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Tuesday, April 28, 2015

12 Pinnable Pinterest Pins That Teach You How to Use Pinterest

pinning

I’m learning to cook, design tattoos, and budget better than ever – and it’s all thanks to Pinterest. Why? Pinterest’s brilliant user experience makes it so simple to browse through photos and bookmark products, gift ideas, or articles (and much more) that you want to come back to later.

Pinterest was first unveiled in 2010, with its very first “pin” being a photo of a paper cut-out of a couple kissing on a bicycle, pinned by Pinterest co-founder, Ben Silberman.

After some early failures, Pinterest caught on and quickly attracted a niche audience, and it didn’t take long for it to join other social networks like Facebook and Twitter at the top.

Now with over 70 million users, Pinterest has become a powerhouse in the digital world. And it’s not surprising that it has become a marketing powerhouse as well.

Whether you’re a restaurant owner, clothing designer, marketing company, or graphic artist, Pinterest is an incredible place to market your business.

So, where do you begin? How do you create a marketing strategy for Pinterest? These 12 appropriately pinnable tips and tricks will show you how you can incorporate Pinterest into your company’s marketing plan.

1) Learn the Basics

If you’re completely new to Pinterest, this pin has a solid overview of how to use Pinterest for business – and in a handy, easy-to-read, shareable SlideShare, no less!

Being a tad skeptical on using Pinterest as a marketing tool is understandable; with a surplus of inspiration and DIY craft pins, it can seemingly “cloud” the marketing efforts of businesses.

However, if you learn the basics you just might be able to see the benefits of Pinterest marketing a little clearer. It’s nearly impossible to ignore the success of Pinterest with stats such as these:

Over 80% of the content on Pinterest is repinned
2 in 5 customers have purchased an item after pinning, repinning, or liking it on Pinterest

2) Create a Pinterest Marketing Strategy

You create marketing plans for your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts, right? Well, Pinterest is no different.

Figuring out where to start tends to be the hardest part. Not only do you need to know your goals for social media marketing, and who your target market is, there is a lengthy list of factors that play into creating a successful Pinterest strategy.

Thankfully, Viraltag's blog offers this step-by-step list to help you get started.

3) Have a Way to Measure Your Pinterest Performance

Once you’ve brainstormed some content ideas and shared them on Pinterest, you need a way to measure your posts’ success.

As with all of your social media profiles, using analytics is invaluable. Tracking which pins do well and which don’t is vital information you can use to keep bettering your strategy and approach to Pinterest.

Google Analytics is a commonly used tool used to measure website performance, but if you’re not sure how to use it to gauge your Pinterest success, don’t fret! This pin lists four ways you can measure Pinterest using Google Analytics.

However, if you’d rather not use a third-party, Pinterest has designed Pinterest Analytics, and you can access it right from your Pinterest account.

4) Determine What Pins You Should be Pinning (to Get the Most Engagement)

Once you know how to pin, you need to determine what to pin.

No matter your audience, this cheat sheet contains 22 tips that can help you determine how to design your pins, or choose which images to repin or like – these numbers don’t lie.

Nevertheless, it is still critical to know your target audience. You can’t just make an infographic on any topic or include 20 hashtags in your caption and see your pin go viral.

Understanding your audience and tweaking your pins to reflect their wants and needs will be a helping hand in amplifying your pins’ success. If you’re looking to increase your engagement, create boards and find pins that are related to what your audience is pinning – and when they’re pinning it.

(Attention: This is the most important takeaway from this post!) Pin content that is related to your business or industry.

That being said, don’t sell yourself on every pin – share helpful or relevant information on some of your pins and boards, as well. It’s okay to be a clothing company but have a board of recipes or your favorite restaurants – it lets your audience know you want to engage with them as people, not just market to them as customers.

For example, at Mainstreethost we try to incorporate a variety of different boards on our Pinterest, but also keep our profile professional and industry-related. It’s all about finding that happy medium between your business’ marketing goals and providing relevant and enjoyable content that relates to your audience outside of the realm of your products and services.

5) Make Your Pins Pretty

As a designer (and a perfectionist), I probably take more care than is necessary on what my pins look like.

