Welcome to My Blog

After months of convincing your CEO, they’ve finally approved your team’s request to go to the epic #INBOUND18 conference this year (September 4th – 7th in Boston).

Ecstatic, you exchange high fives with your teammates, book the flights and hotels, and start your countdown clock to the event.

Now what?

Instead of getting back to your regular work routine, you’ll want to take some time to plan for your week at Inbound before you go. Why? Trust, us, you’ll be glad you did.

An Event like No Other

INBOUND has become one of fastest-growing business events of the year.

It’s a fantastic chance for marketing teams to learn, network, and create meaningful relationships. What’s more, over 21,000 people attended the event last year from 100+ different countries. That’s a whole lot of sales, marketing, and customer success pros all in the same place!

With so many people and so many talks, sessions, and unique opportunities for networking happening in one week, it’s easy to get caught up in the commotion. Instead of ‘winging it’, you’ll want to plan out what you actually want to achieve from the event. Here are some key reasons why you should formulate an INBOUND game plan in advance:

Budget investment: Your company will likely be paying for your transportation, accommodation, food, and miscellaneous things while your team attends INBOUND. For smaller marketing teams with modest budgets, this is a big investment — you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the best return on investment from the event. Planning your days in advance will help keep your team’s budget in check.

Time: In addition to investing money, having you team away for a week at Inbound means that you won’t be fully able to attend to your regular work. Be sure to plan ahead so you can adjust deadlines and work around the event.

One of a kind opportunity: Unless you go to large scale conferences all the time, when else would you get the chance to network with so many marketing professionals in one week? Whether you’re looking to get new customers or partners, you’ll want to make sure that amidst all of the talks and the sessions that you’re blocking time off to make meaningful connections with the right people. Networking can easily get lost

So now you know why you should plan for INBOUND, but how can you make the most of your time there?

In this blog post, we’ll share our own tactics pre-, post and during the event to help you get the absolute most of your time at INBOUND ’18. Let’s jump in.

How to Get the Most of Your Time at INBOUND ’18

Define your objectives and strategy.

Whether you’re looking for new customers, partners for your affiliate marketing program, or just planning to learn new marketing strategies, going to Inbound can help you tremendously.

Before heading off to Boston, get your team together to review your marketing objectives and figure out how what you will do at the event to achieve them.

Our team’s main objectives are to learn new content marketing strategies and to find new co-marketing partners. So once we set those objectives, we drafted out the next steps we will take to help us get there.

If you’re unsure about why you’re going and the main reason is for the after parties and the happy hours(we don’t blame you), you’ll want take a step back and ask your team the following questions:

• What do you plan to achieve at the event?
• How will you use the event to help you achieve your business objectives?
• How will you measure your achievement?

Now that your objectives are set, it’s time to follow through with the next steps.

Create valuable content before, during, and after.

Now that you’re set go to INBOUND, spread the word! It’s time to start creating content to promote your company’s presence. This can be a great way to create buzz around the event and allow people to get in touch with you beforehand. Here are a few different of content you can create before, during, and after the event:

Promotional Images

Create different images you can use across your website, in social media messages, and in email signatures. These promotional images should encourage people to reach out to you and connect at the event in person. Be sure to include a CTA of how they get in touch with you either before or during the event.

Blog Content

Before the event: Write a blog post to help the organizers to create buzz and promote the event(like this one!). You can provide your experiences from past editions as well as new strategies you plan on testing out at this event.

During the event: With so many talks and workshops going on at the same time, it’s impossible to do everything. Live-blogging during the event can help other event attendants catch up on what they’ve missed in the sessions they couldn’t attend.

After the event: Sum up your experiences from the event by writing a recap blog post. This can include your summary of the best talks, workshops and the key takeaways you gathered. Got a great piece of downloadable content that is related to the learnings? Add it in!

Email Newsletter

Let your customers and users know that you’ll be attending the event by sending out a dedicated email. If you were thinking of hosting an user group or a customer meetup, this helps you put some feelers out to see who would be interested beforehand.

