25,000 marketing fanatics made the pilgrimage to Boston for INBOUND 2019 last week, an annual conference hosted by our partners at Hubspot.
At the conference, Hubspot unveiled a new app marketplace, announced improvements to the CRM platform (with some awesome new machine learning features), and talked about the importance of embracing diversity in the workplace.
But the most important takeaway from the conference, at least from our perspective, was the introduction of a new and FANTASTIC new term to describe the next wave of brand and marketing strategists:
Experience Disrupters.
Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, used the term to summarize his keynote, and it quickly became the buzzword of the conference (for obvious reasons). Halligan emphasized the clear opportunities here for marketers in the age of data collection and machine learning, and spoke about the need for putting the customer’s needs first and using data to personalize their experience.
Most importantly, he once again brought up the “flywheel” and those infamous words: “frictionless experience.”
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the most successful companies are those which provide an exceptional customer experience; one that people will literally write home about (via a Google review, of course).
Here’s a few things we gathered from our favorite keynote speakers at INBOUND 2019, all of which are tips for providing a frictionless experience:
1. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.
Too often, we come across a company doing something God-awful to their customers, but they don’t even realize what a terrible experience it is because they’ve never been on the receiving end. It’s important to look inwards occasionally to see how your customers are treated.
Here’s a tip: Secret shop your company by reaching out from an unknown email address or phone number and seeing how each of your company’s touchpoints are received. Trust us, it’ll be enlightening (and not always in a good way).
2. “Mo’ CTAs Mo’ Money” – @JonDick
In years past, marketers were told to KEEP IT SIMPLE and PROVIDE ONE CLEAR CALL TO ACTION.
But, like, it’s 2019 and people want to choose their own path.
Give people multiple options for next steps to take with you; not everyone is ready to “submit a request for more info” or “schedule a meeting” right this second. Sometimes people want a quick phone call. Sometimes people want to download a quick spec sheet so they can share with their colleagues. It’s 2019, and people want to be able to take next steps when, and more importantly HOW, they want.
3. The number one source of friction in the buying process: TIME.
Again, it’s 2019 and consumers are moving faster than ever, and they expect your company to do the same. They want to be able to research your product or service, find the information they need almost immediately; this means you need clean and user-friendly websites in mobile-responsive formats, and ANSWERS to their questions should be available within just a couple of clicks (this is where blogs come into play, but more on that in another post)
Most importantly, customers want to be able to talk to a human. Implement a web chat app on your website (like Google Business Messaging), ensure your sales team is answering incoming web leads within 24 hours, and make sure you have a clear and succinct phone operator/voicemail system (and obviously that those voicemails are being answered within 24 hours).
We know that all the above sounds daunting, but hey- that’s what it takes to be an experience disruptor.
