Inbound - Report From the Field Day Two

By the afternoon of Day 2, Inbound becomes an exercise in mental stamina.  So. Much. Marketing.  

Whereas the first day was full of big concepts and big ideas, day two seemed more about getting down to business.  The first session of the day had some prep work on the screen when we walked in:

Hopped up on coffee and adrenaline, we followed along as the speaker used generative AI to map a data-driven customer journey.  He followed it up by building target customer personas and drafting new ads meant to plug holes in the customer journey.  Our notes are a fever dream of multi-modal AI prompts.  

For lunch, we enjoyed a bite-sized discussion with Kara Swisher talking about the dangers and promises of emerging technology.  Kara is a scion in the technology industry and her trademark combination of wit and insight were as advertised.  

Then it was back to the heavy content, as speakers tackled everything from SEO to attribution modeling.  

Of particular interest to us and our clients was the impact of AI on SEO.  It is clear that AI is eroding search traffic.  When potential guests search for content relevant to a hotel, the in-browser AI often provides effective answers, eliminating the need for the user to visit the property website.  We attended several sessions from industry leaders on how to break through the paradigm and rank within the AI answers.  This is the new frontier of SEO, and one thing is clear; entirely new tactics will be required to achieve relevance in an AI-driven world.

We learned about the new buyer journey, how to more effectively use creative in LinkedIn, how to integrate emerging technology responsibly and how to balance media across social advertising channels.  Our collective notes have reached 47 pages, and we still have a day to go.  Inbound is bountiful.

*No AI was harmed in the composition of this blog post.

Inbound - Report From the Field Day One

Day one is in the books for GCommerce and our partners at Inbound.  As expected, AI is in the spotlight as the technology moves from aspirational to operational.  The pace of innovation is exciting and daunting.  Moore’s law states that computers double in power every 18 months.  Today we learned that AI models are doubling in capability every 6 months.  It reminds us to never get stuck building future strategies on the limitations of today.

Transformational marketing technology is making its way into the hands of marketers at companies of every size. We learned how prospecting has gone from a human-led exercise in futility to an AI-led process of precision.   We learned how conversion-rate optimization can take on new meanings as technology enables the connection of dynamic guest profiles to their website experience - with jaw-dopping results.  We learned how AI will graduate in the coming year from accelerating our marketing organizations to transforming them.  The future is truly boundless.

Our love of Inbound can be described in this dichotomy.  While our heads were spacewalking in the stars, we were also grounded with content that can help us, and our clients, tomorrow.  No development necessary.

Google announced exciting new AI-driven ad targeting, available to those who know how to access it.  We heard compelling statistical data about what makes a successful email campaign, from headline to copy to imagery (quick takeaway - the hospitality industry has a LOT to learn).  We learned about how understanding psychological triggers can allow us to reposition copy for success, and how to build more efficient LinkedIn campaigns.  

Finally, we were grateful to hear that the issues our industry has with attribution tracking are not ours alone.  As browsers continue their regulation and relegation of cookies, the systems we have all relied on for tracking are breaking at their core.  Not only that, the traffic sources that have been a near constant for a decade are degrading.  From the opening session with the CEO and CTO of HubSpot, we heard that search volume will drop 25% in the next two years thanks to AI.  Social traffic is plummeting, in no small part because those channels are suppressing content that contains outside links (they want to protect their walled gardens).  

We concluded the day with a feast for the ages with our close partners - all of whom experienced Inbound for the first time.  We talked about our takeaways and how we all planned to prepare for 2025 budgets.  Most of all, we bonded over stories of hospitality, the industry we all love, newly relevant in the world of Inbound.  
If this all sounds like too much fun for us to have alone, sign up to learn more about our plans for Inbound 2025 and how you can join. 

Why Inbound: A Hotel Marketer’s Guide

It’s the evening before Inbound 2024, and as I sit in my Boston hotel room, I’m reflecting on the impact this conference has had on me and GCommerce over the years. I attended my first Inbound in 2016. At the time, GCommerce was a much smaller organization, and investing in educational conferences was pretty new to us. And all we knew about Inbound was that it was one of the largest marketing conferences in the world (even at that time), and that we wanted inspiration from outside our industry to ensure we stayed on the cutting edge of digital trends and consumer behavior. What we found exceeded our expectations and made our annual attendance more of a pilgrimage than a perfunctory event.  

To be clear, Inbound is hosted by Hubspot, and it is primarily a B2B-focused event. So you might think, “How is this relevant to hotel marketing?” The best way to explain it is by way of a few examples. 

Example #1 - The rise of voice search

Over the years in digital marketing, we’ve been faced with a few highly memorable changes in our space. One of the most transformative moments I recall was the rise of mobile and voice search. In 2015-2016, “search” as we knew it fundamentally changed.

Google Voice Search

Google announced a faster and more accurate acoustic model for voice search and dictation on Android and iOS devices. 