But, even if you’re not a designer, you should care what your pins look like. From photos to vector imagery, your designs should be pleasing to the eye so they stand out in the sea of images on your audience’s page.

Here’s an example of how to take your pin to the next level: comparison

If you don’t have a designer in-house or on hand, there are plenty of tools out there you can utilize. My co-worker’s favorite is Canva, which (unsurprisingly) is on this list pinned by Tailwind.

6) BUT, Don't Just Pin Pretty Pictures

In case you missed the importance of it in the preceding pins, pin content that is related to your audience and your industry.

Yes, you can have a board full of delicious recipes, but be sure most of the content you pin or repin is related to your business. Take care when you are deciding what to pin or repin – don’t just pick a random stock photo and a one-sentence caption, or repin an image without changing the caption.

This infographic features several ways to optimize your pins to increase likelihood of engagement.

7) Optimize Your Pinterest Profile

Now that you know how to optimize your pins, you can focus on your profile.

This detailed checklist shows you exactly what your boards, pins, and profile need to have to best optimize your Pinterest account.

This list includes links to profiles that set an example of what top brands do to create a successful Pinterest presence – it wouldn’t be a bad idea to follow them, either.

8) Use Pinterest to Connect With Your Audience

One of the main purposes of a social media strategy is to connect and engage with your audience.

Commenting on pins and repinning or liking what your audience pins will help you increase your engagement.

However, there are also group boards that you can utilize on Pinterest. You can create and maintain a group board and/or join others that were created by your audience.

Either way, group boards are a great opportunity to better understand what your audience wants to see on Pinterest, and maybe even an opportunity for you to get feedback and ideas straight from your customers.

9) You Can Now Promote Pins

Many users are calling Pinterest a “sellout,” since they have opened up their platform to more advertisements.

For businesses, however, this is certainly a positive addition. If you know what keywords your target audience is searching for, and you want to ensure you reach them with your pin, paying to promote your pin just might be worth it.

Once a pin is published, you can promote it as soon as it hits your board; but be careful! There are rules to advertising on Pinterest that you’ll want to remember.

10) Avoid the Pinterest "Sins"

This couldn’t be a successful post on pins that teach you how to use Pinterest without teaching you what not to do.

There are actually a handful of posts on what mistakes to avoid on Pinterest and how to avoid them.

Save yourself from Pinterest disaster with these quick tips:

Be sure your pins link to something
Invest quality time to Pinterest so you’re posting quality content
Making the first boards on your profile irrelevant to your audience is just as bad as not having any boards at all

If you can avoid making these mistakes on your Pinterest, reaching your marketing goals shouldn’t be too big of a challenge.

11) Remember, You're Not Limited to Just Pinning on Pinterest

Okay, well technically¸ you can only pin images, articles, or links to your Pinterest profile. But that doesn’t mean you’re limited to only searching for content to share on Pinterest on Pinterest. While you’re on one social platform, be cognizant of your other platforms as well.

For example, just as you would share the content you post on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on your Pinterest, be sure to occasionally share what you pin on your other accounts - which is nearly effortless if you link up your other social media to your Pinterest profile.

You can search through Pinterest, Internet searches, and even other social networks. Anywhere that you have the ability to share, it (usually) gives you the option to share to Pinterest.

Sharing your content on multiple networks will not only increase engagement for your business, but it could help increase engagement to your social networks that don’t do as particularly well as others.

12) Have Unique Ways of Promoting Your Business

With millions of users pinning daily, the home feed of Pinterest users are continuously changing, and your pins are moving farther and farther down the page.

In order to ensure that your content gets shared, you have to get crafty. Use bright colors, feature your followers, or hold a sweepstakes – there are many ways to promote your business creatively.

Whether it’s a blog post, a new product, or a sale that your business is having, your pin needs to stand out in the crowd of millions of other pins.

If you’re having creative block, this post has a few innovative suggestions you can try out.

Conclusion

According to Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann, “Pinterest is the place to plan the most important projects in your life.” From tattoo designs to your favorite recipes to wedding ideas, user profiles are overflowing with products, ideas, and projects.

When it comes to marketing your business, capitalize on this aspect of Pinterest. Inspire your audience to use your products and services in their lives, or just inspire them in general.

If you use Pinterest correctly, it could be your products and services that users are pinning – and purchasing.

