So INBOUND 2015 conference has come to an end. And with it end our late night sessions, scrolling through Twitter for session updates from some of our favorite speakers. It sure was a lot of fun.
Here’s a quick recap of how it happened, and the impact it had for us.
How we did it
Sometime in August 2015, we decided to remotely cover the INBOUND 2015 conference. We got in touch with the team in Boston, and they were happy to let us do it.
Landing page
So we got busy setting up an INBOUND 2015 landing page on which we would post all our session recaps. We also curated the Twitter and Instagram feed around the event, along with a really cool Twitter interactions map.
Content
Once our landing page was up, we got to work following the sessions. We would follow the speaker handles and event hashtags on Twitter, piecing together the key learnings from the sessions. And then we would create blogs that curated all of this, along with some great tweets around the sessions. We had over 20 blogs within four days, and it was some of the most enjoyable work that we had ever done.
Promotion
We were also sharing this curated content and reaching out to the speakers whose sessions we were covering. And that led to a lot of social media reach and consequent traffic on our website.
How did this impact our reach?
On the website
Compared to the week before the INBOUND 2015 conference, we saw a significant jump in website sessions. An 80% increase to be precise. Along with this, there was also an 85% rise in our traffic from the US, which was our primary audience for this curated content.
Even when compared to the previous month (that’s August ’15 vs. September ’15), the data shows the impact of the INBOUND event coverage. While the traffic for both months is similar, the September data shows a significant peak during the INBOUND event dates.
September saw an 18% rise in website sessions, along with a 30% rise in the average time spent on the site.
On social media
Coming to the INBOUND landing page itself, it was our most visited page in September ’15.
Twitter was the major source of traffic, bringing in 40% of the visitors to this page. This is expected, since most of the social media activity around INBOUND15 was happening on Twitter.
The numbers aside, our page definitely got some love from the Twitter-verse.
Can't make it to #INBOUND15? @niswey has a great page to keep up with what's happening: http://t.co/joEP9a1Jvu pic.twitter.com/QHUJj929KP
— INBOUND Event (@INBOUND) September 8, 2015
@Niswey thanks for including me on the new #INBOUND15 page you folks put together 🙂
— Anum Hussain (@anum) September 8, 2015
On lead generation
With all the attention surrounding our coverage, we started attracting a significant number of leads from the US. This goes to show that our work around INBOUND15 got us noticed among a very targeted audience overseas.
Taking our learning forward
Our work covering the INBOUND 2015 conference gave us the opportunity to learn a lot from all the phenomenal people whose talks we heard. It allowed us to create value for our audience by curating content from the sessions that were all packed full of knowledge and lessons learnt. And it gave us the chance to be seen and heard by a lot of people in our target audience.
What we learned from this is that content marketing can be used in a wide variety of ways to help achieve business goals.
And now, we can use our learning to fuel our clients’ marketing efforts, by applying similar content promotion strategies to help them achieve their goals.
Update: The INBOUND15 landing page is now transformed into a new page, that’s covering INBOUND 2016. Once again, if you are not in Boston, this is the place to be.
