As businesses shifted toward remote work in early 2020 in the wake of Coronavirus, notable events and conferences like South by Southwest and Adobe Summitt were forced to cancel. While employees transitioned to working from home, businesses and event planners were forced to reconsider their strategies. 

How could they continue to host captivating events while still enabling their attendees to network and engage with one another in a virtual setting? 

That was the question facing the team behind INBOUND, HubSpot's annual event. The conference, known for its influential speakers, exceptional content and HubSpot product announcements, transitioned to be fully virtual for its 2020 iteration. To get a sense of how the team adapted and put on such a noteworthy event in the face of overwhelming circumstances, Chris sat down with HubSpot's Courtney Dagher and Alysa Sheridan on the INBOUND team. 

As businesses shifted toward remote work in early 2020 in the wake of Coronavirus, notable events and conferences like South by Southwest and Adobe Summitt were forced to cancel. While employees transitioned to working from home, businesses and event planners were forced to reconsider their event strategy. How could they continue to host captivating events while still enabling their attendees to network and engage with one another in a virtual setting? 

That was the question facing the planning team behind INBOUND, HubSpot's annual event. The conference, known for its influential speakers, exceptional content and product announcements from HubSpot, transitioned to fully virtual for its 2020 iteration. 

In order to get a sense of how the HubSpot team was able adapt to their change in circumstances, Chris spoke with Courtney Dagher and Alysa Sheridan on the INBOUND team. 

In many marketing circles, you'll hear that UX and creative design are at odds with one another. One only serves to take away from the other. But, that couldn't be further from the truth. 

This week, Guido is joined by Chris Singlemann, a brand marketer and designer at New Breed. Throughout the episode, Guido and Chris discuss the intersection between creative and UX design and how together, they can serve as key differentiators for your product, your website and your brand. As a whole, user experience is largely about delivering on the expectations of the user — and you can do that by aligning with UX best practices and presenting them in unique, creative ways.  

While your lineup of conversational marketing playbooks that you implement can be a strategic decision, there’s a huge amount of tactical choices that can go into each one. How far do you stretch your brand voice? How many choices should you offer in your playbook? Not to mention — how do measure your success?

Making sure you’re getting the most of your conversational marketing can hinge on a lot of these choices. So before today’s episode, Weslee and I sat down to list out the options and considerations that should be top of mind as you start rolling out your chatbots. 

No matter your business, conversational marketing can be a fresh and highly effective tool for engaging with your prospects and customers. As chatbot technology continues to evolve, experiment with the different ways that you can use conversational marketing to shorten your sales cycle, learn new information about your prospects and enhance the empathetic element of your brand.

This week, Guido and Weslee break down the things you need to consider as you start to implement a conversational marketing strategy for your business. What playbooks do you need? What even is a playbook? How do you measure your success? 

Part of inbound marketing is meeting your prospects where they are. Weslee and Guido pivot this week to talk about one of the approaches marketers are taking to creating more personalized, timely experiences for their prospects — conversational marketing. The idea of chatbots isn't entirely new, but it's becoming increasingly prominent in the B2B marketing space. 

Still, it's a new medium. Understanding how to launch a successful conversational marketing strategy and measure your success can be challenging. In this episode, Weslee and Guido explore their experiences launching a conversational marketing strategy for New Breed, the various ins and outs of chatbots and the terminology you should know. 

After spending the past few episodes talking about the customer experience, Weslee and Guido came to the conclusion that it’s a holistic process. One team cannot take full responsibility for the crafting of powerful experiences for your customers that leads to retention and eventually expansion. 

As marketers, Weslee and Guido know their work starts with finding the right leads and setting the stage for sales and service to deliver on the brand promise. Beyond that, their ability to talk to the full process is slightly limited. In light of that, Weslee and Guido brought in former HubSpot VP of Global Customer Support and current VP of Operations for SaaSWorks, Mike Redbord. 

Redbord's years of experience in customer success and support, including the launch and development of HubSpot Service Hub, set up an excellent conversation to gather insights about what it takes for businesses to  craft meaningful and powerful relationships with their customers. 

Who takes responsibility for the customer experience? Customer success, service and support can come through many different roles depending on your organization, but their main focus remains the same: building relationships. How they do so can vary from person to person, so we sat down with two of New Breed's Client Success Managers Everett Ackerman and Dylan Berno to hear more about how they tackle the day-to-day challenges of building relationships, crafting strategy and knowing when to sell and when to sit back. 

There's no questioning the long-term value that customers offer your business. Not only is it significantly more cost-effective to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones, but a healthy customer base helps create more scalable growth and helps build brand affinity as well. How though, do you measure the impact of your customers? 

Reporting on the customer experience can be challenging and requires both quantitative and qualitative data to do effectively. This week, Weslee and Guido discuss the key performance indicators that you can use to measure the health of your customer base and the impact of your customer marketing efforts. 

As Weslee and Guido explored the evolution of inbound marketing, a common trend kept popping up. More and more, customers are becoming an important part of marketing. It's not just about attracting and converting leads anymore, it's about finding high-fit prospects and delivering on the brand promise through top-notch service. 

What role does marketing play in fostering a strong customer experience? How can you measure the impact of your efforts? Over the next few episodes, Weslee and Guido will answer those questions and more as they take a deep dive into customer service, success and experience.