Thoughts on the first days of INBOUND 2016

As a fledgeling marketer, the past few months have been an eye opener for me. I graduated, moved to a new city, got married, and kicked off my marketing career at Red Clay. I have have been in full on learning mode – soaking up as much advice and knowledge as I possibly can. It has me charged up and has kept me excited for the future.

Red Clay’s marketing team is up in Boston for the week at Hubspot’s INBOUND conference. We are surrounded by thousands of marketers from a huge span of backgrounds, cultures, and ideas. In the first day, I got to hear real, palpable strategies to kick-start both our agency’s and our client’s growth.

The balance is being upset in the marketplace – startups, agencies, and others with aggressive inbound strategies are killing huge dinosaur corporations by giving people stuff they want.  This takes guts and a willingness to fail. In his keynote, Gary Vaynerchuk joked that he would never put his kids in a league that gives 7th place trophies,  and poked fun at those who whine about elections results rather than blazing their own trail. Failing in marketing (or life) is what makes us adapt and grow. The opportunity to make your own way is there; you just have to chase it.

It was refreshing to hear so many tangible ways to grow. Nobody is going to hold your hand through these, and you have to recognize failure as a way forward.  My first day’s sessions covered everything from advanced retargeting strategies to the latest in marketing tech – all of which have brand new ways to measure and track growth.

This perspective has me fired up. Being new to an interactive agency, there are so many things I can dive into. Whether it’s Adwords, building ads, digging into analytics, or implementing new content strategies for clients, INBOUND has me fired up to get my hands dirty and start searching for new ways to grow.

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