Live Content

Live content is an excellent way to engage your audience with the event. Try doing AMAs, interviews and tweet chats with event speakers and influencers using different platforms such as videos, Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and Snapchat.

Stay on top of the event hashtag: #INBOUND18

A lot can happen and change during the time leading up to a large scale event.

New keynote speakers could be added, venues can change, and there could be side networking gigs that you didn’t know about. You’ll need to be a part of the event conversation in order to know what’s going on, but also to network and engage with attendees.

For these reasons, it’s important to follow the event hashtag on social media closely, and this is where social listening will come in handy.

Not only can using a social listening tool help you stay on top of the main conversations around the event, it also a great way to do research before the event. You’ll want to use a tool that can help you:

• See what people are saying pre, during, and post event
• Respond quickly to answer questions and engage with attendees
• Identify influencers amongst attendees to connect with

After the event, you can create a recap report with the event hashtag (#INBOUND18). Show interesting insights such as how the volume of event hashtag evolved during the event, which influencers were mentioned the most, and which social platforms were most used to talk about it.

Finally, turn all of this valuable data into a blog post or downloadable PDF so you can get even more out of your experience.

See different sessions from your teammates.

One of the challenges about going to large events is that there are way too many great speakers and sessions to see, usually all at the same time. Life is hard, we know.

And one of the great things about going to conferences with a team is that you can divide and conquer!

As you can’t possibly attend every session, split up with your team so you can learn different things from different talks. Be sure to jot down key takeaways from them and have a debriefing session over coffee or lunch the day.

To go one step further, plan a knowledge sharing or retrospective session with the rest of your team who couldn’t attend to share your key learnings. I’ve personally made this one of my objectives for Inbound, so my teammates will be holding me to it!

Don’t forget business cards.

Everything about events is digitized nowadays. From the organization, scheduling, to networking, everything can be done without interacting with someone in person. This makes the face-to-face aspect of attending events extremely valuable.

Social media is fleeting, so it’s a good idea to give people you interact with something physical that will remind them of your interaction. Whether it’s a business card, pens, or USB drives — who doesn’t love free event swag?

If you’ve never ordered event swag before, try to go for something out of the ordinary. We all have enough tote bags!

FYI. We’re bringing macarons from Paris. Do we have your attention now?

Are you prepared for INBOUND18?

Don’t let time leading up to INBOUND18 pass you by! Make the most of your time by using some tips from this guide to prepare for your trip.

Start registering for the sessions you want to attend, reach out to people you want to connect with, and track the conversations around the event.

Since blockchain technology hasn’t been widely implemented, it makes sense that the SMB community considers it to be the most difficult emerging technology to understand.

But with over $1.3 billion invested in blockchain companies during the first five months of 2018, leaders in tech and finance believe the technology will become mainstream and revolutionize the way we do business.

Small- to medium-sized businesses that implement blockchain technology could safely and securely store their customers’ most sensitive information, like personal data and passwords. And companies that decide to adopt blockchain technology after it becomes commonplace could lose customers to the businesses who already protect their customers’ data with the technology.

It’s possible that Blockchain technology will eventually impact your industry and business in one way or another, so if you don’t know exactly what blockchain is or how it works, here’s a quick two minute rundown.

Think of Blockchain as a spreadsheet that is copied and sent to every computer in the network. To make sure the spreadsheet’s true state is verified and updated, the network references and communicates with each other to see if all the spreadsheet copies are the same.

If one of the copies isn’t the same, due to someone manipulating a transaction’s record after the fact, the network rejects the transaction. This halts hackers from altering the spreadsheet to send someone else’s digital currency to themselves.

By connecting consumers directly with suppliers, Blockchain also removes the need for a middle man, like a bank, to complete transactions. This makes economic transfers faster, cheaper, and more secure.

How does blockchain work?

