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Come Together. Get Inspired. Be Remarkable

And we did. We were. And we aim to be.

Inbound 2014, was phenomenal, just as most of us expected it to be.

First off, kudos to Inbound for accomplishing the remarkable feat of drastic growth from when it first started out in 2010 with an attendance of just 1300 to over 10,000 attendees this year, that arrived from over 50 countries around the world! This exponential growth points ever so clearly at the rising inbound movement among organizations and marketing agencies around the world.

If you were unable to attend Inbound 2014, the folks over there have been nice enough to put most of the slide decks on their website. Check them out here as well as on the Inbound website.

Inbound, at its core, is all about transforming existing pushy, profit-oriented processes to an unequivocal focus on people– employees, prospects and customers.

In this post, I just wanted to share my top 5 key takeaways from the event- concepts, ideas and strategies that really resonated with me and all the various touch points that need transformation and a fresh mindset to truly deliver value

1.) TRANSFORM YOUR LEADERSHIP

One of Inbound’s most profound takeaways came from Simon Sinek who opened with a powerful keynote – “Leaders Eat Last,” an Incredible Tale by Simon Sinek- on the responsibility of leadership. A few insights from Simon’s keynote:

• “We are social animals and we respond to the environments we are in.  This is especially true in the workplace. When we trust people we are with, we trust that the work will get done.”
• “Have a standard that you hire better than you in your functional area – A players hire A+ players
• Great leaders would sacrifice the numbers to save the people. When push comes to shove, numbers never come to your rescue – people do.
• Leaders are for the people; the people are responsible for the numbers.

2.) TRANSFORM YOUR CONTENT

• It goes without saying, that content is the foundation of the Inbound methodology. And as one would expect, several of the sessions- whether they were about SEO, social media, email marketing or blogging- all lay heavy emphasis on the underlying concept of Think, Teach, Help.

A few highlights on what qualifies as great content:

• Build content that helps your audience do something – content that equips your buyer succeed in something and encourages actions that make the community better
• Content that provides recipes that help others do business with our without your great product.
• Engage customers with what they want to talk about, not what you are interested in talking about
• Initially, it was thought that for a company to excel in Inbound, it has to master the craft of ‘thought leadership.’ But the status quo has changed. As Chris Brogan suggested, shift your focus from being a leader to being a helper.

3.) TRANSFORM THE WAY YOU DO SALES

• Hook sales activity with useful, valuable, relevant content. But always provide value, whether or not your prospects buy. For instance, if you are offering a free webinar and you offer a discount on a paid webinar that you plan to have the following week where you can delve into more detail – make sure that the free webinar is of true value to your audience as well!
• 80% sales come from between 5-11^th contact with that person. Now, more than ever, it is important to engage in warm and personable sales
• Help buyers reach their level of ownership. Get buyers to love you!
• Hubspot announced its move into the CRM space with much gusto. The company officially launched a CRM solution that is built on the same database as its marketing platform. Sidekick, a sales acceleration tool (and a new and improved version of HubSpot’s Signals tool), was also introduced. Both the new Hubspot CRM and Sidekick have singular focus- Inbound sales, which means that now you can conduct prospect research, understand context, learn your prospect’s social media activity and personalize every single interaction and the entire consumer buying process.
• Inbound is no longer just something that marketing does—it’s an approach that that penetrates all customer touch points.
• David Meerman Scott advises, “Instead of selling, you educate and inform.”

4.) TRANSFORM THE ART OF SOCIAL SELLING

• While several B2Bs are now starting to see that social media is a crucial aspect of their marketing endeavors, and not just a nice-to-have option, social selling is more than just making perfunctory posts on twitter, linkedin and facebook.
• Socially surround the folks/networks your buyer trusts. People buy from people that they know, like & trust.
• Create engaging content – that which people can and want to share with their communities.
• Scott Monty, EVP Strategy at SWIFT communications quoted Cicero, “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts” and emphasized the important of speaking in a tone that will resonate with your buyer personas.
• Despite all the intelligence, techniques and technology, social selling comes down to building authentic relationships with potential buyers that are grounded in truly delivering value and resolving pain points.

5.) TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS

Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing keynote David & Goliath: The power of the underdog revolved around Why Being ‘Disagreeable’ Can Help You Transform an Industry.I want to highlight a few points he made, that I personally thought, were incredibly wise:

• Successful transformations reframe the problem that makes the solution possible. They erase existing boundaries and start from scratch. Seemingly small innovation can revolutionize industries when we look for new solutions to old problems
• It’s simply not enough to have great ideas, focus, and disincline; you also need to be the kind of person who will tune out the naysayers and follow through on your revolutionizing ideas. Once other entrepreneurs open themselves up to new ideas, ignore the noise and get to working, they, too, can transform industries.
• The most successful entrepreneurs not only have courage and imagination, they also have a sense of urgency. They’re not willing to wait. They have a burning desire to get something done. It was the same kind of urgency Jobs’ had. The Apple co-founder visited Xerox PARC, where they had been working on a mouse-controlled computer for years, according to Gladwell. After Jobs saw the innovation, he immediately returned to his office and pushed his team to make the first Macintosh and then he went to an industrial designer and had a mouse built to accompany it at a much cheaper price than XEROX.

“Remarkable results rarely come from avoiding risk. You must try new things.” –  Dharmesh Shah

All of these bold, inspiring talks served as hefty reminder that in order to see a change in our teams, our organizations or something as large scale as the world, the change must start within us.