These 12 pins are a solid foundation for your company’s Pinterest marketing plan. And not only can you read through them now, you can pin them to your boards to always have as a reference when you need a helpful reminder.

April 28, 2015 at 05:00PM via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1GE6g8e

How Ecommerce Can Capitalize on How Men and Women Use Pinterest

Pinterest has long been recognized as a female-centric social media platform with 80% of its total users identifying as female, but the times are changing. One of the biggest differences we see lately is the ability to narrow search results for males, so search results show men's watches or women's watches, based on your interests. Since users are able to select search results to more closely reflect their interests (whether shopping for themself or someone else), this benefits all users. And, this is just a first step in making Pinterest more appealing to men. With this particular task out the way, Pinterest still has a few more steps to attract and keep male users.

Understanding the differences between how men and women shop is a great place to start.

Shopping Actually Makes Men Happy

It’s a fact that shopping makes 64% of women feel happier. That’s probably why Pinterest was such a success with the female demographic right away. However, we must take into account the fact that 40% of men also say that shopping lifts their mood. With that many men excited about shopping, why would any ecommerce platform or social network make men feel left out?

Men Are More Decisive

One of the biggest differences between male and female Pinterest users is the users’ intent. Men figure out what they want and then buy it, often without regard for the brand or the price. Women spend their time on Pinterest seeking out different options, better prices, cheaper brands, and more creative ways to get what they want.

In other words, Pinterest is a scrapbook and dream board for women. For men, it’s a shopping list. Once Pinterest adds that buy button, men everywhere will likely take over the network to get their shopping done in one simple step.

Men Love Images

Rich Pins with prices and other information do well with women who want to comparison shop for a while before making a choice. Men, though interested in the price of any object they want to buy, definitely react more to the image itself. It’s just science.

Because they’re more interested in finding exactly what they need, men are also more likely to pay higher prices for name brands. Lists of similar products by various brands probably won’t show up in most men’s Pinterest feeds.

Understanding how men and women use Pinterest gives the platform a chance to appeal to a much wider audience. There are already more than 70 million users, and the numbers grow each day. But understanding what men find valuable in Pinterest doesn’t just help the social network. Ecommerce companies who not only know how men and women like to shop but also know how they use their Pinterest accounts can make advances now before the buy button even gets here. A place to do all their research, comparisons, and shopping in one place seems to be exactly what men really want. If Pinterest can provide that, we have a feeling the platform will take over the world—one man at a time.

April 28, 2015 at 04:30PM via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1bPrvaa

Inside ESPN.com's Brilliant Redesign: Why You're Going to See More Personalized Websites

Introducing_the_new_ESPN_com_copy

ESPN recently redesigned their website. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Companies redesign their websites roughly every 18-24 months. (You're probably sick of yours right now, am I right?)

But this particular redesign garnered a ton of attention, earning coverage and analysis in Fast Company, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat, among other publications.

So why did so many other publications want to cover such a common thing like a redesign? Well for starters, ESPN's website gets a ton of traffic. In 2014, ESPN.com attracted 22 million daily users, notably more than CNN.com, BuzzFeed, and other high-volume sites.

But that's not the only thing they did. They made one major strategic shift: ESPN redesigned the website to adapt to the person looking at it.

Building personalization features into the fabric of the new site, ESPN.com will now reflect the interests, location, and device of each fan. For example, when I visited ESPN.com for the first time after the redesign, it took a guess at my favorite sports teams based on my location, then enabled me to tailor my view for future visits. It looked like this (Clearly, I'm a bit of a townie):

ESPN-For-Boston

Once your preferences are set, the website will prioritize relevant content whenever you visit again. With dynamic delivery of relevant stories, ESPN.com becomes, as the company put it, "a constantly updating river of content" that is tailor-made just for you.

"We're hoping what you will notice is that you are more engaged and immersed than ever, getting exactly what you want, when you want it, wherever you are," wrote ESPN's editors in the redesign launch post. "That's what all of us fans expect."

ESPN was not the first to add personalization to its website, but given its popularity and the sheer volume of impact this approach will have, we expect this may signal a tipping point in website personalization.