Below, we’ve fleshed out a concrete example of how blockchain works. Before we show you the example, though, you first need to know the three components that make up a blockchain:

• A record, which is all the information of a digital transaction.
• The block, which is a bundle of records.
• The chain, which is all the blocks linked together.

Blockchain in Action

1. Jack agrees to sell two coins for $50 to Jill. The record of this trade lists its transaction details, which includes a time stamp and a unique cryptographic signature.

2. The transaction is distributed to every computer in the network.

3. The network of computers or “nodes” scans and cross-references every copy of the database to make sure the transaction is unique and valid.

4. If the network approves the record’s validity, minders add it to a block. Each block has a unique code called a hash on one of its sides and the hash of the previous block in the chain on its other side, which link the blocks together in a chronological and permanent fashion.

5. Jill receives two coins from Jack, and Jack receives $50 from Jill.

It’s better to prepare than to regret.

Blockchain technology’s potential impact on the business world could drastically change the expectations of your customers. If you learn about the emerging technology’s use cases and benefits now, rather than later, you won’t risk falling behind.

In 2017, businesses acquired an average $7.65 ROI for every dollar spent on influencer marketing. Nowadays, influencer marketing is an indisputably viable marketing method.

However, it can be tricky to know who to trust when you’re choosing an Instagram influencer for your next marketing campaign. You don’t want to use an influencer who doesn’t have real followers or a fully engaged audience. This would be a detriment to your marketing budget, but even worse, it could put your brand’s integrity at risk.

Fortunately, there are some quick and easy methods to determine whether an account has fake followers on Instagram. Once you’ve collected a list of potential influencers for your next Instagram marketing campaign, take a look at some of our tips and tools for detecting fake followers or bots, so you can ensure you’re only working with the best.

Instagram Bot

In the last few years, it has become popular practice for some people to buy bots to increase their followers on social media accounts — in January 2018, The New York Times published “The Follower Factory,” to highlight this shady tactic. Essentially, someone will buy a bot, and the bot will like and comment on posts with a specific hashtag, or follow people with the hope that those people will then follow them back.

You don’t want to pay an influencer if she uses a bot to collect followers. A bot might increase her follower count, but her audience probably isn’t truly engaged or authentic. Plus, using an insincere influencer could throw your business’s integrity into question.

To figure out if an Instagram account uses a bot, consider these five tips:

1. Take a look at the account’s comments on other people’s posts. If the comments are repeatedly generic, i.e. “Pretty pic”, its a sign there’s a bot behind the profile.
2. Check if the account has tons of followers, but terrible content. Trust your judgment — if your influencer has 10,000 followers but only uploads below-average posts, her followers might not be legitimate.
3. See if after you follow the account, they unfollow you. If you follow your influencer but then she unfollows you, it could be a bot, cleaning up her follow-to-follower ratio.
4. Be wary if they follow you again after you don’t follow them back. A bot is programmed to repeatedly follow and unfollow you, until you return the favor.
5. Consider them a bot if they follow thousands of accounts, but only have a few followers in return. If the ratio seems way off, its likely a bot.

Ultimately, using your judgment is the best way to determine whether an account uses a bot. If the account takes actions you can’t necessarily justify, its likely because it’s not a human behind the screen.

Instagram Audit

There are a few different Instagram auditing tools out there to quickly scan your influencer’s account, and provide statistics regarding their authenticity and engagement score (i.e. how often their audience actually comments or likes a post). Let’s take a look at three now.

1. IG Audit

Price: Free

IG Audit has a nondescript user interface, but it does the trick — for public accounts, that is. Most influencers already have a public account, in which case, you simply enter their username into IG Audit’s search box and they’ll provide you with an estimated real to fake follower ratio. Built by a former NASA Scientist, the tool randomly scans 200 followers — based on those followers, it gives the Instagram account a score out of 100. For instance, I scanned Rebecca Kufrin, America’s newest Bachelorette, and she received a real follower score of 93%.

