1,000 inbound marketers gathered in Boston 10 days ago to network, learn and celebrate the successes of hundreds of businesses growing using inbound marketing and HubSpot software.
This second annual HubSpot User Group Summit (HUGS) event, held as part of FutureM week here in Boston, was one of the most energizing and educational marketing events I've ever attended. The twittersphere was abuzz with excitement as HubSpot gave out awards to our most remarkable customers and VARs, shared education and enabled networking galore.
Congratulations Are In Order
HubSpot users all over the world have been generating more leads and growing revenue using inbound marketing software and advice. In 2011, HubSpot wanted to recognize some of these businesses and launched a contest during which five finalists emerged in the Inbound Marketing Success story of the year. In this User's Choice Award, more than 1,500 customers voted on the winning inbound success story.
This year's winning company, Clear Risk, a Newfoundland-based provider of risk management software to the insurance industry, emerged as the ultimate winner. The team at Clear Risk transformed a costly outbound strategy into an inbound lead generation machine that increased leads more than 2,000% and tripled sales enabling the company to secure VC funding for continued growth. The spirit of comeraderie was apparent as the second runner up, FireFish, interviewed her peer and new friend about his company's win!
Inbound Content & Education
Learning new ideas and ways to apply HubSpot software is the primary reason customers attend HUGS each year. This year, customers absorbed content from HubSpot's co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, customers and expert marketers across nearly every marketing topic. Presentations and handouts from the sessions are already online with video content coming soon. The most popular sessions included Building a Content Machine, Generating Leads with Co-Marketing as well as an oversubscribed deep dive course on HubSpot Enterprise, new capabilities being rolled into HubSpot from the Performable acquisition.
Some of the attendees shared their key takeaways on their own blogs including:
- Optimizing the Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) is key to delivering results long term (Brent Leary, CRM Essentials)
- When you know that a piece of content is starting to rank for a key search term, and you want to increase its visibility, focus linkbuilding efforts on that particular asset (Laurel Miltner, PR20/20)
- Moving B2B marketing to personalization that mimics 'market of 1' personalization like Netflix and Amazon will be game changing (Mark Gibson, Advanced Marketing Concepts)
Networking & Fun at HUGS2011
HubSpotters and customers alike networked, dined and enjoyed live entertainment during the week. What's not to love when there's live entertainment and a 15 foot tall sprocket to welcome you!? Check out the flickr gallery to see who was there ... and plan not to miss HubSpot's 2012 events. Stay tuned for dates & times and consider joining a local HubSpot User Group, active in more than 20 cities!
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Originally published Sep 27, 2011 9:00:00 AM, updated January 17 2023