Inbound 2023 was a bit of a disaster for me. On day one, I learned from 2,161 miles away from home that my beloved dog of 14 years had passed away, which was followed up quickly by a high fever and flu-like cold that had me confined in my hotel room for the rest of the conference (although it was a spacious, beautiful room at The Lenox Hotel, which helped make the situation a bit better).
One year later, I can’t help but think of how much has happened; we welcomed our new best friend, Cocoa, into the family (although we still miss Rozzi everyday), AI has gone from a concept to actionable agents, and walled gardens of Google/Facebook and more keep eroding away at our ability to drive traffic to our websites. When I look ahead to what’s to come in the next year, I’ve walked away from Inbound 2024 thinking there’s a lot going on in the marketing world that holds onto long established concepts like behavioral science and creative messaging – the “human-ness” of marketing, but now – to the power of AI.
I left Inbound Marketing Conference 2024 feeling mentally exhausted by the amount of content and ideas I consumed, yet inspired by being surrounded by others looking for ways to keep finding ways to do our jobs better – for our companies, our clients and because of our passion for the field. After digging through what seemed to be endless pages of notes, here are my top 5 takeaways from Inbound Marketing Conference 2024.
Top 5 hotel marketing lessons from Inbound marketing conference 2024
1. Take risks and be nimble – don’t be afraid to back out quickly if something isn’t working.
This one isn’t exactly new, but it was a good reminder and also made me realize we aren’t the only ones trying to navigate the endless onslaught of new products, platforms, and ad types. There are so many places, platforms, campaign types, etc., to allocate the budget for these days. It can be overwhelming and you most likely don’t have enough budget to run on all of them (unless you have Barbie movie kind of funds). It’s important to take risks, test new channels, and be ready to jump ship or pivot quickly when things aren’t working. Just because something is standard in the industry doesn’t mean you should keep on doing it if it doesn’t move the needle for your business.
2. People desire to connect, so don’t be afraid to use emotion and other creative approaches in your ads to stand out.
Each year I’ve been fortunate to attend sessions at Inbound; LinkedIn always comes in with a fire presentation filled with deep data points and creative examples ripe for testing. This year, Amanda Green’s session on LinkedIn Creative Strategies to Maximize Engagement claimed that “Creative is your biggest lever to drive sales” (more so than targeting) and that currently, “75% of ads are not effective”. I think so often, brands play conservatively with their language and lean away from taking risks by using things like humor. But, regardless of whether you are in B2B or B2C, your ad’s success depends on your brand’s ability to connect with humans. Test ear-catching copy – use puns, alliteration, power words, rhyming, and more. Test creative variations that increase “dwell” time or tie into the psychology of color.
3. It’s easy to be fearful of AI, but don’t forget it’s AI to the power of YOU. It will only elevate your beautiful, unique, and creative self even more.
The CTO of Hubspot, Dharmesh, opened Inbound 2024 talking about AI agents and stating that it’s “AI to the power of YOU”. Really, AI is only going to take your creativity, uniqueness, and inherent you-ness and expand upon them exponentially. Speaking with different people at the conference, there is still a lot of apprehension and a bit of fear around AI – and sometimes an uncertainty about where to even begin with the technology. During his session, Dharmesh introduced the first professional network for AI agents, agent.ai, where you can go right now and hire different AI agents to help with everything from company research to making memes to conversion rate optimization. I think this takes the abstract concept of “AI” and turns it into specific use cases of how AI can work for you and your team. I encourage you to check it out and start playing around with it today. I think you’ll find fear and apprehension replaced with growing excitement around the technology.
4. Just because search traffic is set to decline 25% due to AI doesn’t mean the organic search channel is losing importance.
According to an insight packed session I attended by SEMRush, from 2022 to 2024, click-outs from Google to websites went from 45.1% to 41.5%, and the prediction is that this will keep declining. There have been a few recent studies about this topic, most recently and notably the one from Rand Fishkin. Google will continue to trap users in its own ecosystem, leading to fewer and fewer clicks “out” to other websites. In the hotel marketing world, we already see this in Google’s hotel search and travel planner. Google keeps users searching and researching within Google until they are ready to book – then bam, google hotel ads to the rescue. Even then, the number of Google searches isn’t declining; it is only the number of clicks from the search engine.
As search marketers, it may be time to re-think the importance of optimizing impressions in organic search while emphasizing the importance of being visible for “click out” transaction searches. Optimization for search engines will continue to be incredibly important, and on top of that, new search engines will also emerge that need to be considered in your strategy moving forward. Yes, Google will most likely maintain market share, but knowing how LLM-based search engines work will continue to increase in importance as they become ingrained in each type of search platform. The top hints I grabbed from this session are that LLM-based search engines (think SearchGPT, Perplexity) love structured content and data. They consume from sources like YouTube and Reddit because of this. Make sure you are optimizing these platforms to be ready for LLM-based search.
5. People do strange things – tap into people’s natural reactions to make your hotel’s marketing work better.
My absolute favorite part of marketing is the psychology around how creative messaging and design works. In the end, we are finding ways to reach the right audience with the right message to encourage them to buy – but ultimately, people are hard-wired to simply react as they try to find decision-making shortcuts. In my first (and possibly favorite) Inbound session this year, Nancy Harhut walked us through 5 Unconventional Messaging Moves for Marketing Mavericks. They included tips like using the BYAF (but you are free) technique – think “the choice is yours” type messaging; stating the obvious – like how Folders calls themselves “mountain grown” when most coffee is mountain grew, or using loss aversion to call out how much money you could lose vs how much you’ll save.
It’s always better to Inbound with friends
Okay, this is a bonus takeaway, but really part of what made this year more magical. I had the absolute pleasure of sharing the experience of Inbound with colleagues and clients that I get to call friends. After each day, and in-between sessions, we got to discuss our experiences and favorite insights from Inbound over a great meal in Boston. It was energizing and helped fuel our takeaways into more actionable considerations that are going to best help our teams and our clients in the coming year. Special thanks to the Lenox Hotel team for their gracious hospitality.
Interested in joining us for Inbound 2025? Let us know!