Amazon Echo

The Amazon Echo became the first mainstream smart home device in 2015. 

Voice search on remote controls

Some Sony remote controls released in 2015 had a voice search function that could be activated by pressing and holding the microphone button. 

Local voice search

Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches, which led to an increase in local voice search. This allowed retailers and marketers to target ads to local search users, even in specific geographic areas.

Inbound education

In 2016, two separate speakers provided a deep dive into voice search.  One of the speakers charted the rising impact of voice search and forecasted its importance for future marketing relevance. The other provided an educational deep dive, where she used examples from her role marketing a regional healthcare provider to demonstrate actionable tactics to better optimize for voice.

What did we do?

With the learnings from Inbound, we doubled down on our local SEO efforts for our hotel clients. We also refined our schema markup process and worked with each hotel in creating an FAQ page that would be easily crawlable lending itself to common voice searches.

Example #2 - Creating a frictionless customer experience

While not necessarily a novel concept, in 2019, Inbound’s content really leaned into the idea that you needed to remove all points of friction during the sales journey for your business. That includes:

- All pricing online

- all products free to try

- no forms or gates in front of content

- no custom contracts

- no hidden pricing

- all purchasing made simple

- underpinned with great service

Humans shy away from friction, so prioritizing a frictionless experience would, in turn, mean more happy customers.

Inbound education

One speaker, in particular, challenged us to rethink the friction we all accept as “standard” in the travel purchase journey.  In a motivational keynote, they talked about mapping every hurdle a consumer must jump to do business with a company and how they were able to break those barriers and unleash customer loyalty.  

What did we do?

In a lot of ways, this helped me shape the initial vision for Metadesk. Metasearch advertising has always been mysterious and complicated for hotels. And secondary to driving direct bookings, our mission with Metadesk has been and continues to be lifting up the curtain on how metasearch works, how to optimize for better performance, and how to make it easier, plain and simple.

Removing friction isn’t a one-time project. It requires a constant feedback loop and investment in the refinement of your business, product, or offering.

Example #3 - Understanding and marketing to GenZ

Also, in 2019, GenZ was starting to enter the workforce, in addition to our own research. They were seeking genuine relationships with brands, requiring marketers to dust off their storytelling skills and not solely rely on really good targeting.  We had to begin thinking about relevance again, how our brand is uniquely meaningful to our customers.  And we had to do so with authenticity and integrity.  

Inbound education

The main stage featured a panel of journalists and tastemakers that spoke exclusively to the GenZ audience.  They made clear that most marketers were falling into a trap - we expected the behavior of GenZ to be reasonably similar to Millenials when nothing could be further from the truth.  These were novel ideas at the time, presented by the ultimate subject matter experts.

What did we do?

The good news in all of this is that we are all in the travel industry - one of the most personal, emotional, and meaningful consumer categories on the planet.  We have the ability to tell meaningful and transformative stories; we just need to renew our commitment.  Remember, to be appealing in this reimagined world, we also have to be intimate and personal, which requires an emphasis on 1st party data acquisition - something we’ve all been talking a lot about for the last few years.

Example #4 - AI -> Present day

Flash forward to last year, Inbound 2023, Generative AI took our world by storm. We saw more advancements in technology in a 1-year time-span than we had seen in the previous decade. Frankly, as a digital marketer, it was exciting and incredibly exhausting to keep up. With that said, I was truly moved by Yamini Rangan’s keynote as she spoke about how AI can and will help us all reconnect. Since COVID, GCommerce has become a fully remote company, and maintaining our culture and what makes us a great place to work has been a daily exercise. Hearing AI used in a way that wasn’t just for the sake of being able to say we use AI, but to aid in our mission to cultivate genuine relationships with our hotel clients and, in turn their relationships with their guests - it was reinvigorating. If you haven’t seen Yamini’s keynote, I highly recommend watching it on YouTube.

Inbound education

AI was the main headline of Inbound 2023 and guidance on how to use AI showed up in multiple sessions. During one particular educational session, the speaker introduced the verbiage “Multi-modal AI, which covers not just text but also video and photos.  They also confirmed that people still want to interact with people and we need to make sure any AI we use is natural and not advertised.

What did we do?

The good news is that AI and ML weren't brand new to us. In particular, we’ve been leveraging ML for the last decade to manage our media campaigns on behalf of our hotel clients. We did take away several use cases where we can use Generative AI to cut down on menial tasks and give time back to our team to focus on more strategic work. From testing ad copy to on-page SEO, we’ve learned (like many others) that the secret is to combine the power of AI with human expertise. And the result is magic.

Why Inbound?

So, 8 years later, we’re hooked, and it’s not just because we love visiting Boston (we do) and love being around other experts in our field (we do). It’s because Inbound is so in tune with the major developments in the marketing world and how consumer behaviors are changing at a global scale. 

We’re pretty sure we know what the major theme of Inbound 2024 is going to be, and you’ll have to stay tuned to see if our predictions are correct. More to come soon!