Inbound marketing sessions at Summit 2017

People challenged with a claim naturally resist it. But people who arrive at a conclusion will naturally defend it.

In this session, Flint McGlaughlin, Founder and Managing Director, MECLABS Institute (parent research organization of MarketingSherpa), will share the levers you can pull to help your customers arrive at the right conclusions about your brand.

McGlaughlin will integrate case studies around value proposition and branding from almost 20 years of consumer behavior research to help attendees at every level in an organization. Business leaders will discover how to rethink how they communicate their brand while marketers will learn to transform the messaging of any piece of marketing collateral to, ultimately, improve results by replacing promises with expectations and claims with conclusions.

“I sat in the audience during that Best in Show session, and I thought to myself: ‘That’s where we’ve got to get. We’ve got to get to that level.’”

Dan Briscoe, VP of Marketing, HCSS shared a case study at and attended MarketingSherpa Summit 2016. What he did next with his team is nothing short of phenomenal, the most inspirational story of customer-first marketing we’ve seen this year (out of 194 MarketingSherpa Awards entries).

Which is why Briscoe and his team won Best in Show in MarketingSherpa Awards 2017. In this session, Briscoe will show you how his team tripled and quadrupled web visits, social web traffic and video views, generated more than $300,000 in free PR from FOX News, Fortune magazine, and industry press, and were ultimately able to double the marketing team and boost annualized revenue 53%. Briscoe will share:

• How the construction software company got to where it is today – by starting small and experimenting
• Experiments that didn’t work
• The base level of success that enabled HCSS to get to where it is today – generating leads and optimizing conversion
• How to build a strong team (Briscoe has taken over the recruiting department for the entire company as well)
• How to prioritize from all the marketing activity that could drive success to identify that factors that actually will

As a member of the MIT Blackjack Team, Jeff Ma was the inspiration for the main character in the book Bringing Down the House and the Kevin Spacey film 21. Ma is now the Senior Director of Analytics at Twitter (after selling his startup to the social network) and is a former Predictive Analytics Expert for ESPN.

In this session, Ma will draw from his unique personal experiences, from the blackjack table to consulting with professional sports teams, to discuss innovative metrics in a way that will make you reevaluate how your group practices customer-first marketing, accesses talent, finds undervalued assets, and measures the true worth of your business. By eschewing emotion and honing in on hard facts and results, Ma has helped usher in what Newsweek calls “a new age of numbers in corporate America.”

You likely think of The Onion as the world's most prominent parody news website. But it’s also a powerful digital brand with more than 5.8 million likes on Facebook, 9 million Twitter followers, 11.4 million domains linking to them in the ahrefs database, and 30 million people collectively visiting its websites every month.

In 1989, featured speaker Scott Dikkers bought The Onion for $16,000. The digital media company recently sold a stake to Univision at an approximately $500 million valuation. In this session, the satirical news source’s longest running editor-in-chief (and winner of more than 30 Webby Awards) provides an inside look at how The Onion:

• Builds an engaging, authentic relationship with its audience
• Writes headlines
• Creates viral videos
• Taps into real-time, trending topics
• Hires and manages creative talent

Plus, this is the first session the morning after the official Summit party. You’re going to want to have some fun – and Scott is a funny guy. He’s collaborated with Dana Carvey, Robert Smigel, Saturday Night Live, MTV, IFC, and, well, he wrote The Onion.