There has to be a revolution in the way we approach marketing. The challenge for marketers today is to be aware of context and the concerns of their audience. The modern day buyer has immense power on how and when they will engage with a company. More often than not, they are not affected and influenced by blatant advertising messages. The only way to truly set your brand apart and to survive amidst fierce competition is by understanding the modern buyers’ buying habits and personalizing your marketing as well as sales efforts to reach out and connect with them.

Author bio:
Ankita is an Inbound Marketer and tech enthusiast, with a passion for channelizing content into creative marketing and communications solutions for SMBs. She currently works at coMakeIT, where she is tasked with delivering real business results through a unique content strategy.

The post 5 Key Takeaways from INBOUND 2014 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

My topic for the presentation was Content Marketing : The Magic Wand of Inbound Marketing, where I tried to convey the importance of content centric marketing strategies, the various forms and usage of content and how a well planned content strategy can actually help take a Prospect to Lead to Opportunities. Also the presentation has a content marketing case study, based on an infographic by [x]cube LABS .

Will very soon post some pictures from the digital marketing conference but till then.. here is a little modified version of my presentation :

Content Marketing : Magic Wand of Inbound Marketing by Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury

Presented at Digital Marketing Summit, Hyderabad.

The post My Content Marketing Presentation at Digital Marketing Summit Hyderabad appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

@aimclear in session on Do’s and Don’t of Facebook Marketing

Session on Facebook Marketing

Andy Beal on Search Engine Reputation Management Session

The post SES San Francisco 2010 Photos appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Would not be able to live blog the session as I am completely down with cold and flu. But will definiely take a note of the stuff happening and making a proper post later. My sincere apologies to all my readers, please bear with me.
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I would also be attending the second day session of Search Camp 2009 in Chennai on 1st March and plan to live blog the session as well.

If you would like to experience the live coverage or participate in the discussion you can do so by signing up for the live coverage below.

<a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php?option=com_mobile&task=viewaltcast&altcast_code=3fcf0d7496″ >Search Camp 2009 – 2nd Day Live Coverage</a>

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The conference is sheduled to start from 8 am on 28th Feb. You can however, sign up for a reminder below.

Google India Search Masters Confernece

Apologies to my readers I couldn’t continue withthe live blogging yetsreday as my laptop ran dry and though they had charging points for Laptops, they were set in a different room. So charging my aptop would have meant missing some part of the conference.

However, I have taken a detailed summary of all the discussions and would be publishing them over the next few days.

The post Live Blogging of India Search Masters Conference appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Though I was initially planning to attend only the Indian Search Masters Conference, I have changed my mind and now I am all set to catch the action at Search Camp on the second day. It is going to be a pretty hectic weekend for me but probably it would be worth the effort given the fact that its just once a year that we get to have such a great gathering of search marketing professionals across the country.

I plan to live blog the sessions at Search Masters as well as Search Camp and in case you guys have any specific questions that you would like to be put forward in any of these sessions please feel free to do so and I would be happy to put forward your question in the sessions wherever its applicable and post back the answers on my blog.

As of now my schedule looks like..

• 27th Feb evening – Fly to Bangaluru
• 28th Feb morning – Attend Google Search Master 2009
• 28th Feb Evening – Fly to Chennai
• 1st March Morning – Attend Search Camp 2nd Day session
• 1st March Evening – Flying back home ( Hyderabad)

You can also read last year’s updates on Search Camp conference here.

The post Search Conference in Chennai – Search Camp 2009 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I was a little surprised to receive the email at first as I had no clue about such a conference happening and was actually considering to attend the SearchCamp 2009 in Chennai over the same weekend.

It is great to see that Google taking the initiative to meet the webmaster / SEO community in India. While there has been a few other SEO conferences in India over the last few years none of them saw any official representation from Google – also in the other International conferences though Google representatives actively participate, we have not seen Google organizing a similar conference.

The agenda of the conference would include discussion on Google Webmaster central and Best practices, Custom search, Webmaster Help Forum, Building Mobile friendly websites, Google analytics and website optimizer. Google’s Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik would also be there for an interactive session.

Indian Search Masters 2009 is the first official conference organized by Google ( the mail says so). Also, the invitation letter clearly mentions that the invitation is non-transferable and if you would like to nominate anyone else for attending the conference, it will be up to Google’s discretion to decide if that person is to be invited or not. The fact that Google has been selective in extending the invitation is really appreciated because my previous experience in some of the Search conferences in India shows that often the crowd is too big for any productive discussion and at times there is a huge difference between the knowledge level of the attendees that makes it boring for some.

*A small edit: This doesn’t seem to be the first one, though the invitation said “we would like to invite you to the first official conference for webmasters organized by Google.” it seems Google has done similar Search Master Conference in Brazil and Mexico last year.

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While Delhi SEO Meet was a good effort keeping in mind it was the first of its kind in India, Search Camp 2007 had a much wider scope in terms of the number of participants, their profile and the topics discussed. The point that caught my attention the most with the topics of discussion at Search Camp is that they also had a Black Hat guy to present and being a White hat (ok, I agree, at times Grey ) , I have a lot of inquisitiveness to learn the intricacies of high end black hat ( not that I plan to apply it, but its always good to learn ).

Reached Chennai at 10.00pm I night and could manage to get an accommodation at Hotel President after being given a full house response by four other hotels. Need to catch a good sleep now and see how the search camp goes tomorrow.

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