Every year HubSpot runs a pretty serious research into the state of inbound marketing. This year is no exception but we also added sales not just marketing as a research topic. 

The major finding in our 8th annual survey is not just that things are changing, they always do (and they better), but that things are changing at an insanely rapid pace. And most importantly we think that they are changing in the right direction. 

In five years only, marketing and the way we do business are going to be completely different. Why? Because the world is adopting inbound. It's becoming more authentic and less interruptive. 

As Brian Halligan says, 

Inbound means transforming how we do business to be more helpful, more human, more empathetic. It ... is about matching the way you market and sell with the way people actually want to shop and buy.

So it's not just about marketing, it's about everything we do as a business that needs to be is 100% customer-focused rather than marketer or seller-focused. 

I run a webinar a while ago for a group of my HubSpot customers on how to get more conversions with inbound marketing. 

It's a difficult topic but an important one because everyone who's doing inbound marketing wants to generate leads. 

A lot of companies create content and put landing pages out there hoping to get some good conversions out. But publishing just something and hoping for the best doesn't work. You need a proper strategy behind this. 

Another common challenge is staying up-to-date with everything new in the world of marketing and digital and keeping up with your customers and their constant change in behaviour. 

So today, I want to share with you those slides that will offer you both strategic and tactical tips on how to increase your inbound marketing conversions. 

But before I get to the deck, I want to summarise the key points for you. 

The one thing my customers struggle the most with is content. 

There are three big reasons for this: 

• They don't create enough content (the usual excuse "we don't have time").
• The content is not ranking ("we publish twice a week, but we are getting so little traffic"). 
• The content is not converting ("we write a lot but very few download our content offers on the landing pages").

Of course, the one big thing that solves for the latter two (I am not even going to pay attention to number one) is your buyer persona and making sure you are creating content for the right audience and promoting it there where your audience really is. With strategy you fascinate. 

But there's one other thing that marketing people often forget. Content is not just words. The internet is flooded with so many blogs, LinkedIn articles, Medium articles, magazines and newspapers. All words, words, words.

However, text may not always be the right approach. In a crowded world of information, you need something to stand out. And words don't always do the trick. You might need to get a bit more creative to attract people to your site. (I'm guilty of the words, words, words addiction too...)

Marketing professionals and agency people like to-do lists. They just have so many things on their plate. But what they like even more is ticking off items on that to-do list.

As the workload increases, though, that to-dos list usually starts to get shorter, but the actual to-dos are of a bigger scope, which is not very helpful because the point of the to-do list is to break things down into small parts and tackle each one by one. When the task is too big and you don't break it down into subtasks, you tend to forget things or you don't know where to start nor can you tell your people what to do. 

What marketing and agency pros need in these cases is a checklist that they can use every time ‒ for various campaigns or clients. Think like a to-do template that enables them to turn these ad-hoc to-do lists into a process.  

Here's where today's post is going to help. It offers a simple checklist of 69 to-dos to help you optimise your marketing and communications activities throughout the entire inbound marketing methodology.

We've spoken about how influencer marketing is becoming a really big deal. Here are all the stats to prove that. But that only gets us so far - to make us understand that we really should be doing influencer marketing. Knowing that you need to do something is different than actually doing it.

In our fast-moving, overcommunicated world, implementation is key. 

That got me thinking about the essence of influencer marketing and what it is about - basically, it's about engaging well-known influencers in your space of business to talk positively about you, your products or your services. 

Now, this is where we can start a debate because isn't this exactly what PR people do? They influence the influencers? They engage and build relationships with the media and with bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers and everyday peeps who have a serious online following so that they spread positive words about our business. This type of activity is far more effective than paid and push messages because, according to McKinsey, 20 to 50% of purchase decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth, influencer opinions are twice as effective as ads and customers acquired through such initiatives are 37% more likely to stick around. 

And that totally makes sense.