We went to the largest marketing conference in the U.S. Here’s what we learned.

Professional conferences can be a lot of things, predominantly an overload of information. No cap.

Listen, I know we’ve been taught not to use generational slang in our professional efforts; like everything in 2024, things are changing. Read on.

Our team recently went to Inbound in Boston, HubSpot's three-day conference dedicated to the latest trends and tactics in marketing, sales and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It’s always a highly useful event, and we want to share the highlights of what we learned here.

The information provided during our three days there was akin to drinking from a fire hose. We’ve got so much to say about what we learned that we’re breaking this up into two parts. Here are the first half of our biggest takeaways.

The SE in SEO now means “search everywhere” not just search engine.

In 2024, 17% of question search traffic was on social media according to NP Digital, meaning that consumers are starting to use social media as a search engine. Social searches are different from search engine searches because social media platforms account for social relationships between the results and the searcher, not just the keywords in the query.

A recent poll by Adobe Express showed that two out of three Gen Zers use Tik-Tok to search for information. This means that content, especially short form video, is going to become more and more important — and so is your ability to engage with your audience.

While we’re talking about search, lexical search is over. Learn “semantic search.” 

Lexical search is keyword searching. It relies on matching literal words and phrases in the query for search indexing. Semantic search interprets the meaning, words or phrases through AI rather than just matching keywords.

“If you don't understand the intent of search terms and phrases, and you treat SEO like it's 2012, you're gonna have a bad time,” laughed AKC social media expert Nicholas Wilkening. “Figure out the intent of a search term or phrase and you'll have more success in your SEO/SEM efforts.”

What does this mean in practice? Instead of just stuffing your copy with keywords, consider the intent of the search. Use natural sounding language, and structure your copy with bullets and boldface phrases to make it easy to scan.

Now, while you’re writing brilliant copy to land search hits, don’t forget that video is still king. 

We repeat: video is king.

A report by Wyzowl found that 73% of people prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service. Additionally, 88% of people said they've been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand's video. Given the growing popularity of social search, short form video is a key way for certain demographics to find your products and services. 

Because of how video is being consumed, Inbound experts suggested focusing on how-to videos and moving away from more formal, traditional “talking head” style videos. 

As you’re distributing this video content, we do have a couple notes on email marketing trends as well.

According to a presentation we attended, “negative tone” subject lines increase open rates by 34%. During that same session, we learned it’s okay to experiment with a little bit of slang, and subject lines that capitalize the non-first word also increase open rates.

Confused? Here’s an example: “no cap, most companies make this MISTAKE in their email subject lines.”

Now that we’ve been deep in the weeds, let’s take a minute to get back to basics. While we’re trying to juggle all these different marketing strategies, it is easy to get lost in the story.  Don’t forget it is HUGELY important for consumers to easily understand what you do.

Don’t sacrifice clarity to the art of telling your story. 

How will you solve someone’s pain points? Why should they choose you? What makes you different from your competitors? Websites and brands that lead with this have more success converting customers, according to research by NP Digital.

TL;DR: 

• People are usually looking for useful information or things they need. 
• We’ve got an increasingly CONFUSING relationship with capital letters. 
• It’s not realistic to be so excited about everything all the time. A little negativity can bring refreshing balance to someone’s email inbox. 
• When you’re assessing your content strategy, don’t just send sales emails; strive to become useful. 
• How-to and listical style content still get the best engagement, especially as short form video. 
• It’s going to be worth it to focus on quality and distribute a few pieces of really good content, rather than just quantity.
  

Stay tuned for our next post about how to build an AI agent that can help your marketing efforts. Spoiler alert: AI isn’t going to take your job, but someone who knows how to use it better will. 

If you want help using any of the tips we’ve written about here, we’re for hire! Get in touch at content@akcmarketing.com!