Why You'll See More Adaptive Websites

Personalized content on websites began in the ecommerce space with Amazon recommendations, and continues to be prevalent on many other sites today. Shop Direct, one of the largest U.K. retailers, recently launched a fully personalized homepage for its main brand, Very.co.uk. Shop Direct claims that this website will serve 1.2 million different versions of the homepage to its customer base and expects that number to rise to 3.5 million by the end of the year. 3.5 million different web experiences out of one website.

Spurred in part by early experiences with personalization on ecommerce sites and a natural proclivity for relevant content, consumers in all industries are starting to expect some level of a customized experience. According to Janrain, nearly three-fourths (74%) of online consumers get frustrated with websites when content appears that has nothing to do with their interests.

Where customer demand exists, technology shortly follows. As more websites are plugged into contact and email databases, dynamically producing different views becomes technically much easier. While Amazon and ESPN likely have robust personalization and content delivery engines powering their entire sites, a wide range of companies are using tools to leverage what they know about visitors and personalize their most critical pages or conversion paths.

How to Make Your Own Website Adaptive

Get the Technology

To personalize your website, you'll need a database to automatically store relevant information on each visitor about their on-site behavior. You'll also need a tool to serve up different content based on a set of criteria from that database. (Full disclosure: HubSpot software does this or we wouldn't know so much about the topic. There are also a number of other personalization engines out there you can research, including Monetate for ecommerce and retail.)

Start With Mobile

I know. I know. You want to get to the good stuff like personalizing for brown-haired, knitting fanatics or targeting CEOs who have visited your pricing page. But trust me, before you do anything else, start with mobile. Make sure your website, blog and landing pages can recognize the various devices visitors use to view your content and adapt to give them the best possible view. The reasons for this are manifold.

First, mobile-optimization is now weighed heavily as a search rank criterion on Google. If your site isn't fully optimized for mobile, its ranking could plummet on mobile searches, no matter how good the content.

Second, making sure any person could easily read content and click on your links your links is the very foundation of creating a good user experience. But that good experience needs to adapt as your visitor moves from their static desktop to mobile phone to their tablet on the couch at home. Customer-focused personalization has to be rooted in a responsive, device-agnostic design. As Ryan Spoon, ESPN's SVP of product development told Fast Company, "The last time we did a redesign, there was no concept of a mobile application or fragmentation between iOS and Android. As the world has evolved, we want all our experiences to evolve."

Add in Lifecycle Stages

Think of a brand new, fresh-faced, first-time visitor to your website. Got 'em? Aren't they adorable?

Now think of a long-standing, loyal customer of yours.

How different are their needs from each other? Furthermore, how different are those needs from the needs of someone who has been to your site repeatedly and is seriously considering purchasing your product or service?

You see what I'm getting at. As an individual's relationship with your company evolves, the content that is interesting to them is going to change too. Media companies, like ESPN, may differ on this slightly, but for my marketing dollar, the most important personalization I can do is to adapt my content to fit the customer lifecycle. By customer lifecycle, I mean all of the stages individuals go through when they're weighing a purchase decision. People begin with needing exploratory information on the field, then progress into more and more specific questions related to your product and company. After someone purchases and becomes a customer, his or her content needs shift again.

Get Advanced With Interest- and Persona-Based Personalization

The second major personalization feature you should implement is based on what topics are most relevant to certain types of people. This is the strength of a website redesign like ESPN's. In a world of hundreds upon hundreds of sports teams, how do you appeal to everyone?

You can get a sense of what's interesting to each individual viewer by keeping tabs on their viewing history. That's where the contact or subscriber database comes in. By leveraging cookies to store the pages, articles. and other content each viewer consumes in a running profile, you can start to pick up on and leverage trends based on that behavior. If, for example, I only read articles about the New England Revolution and skip articles about the Boston Celtics, you might start to guess that my interests are squarely in the soccer/football arena. By surfacing those articles above the articles on basketball, ESPN would save me the step of having to search for them, making my whole experience on the site more relevant and fulfilling.

Allow Your Visitors to Contribute to Their Own Personalization Settings

Every website visitor brings with them a certain amount of information when they land on a site -- it's kind of like a digital footprint. From the moment someone arrives on your site, your analytics can recognize the device they're using, the channel or site from which they came, and their general location based on the IP address associated with their computer. That IP address is what told ESPN that I was accessing their site from a computer in Massachusetts.