2. FakeCheck.co

Price: $1 per credit to unlock information

FakeCheck.co analyzes Instagram accounts by collecting data regarding the account followers’ engagement level. As they rationalize, “If the resulting ratio for likes and comments based on the number of follower is outside the industry standard, it is likely that the account has paid Instagram followers”. The site is user-friendly, and offers additional information, such as the top ten Instagram social engagement accounts from the past 30 days. However, unlike IG Audit, you’ll need to pay to unlock information. Fortunately, the cost is low, starting at only one dollar. For instance, I scanned Taylor Swift’s Instagram account, but I’m unable to see average likes or comments without paying for it.

3. Social Audit Pro

Price: $5 for 5,000 followers, $20 for 20,000 followers

Social Audit Pro is a paid service, but you get your money’s worth. They offer useful analytics about other public accounts on Instagram, and also provide a cleanup tool to remove any of your followers that might’ve been flagged as fake or dormant. The cost is reasonable, and you can use the tool to compare your Instagram influencers and fairly determine how many people they’re truly reaching and engaging.

Remember, fake followers can’t become real customers, so it’s critical you find influencers who can connect your business with the right people. Take the time to collect data and thoroughly examine Instagram accounts before choosing an influencer, so you know you’re not inadvertently getting involved in disreputable social media tactics.

Although the exact day and time you post content to Instagram matters less than it used to — your followers’ newsfeeds are organized by relevance and engagement, rather than post age — it’s still very important.

And now, you can schedule Instagram posts to make it even easier.

Let’s say 10% of your audience is online on Tuesday at 3 p.m. You post a creative GIF showcasing your latest product. Because not many people are scrolling through Instagram, it gets fewer likes and comments than your average post. Instagram’s algorithm interprets this as the post is less appealing than your typical content, so it’s displayed to a smaller percentage of your network.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to figure out when your followers are most active and post on those days and times. (Need a tool for this? Try Iconosquare or Squarelovin.)

While having this information is useful, you do have to wait — poised over your phone or computer — for the specific hour to strike. I don’t know about you, but I prefer the “set it and forget it” approach.

Luckily, Instagram’s API that lets users of marketing tools like HubSpot schedule Instagram posts in advance. In other words, if you use social media scheduling software, you can upload your content and choose when it will go live on Instagram.

To start, you’ll need a third-party scheduling tool to do the scheduling. Below are a few handy options, most of which offer mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices.

1. Later

Price: Free for individuals, business plans start at $19/month

Later is a social media post scheduler, dedicated to Instagram. The platform includes a full social content calendar, drag-and-drop post planning, and the ability to publish automatically to your Instagram Business profile. In addition, the service’s Linkin.bio feature allows you to link certain posts to specific product pages.

2. Tailwind

Price: $9.99/month for bloggers & small businesses

Tailwind is a social media scheduling toolkit specifically for Instagram and Pinterest. Using smart features like bulk image uploading and a built-in Hashtag Finder, the tool allows small businesses to quickly personalize their Instagram profiles to their audience.

3. Buffer

Price: Free with limited scheduling, business plans start at $15/month

Buffer schedules social media posts across six social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. The tool allows users to manage their social posts from one dashboard and schedule content as they discover it online. In addition to a mobile app for iOS and Android, Buffer also offers an extension for your internet browser.

4. Schedugram

Price: $20/month for one social account

Schedugram is an Instagram post scheduler that includes a photo editor. The tool allows you to plan out a long-term posting calendar while modifying image details prior to publishing. With features like Product Tagging, a user’s potential customers can also make purchases from Instagram posts.

5. Sprout Social

Price: Plans start at $99/month per user

Sprout Social, compatible with six major social networks, is a social media content calendar that allows you to schedule posts and measure multiple aspects of their engagement once they go live. The platform’s “social listening” abilities help users identify unique trends across their social content and apply these trends to the rest of their marketing strategy.

