building a great product and then do one other thing really really well. I also found that a lot of learning and major themes were around how marketing automation uses neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
I'm listing out my favourite speakers this year that made this long trip to Boston worth it.
Kim Malone Scott
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing Your Humanity
As a part of my learning more about leadership, I've been following Candor's work from afar and, having met Kim in a previous life, I was ecstatic to hear from her again in person. What I also learnt is that passionate people want their life's work to be about fuelling a movement that makes a change even without them being directly involved in its promotion – hopefully we'll be able to do that in Melbourne too.
She shared an excellent tool, Gauge, that's built to send you weekly reports that show how people feel about your feedback. You will improve naturally as you see how your praise and criticism are perceived in the Radical Candor™ framework. Plus, the Gauge will give you specific tips for better impromptu feedback.
Kim Scott shared techniques for giving, getting and encouraging better guidance.
"Guidance is praise and criticism – often called 'feedback'. But feedback is screechy and makes people want to put their hands over their ears, while guidance is something most people long for."
Great bosses must also get guidance (especially criticism) from employees, and encourage it between them.
"Your employees need to know when their work is good and when it is bad. And yet most people are profoundly uncomfortable with praise and criticism. Criticism can feel brutal, and praise can feel patronizing. Giving guidance—praise and criticism—is hard and feels unnatural, but it’s just the beginning."
Hope that these resources help you have better relationships at work and do the best work of your lives. Well, it's certainly helped me be a better boss and I hope that we can get Radical Candor represented well in Australia and perhaps urge them to come be a speaker at TEDxStKilda!
Oli Gardner
The Conversion Equations
The Co-Founder at Unbounce, Oli Gardner touched upon something that we take quite seriously at Connect Labs – conversions. He spoke about how the future of marketing will be conversion optimisation.
He started off with a golden nugget:
Your website has to tell a story but the way you tell it has to be backed by psychology to help the conversion process. Oli has created a website optimisation framework called the Clarity Equation which maps stories and metrics to increase conversion rates and delight customers. You can make a copy of the Clarity Equation Calculator to test your own landing pages and make improvements accordingly.
Here are some other tools shared by him:
- Unbounce: For building and testing landing pages
- Upwork: For getting landing pages built in Unbounce for $25
- The De-Jargonator: For calling bullshit on your copywriting (and for fun)
- Usability Hub: For running qualitative 5-second tests
- Contrast Ratio Calculator: For determining the contrast between your copy and the background
- Readability Score: For calculating how complex your copy is
- Typography Golden Ratio: For typesetting your content
- Link Analyzer: For counting and auditing the links on your page
Conversion automation is definitely where marketing automation is headed and it's a no-brainer to get executive buy-in as it maps directly to increasing conversion and delighting customers.
All of Oli's resources listed on this epic knowledge-dropping page on the internet.
Tom Shapiro
Using Neuroscience to Increase Customer Acquisition
I found the sessions on neuroscience really enjoyable. It actually makes sense to use science-backed knowledge and data to drive design decisions in the marketing process.
Last year, PhD students from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley calculated that the human brain is up to 30 times more powerful than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Yet think of all the companies that are more focused on managing campaigns than understanding how their audience’s brains function.
According to Nielsen, 90% of buying decisions are based on the subconscious. It’s with a clearer understanding of the brain that you can connect more deeply, engage more meaningfully, and guide your audience to action.
The end result is that your marketing does not need to focus on convincing others of your product’s or service’s worth. Instead, your marketing works to cultivate a highly targeted audience that emotionally yearns to do business with you.
If you don't want to weaken the conversion process here's a snapshot of learnings:
- Purchase decisions are based on emotions
- The mind wanders 30% of the time
- Surprise amplifies your feelings
- Remove a pain point and achieve goals
- The brain processes visuals 60 thousand times faster than text
- Colour increases brand recognition by a whopping 80%
- Specificity works – be more focused on what your CTA says
- Too many options can lead to purchasing paralysis
Angela Duckworth
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, an education speaker and co-founder of the Character Lab. She authored the immediate New York Times bestseller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
Without saying any more, here's her TED Talk to leave you inspired about how powerful passion can become with great persevearance:
I've basically come back to work not just trying to reinvent the wheel but trying to use these learnings to make Connect Labs find more ways to make our clients successful.
Join us on November 30 for our next Melbourne HUG event to learn more about INBOUND 2016.
