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!