6. Autogrammer

Price: Plans start at $9.99/month

Autogrammer is a social media post scheduler for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Users can bulk-upload images and automatically schedule posts for multiple social media accounts on the same calendar. Like Schedulgram, Autogrammer also includes a photo editor where you can crop, rotate, recolor, and apply filters to photos before they’re scheduled.

7. HubSpot

HubSpot is our growth platform, bringing together numerous sales, marketing, and customer service tools — one of which is a social media publishing calendar. You can learn exactly how our scheduling tool works in the step-by-step instructions below.

Now, let’s dive into how to schedule Instagram posts for an Instagram Business page — which you’ll need — using HubSpot:

1. Ensure you have admin access to your Facebook Business Page.

Instagram and Facebook might be separate accounts to you personally, but businesses that want to automate their Instagram posting schedule will need to tether both accounts together. So, you’ll need the username and password of your business’s Facebook account to do this.

2. Switch to your Business profile on the Instagram mobile app and connect this account to Facebook.

If you have a personal Instagram account, you probably know you can manage more than one profile from the app — and the other profile is your business account (keep in mind you’ll need an Instagram Business account to schedule Instagram posts in HubSpot).

To switch to your Instagram Business page from your personal page, navigate to your profile on your mobile device and tap the thee dots in the upper-right corner of your screen. Then, in the next screen, select “Switch to Business Profile,” as shown below:

Under “Settings,” select “Linked Accounts.” Here’s where you can select Facebook and link your two accounts together. You might be asked to “Log in With Facebook,” at which point you’ll enter your business account’s username and password. Otherwise, select “Continue as [yourself].”

3. Open HubSpot and use the “Social” tool to integrate your Instagram profile.

Now that your Instagram profile is anchored to Facebook, you’re ready to integrate it with your post scheduler. For our purposes, we’ll be using HubSpot’s Social tool.

Open HubSpot, select the “Marketing” dropdown, and click “Social,” as shown below.

On your first time opening HubSpot’s Social tool, you’ll see an orange button to “Connect accounts.” Click it, and it will bring you to the following progress screen:

Click the first option, “Facebook & Instagram,” and follow the prompts to complete this integration. For more details, see the full connection instructions by HubSpot Academy.

4. Create your first social post for your Instagram account.

Once your Instagram account is integrated into HubSpot, you’ll see an option to “Create social post” in the top-righthand corner of your HubSpot dashboard. Click it, and you’ll see icons for which social network you want to start with. Select the Instagram icon to compose your first post for your Instagram account.

5. Compose a message with your desired visual assets, captions, and hashtags.

Upload your image using the landscape icons on the bottom-lefthand corner of the white text field that appears, as shown below:

Then, caption your image with the text, hashtags, and user mentions you’d like to post your photo with, as they should appear on Instagram.

6. Set the date and time of your Instagram post.

Just above the photo you’re posting, you’ll see a field labeled “When:”. Use this field to set the exact date and time you want your post to automatically go live on your Instagram profile.

Pro tip: Social media content posted a few minutes before or after a round hour often gets better engagement than content that’s posted at, say, exactly 9:00 a.m. This makes your post seem more human to your followers, increasing the chances of them clicking on it (ex: 9:03, 10:58, 2:31, etc).

7. Preview your post to make sure it looks right.

Any grammatical errors? Are all your intended hashtags included? Is the image successfully uploaded? Check to make sure, and you’ll be ready to schedule.

8. Click “Schedule message.”

As you might be able to tell from the screenshot in Step 5, you can schedule your social posts in bulk. Got any more Instagram posts planned? Draft them now and schedule all of them at the same time. Once every post you want to schedule has been loaded into HubSpot, you can hit the orange “Schedule message” button on the bottom lefthand corner of your compose window.

Post automating isn’t available for Ads, nor will you be able to use it within Instagram itself. This means unless you’ve got a tool hooked up to your account, you’ll still have to time that picture from brunch strategically.