The Salted Stone team had an incredible time at INBOUND ‘19!
We got some face time in with long-term clients, met a bunch of awesome new people, and attended some incredible talks and workshops.
Plus it was a rare opportunity to get teammates from our U.S. and Australia offices in the same room to take part in our favourite activity — telling other people about S2.
Here are some of our team's hottest takes from the marketing industry’s favourite conference:
Andrew Levy, Operations Manager
"Customer Experience is the new brand currency. My biggest takeaway revolved around the transition of human behaviour and business expectations. Companies used to win based on a superior product or service, where today, companies win or lose based on their customer experience.
We live in a world where buyers are vocal when satisfied or dissatisfied, certainly and faith in product is slowly eroding, and expectations are high, so staying relevant and appealing is imperative. Companies are redirecting their investments into customer experience innovations and developing /implementing a sound strategy which will be more influential than any marketer, sales rep, or service person.
It’s a shift but winning the race for customers will depend on the experience, not the product or service."
Talar Malakian, Business Unit Director
"Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and Initialized Capital, gave a talk where he emphasized the importance of paid family leave. He said that since becoming a father, he's recognized the importance of prioritizing support for families in the workplace.
When I had my son, I was lucky to find support in Salted Stone and our parental leave policies. That experience has definitely allowed me to continue growing as a professional.
It’s awesome to see that more business leaders are getting on board with people-focused policies. The fact is, business growth is tied directly with social justice, ethical practices, and values-based leadership. It’s nice to know our industry is waking up to see it."
Michael Peach, Technical Marketing Manager
"The power of conversations!
With more solutions becoming available to every problem it has become more and more important to make an impact with potential customers straight away. The biggest take away I got from Inbound was the power of conversational marketing in providing answers and solutions that are both timely and relevant. This creates instant, positive associations with a brand that carry on throughout every other touchpoint a user has. David Cancel (Founder of Drift) stated that "The future of marketing is solution based selling - we need to get closer to the customer and understand they are humans and solve for their problems".
So what’s next?
As we move into 2020, a year that was featured in many futuristic movies our drive for convenience is moving from touch to speech. ComScore predicts that 50% of all searches will be accomplished by voice search next year.
If it’s not crazy enough, having faceless conversations with our friends and network via
messaging and social media, we’re now having conversations with AI driven Siri, Alexa and
Google Assist or maybe you prefer chatting with Watson, Bixby or Cortana?
The challenge for businesses in this new world of convenience and conversation is how to
stay connected to the consumer. With more choices than ever before, how you sell has
become more important than what you sell. We need to go from “being interesting” to “being interested”, asking visitors who they are, keeping track of what they do, and inviting them to share feedback so we make sure our content is hitting the mark.
Create a brand that consumers love, need and want more of! 2020 is all about ...
conversational marketing.
