Disclaimer: Just to let you know, both I and About Inbound have no affiliation to the INBOUND event. This is an independent guide with helpful information based on our experiences  and is meant for those travelling to INBOUND this year. Particularly first timers that are travelling internationally.  If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear them. For official information visit inbound.com

We're well into summer and many of our clients are starting to plan their trips to  Inbound 2018., the annual event that is held from the 4th until the 7th of September. This is the time of year that the questions about planning and preparation for Inbound crop up again. To make life as easy as possible for everyone, we decided to write down some of the most asked travel and preparation tips for the Inbound conference in 2018 for easy reference.

Have you gotten stuck or felt restricted by Hubspot's email layout editing features? We know we have wished it to be more intuitive. We often see clients getting confused during the process of creating their email layouts using Hubspot. We recently spotted a very exciting feature in one Hubspot portal that might make these struggles a thing of the past!

The current options for group training and collaboration for remote teams/audiences can be divided in 2 distinct approaches. You can fly your team to a central location for one or more days to collaborate and learn the skills needed or, set a date and time and use one of the many remote meeting tools with video, audio and screen sharing for self paced training and collaboration. The second approach needs far less investment but often results in less engagement. We recently found out that there will soon be a third option that could provide a better balance between these time/cost and results trade offs. You will soon be able to get your audience into a virtual room using your existing devices and VR. 

Back in December 2017 we started having major issues with our Hubspot social integrated twitter accounts at About Inbound. We ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on and lost a lot of time posting tweets that did not have any reach, so much so that we wrote a blog post about how API integration issues can cause major disruptions that we as marketers should be conscious of the integrations we depend on. Frustrated with our unsatisfactory workaround (as we'd have to guess when the problem might reoccur and on every occurrence we would loose time and followers) we kept a close eye on twitter development sources and Hubspot product updates. 

It was around 12 noon when we met with Jonny - CEO of meetingroom.io, to get a demo of the latest iteration of their interactive room. We already knew a bit about the concept and were excited to see what kind of scope the service might have for providing remote training and virtual meeting opportunities. Jonny warmly welcomed me into the meeting where he and Vourneen were already having a chat at a round table in the demo room. The space was fairly large, with two windows looking out onto an infinite plane of rippling water. The room’s four walls were covered with various screens and whiteboard surfaces. 

The startup world is so dynamic and different from the world of Enterprise, that it can be extremely difficult to anchor your growth with the appropriate processes. Bringing in quality leads and converting them into customers is always a top priority in business but any startup growth model is by definition very dynamic. This makes it extra difficult to build the right inbound sales team and put in place the right sales processes to support the rapid growth and flexibility needed for your startup to be successful.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if your API based marketing automation sucess would fall apart? or your marketing integrations would stop? Do you have any backup plan or supporting processes?

In this article we will explore what the implications can be and why you should make sure to monitor and plan for integration failures.

We just don’t buy like we used to. Instead of reaching out to sales people or going into stores early on in our journey, we begin with research on Google, seeking out recommendations from our network on Facebook or LinkedIn and consuming content online. By the time we speak to sales, our mind is just about made up about the purchase. So why is it that we still market like it’s 2005 and treat our potential buyers as if they want to be sold at? Technology has facilitated the shift in buying for years. This has changed consumer attitudes in B2B and B2C which dictates us to change our marketing tactics. Increased regulations like GDPR and PECR also mean that as marketers we have to change our behavior.

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So you are pushing out content to your social media followers via Hubspot and have built up some decent content sources to re-tweet, Facebook send out on Linkedin etc. Now how do you drive your audience to engage with you and generate more leads? Remember that according to the inbound methodology your first priority should always be to drive value. Social monitoring plays a key part into understanding

your social audience and providing them with value. To help you get the most out of the Hubspot tools we will dive into Hubspot's social monitoring settings and give you some great Twitter workflow tips to use them effectively.

You are possibly wondering what linear algebra has to do with social media. Let me explain. I listened to Dharmesh Shah introduce the concept of what he called “vector alignment” while attending the Inbound17 event. He came up with this idea based on a conversation he had previously with Elon Musk. This concept is very simple yet most organisations find it difficult to implement or worse overlook it completely as a priority.