Keep calm and be positive
I think I am in fact in love with Boston. Last September the famous New England fall was not yet in full swing (actually there was a heatwave and basically summer), but the city stole my heart yet again. I was attending InBound, an enormous marketing and sales conference that saw over 20,000 people attending this year. One of them was me, a copywriter at her first real conference ever, super excited to get to learn new stuff and meet people.
Conferences like this are naturally filled with way too much stuff, and you can never keep track of all the new information. But it’s the hype, the awesome energy, and the quality content, that will eventually make you remember it for the rest of your life. Thus, the first thing I learned was to never let go of a positive attitude. Weird stuff will happen. Someone will be late, your credit card won’t work, you might miss that one session you really wanted to attend… shit happens. Be excited. Be involved. Make the most of it while you’re there, no matter what.
Focus on the relevant stuff
InBound, like most big conferences, offers hundreds of different types of sessions, mostly lectures and workshops, with most of them happening simultaneously. I signed up for a bunch of sessions way ahead of the conference just because I didn’t want to miss out on any of the content I was sent there to see and learn.
The best lecture for me personally, was “Copywriting ABC”, as I was taught actual copywriting hacks that I have found extremely useful in my work already. This lecture included an actual list from A to Z: what words to use, what not to use, how to phrase things, and in general what to do in order to create the best type of online content. What I got out of it was concrete pieces of advice that I’ve been able to use in my everyday work with clients ever since.
In general, I think there were three types of sessions a content person could and should attend at this conference:
sessions like the aforementioned ABC lecture (and another on Instagram marketing hacks, for example) with a bunch of tips that can be used in different ways in creating different types of marketing content;
life-story lectures that focused more on the lecturer’s personal experiences and how they managed to get where they are today (example: a Johnny Cupcakes lecture that, despite being interesting, didn’t really teach me all that much in the end); and
stuff on marketing theory and/or statistics (example: a lecture on gender diversity in the tech business), which is, of course, interesting in its own right but might not give you that many useful tools to use in your everyday work. I would have wished for a stronger focus on workshops and actual real-life tips and hacks.
I attended up to six lectures and workshops a day and saw inspiring talks from interesting characters like the award-winning author and scholar Brené Brown, the former first lady of the United States Michelle Obama (she was amazing, by the way), and YouTube personality Issa Rae.
While everything was worth all the hype, the second important thing I learned was to pay more attention to what sessions to sign up for and when. You can’t benefit from the things you see and hear if you try to do too much. To really get your money’s worth out of a conference like this: sign up for the relevant sessions only, don’t get too greedy, and focus on the stuff you actually want and need to learn. Ten consecutive sessions will teach you nothing if you’re too tired to concentrate by the third one.
Get to know all the people
I am sort of extroverted and outgoing, so usually at whichever event I go to, I make a bunch of new friends with random people. Traveling, especially alone, has taught me that usually connecting with complete strangers offers the best opportunities – and I’ve never been disappointed so far.
While I went to InBound 2017 to learn about all things inbound marketing, I came home with a stack of cards of random people’s names, emails and phone numbers on them, as well as some actual friends. I distributed my own cards all around, trying to make sure that Frantic was always seen, heard and remembered. In the end, I ran out of cards and had to scribble my contact details onto whatever piece of paper I could find. But hey, networking is everything.
Thus, the third thing I learned was to connect with everybody. The human contacts are the ones you take with you when you leave a conference like InBound. The stranger you bumped into in the crowd, the people you bonded with on the dancefloor, the discussion you had after that one lecture – these things are the ones that stick.
I am grateful that I had the opportunity to take part in an event like this and thus improve in my own work field with all the new tools I acquired. Attending conferences on your own is a valuable experience since you have no choice but to network, connect and share your thoughts. I was lucky to learn fabulous new things and meet such wonderful people. Now I know how to survive my next big conference. InBound – maybe I’ll see you again in 2018!
In case all this sparked your interest, here’s all the InBound content that is now available online!