Given that, they then took the educated guess that I would be interested in Massachusetts based sports teams. It was a good starting point because it meant the personalized experience began right away.

But what if I wasn't into Boston sports? What if I liked the Denver Broncos, The English Premier League, or somehow (inexplicably!) the New York Yankees? ESPN was smart to follow up their automatic personalization with filters I could tweak to correct my view. Checking in with your website visitor directly to make sure you've gotten personalization right is a great move to keeping your viewers engaged.

When in doubt, ask -- particularly if personalization is going to have a big change in the visitor's experience of your website. Sales Benchmark Index, an entirely different type of company from ESPN, does this kind of visitor-selected personalization to send visitors down the conversion path that works best for them.

SBI-personalization

Time will tell if ESPN's website results in better numbers for the media company. The move to create a website that acts more like living, evolving channels than static brochures, however, seems to be a trend that is swiftly finding its way toward the norm. There is still more to discover in this space, including more than a few mistakes I'm sure companies will hit along the way, but a personalization strategy rooted in the desire to create a better experience for visitors holds a lot of promise for marketers and media companies alike.

April 28, 2015 at 02:00PM via HubSpot Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/1PRDjHc

14 Helpful Tips for Getting the Most Out of a Conference

get-the-most-out-of-a-conference

This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

So you’re going to a conference.

What’s in store for you? You’ll attend dozens of sessions led by professionals in your industry, meet a ton of new people, and take home lots of great swag.

If you’re a conference-going expert, you probably have your own short list of tried-and-true tactics for making the most of a conference. (If so, we'd love to hear in the comments.) But if not, never fear -- we’ve got your back with our best tips for how to do it right.

Pregame: Before You Go

Be prepared. Be prepared. Be prepared.

It bears repeating. The quickest way to throw away hundreds of dollars (besides actually throwing them away) is to go to a conference without sitting down and formulating a plan first.

It’s not exactly military statecraft, but it’s essential. I guarantee there will be no time to stop and pause once you arrive at the event, so take some time to complete the following items before you board that plane/train/bus.

1) Review the agenda.

This one’s a no-brainer. Set a goal for what you’d like to learn at the conference, and use the agenda to devise a plan specifically tailored to that goal. Make sure to attend conference-wide events like keynote addresses. Most conferences won’t hold breakout sessions during these presentations, so you won’t have to worry about missing out on anything else.

When it comes to smaller sessions, consider both the speaker and the subject matter. Highly tactical sessions are generally useful to attend regardless of who leads them. However, sessions less directly related to your profession can be valuable as well if they’re led by an industry figure you’re angling to meet.

2) Orient yourself.

Familiarize yourself with the conference space so you don’t get lost. You don’t want to miss important information, or for a roomful of people to form a negative first impression of you by showing up late.

If you’re attending a smaller conference, it should be enough to take a half hour or so the night before or early in the morning on day one to walk around the space. For larger conferences, this might not be feasible, especially if the show will be held across multiple venues. Grab a map from the host, and keep a copy on your phone or print one out to reference between sessions.

3) Find out who’s going.

The people you’ll attend sessions with are as important as the sessions themselves. There’s no better time to network with your peers, connect with new prospects, or touch base with customers than at a conference.

Most conferences will have a Facebook event page and/or a Twitter hashtag set up. The conference hosts will start promoting these pages in advance of the event, and they’re a great way to keep track of acquaintances and people you’d like to meet.

Don’t count on simply running into prospects at the conference. Instead, reach out to them ahead of time to let them know you’ll both be in attendance. This way, you can book time on their calendars and have their full, undivided attention instead of trying to cram a 15-minute conversation into a stop-and-chat.

4) Set an out-of-office reply.

Let’s be honest: You’ll probably be checking your work email during the conference. But even if you are, you definitely won’t be able to respond at the same clip as you do in the office. Make sure prospects and customers know why they might not hear from you for a few days by setting up an out-of-office reply.

(For inspiration, check out these hilarious examples of out-of-office replies.)

5) Bring the right gear.

Conferences are multi-day affairs where you’ll be booking long hours each day. To remove as much stress as possible from your experience, make sure you’ve taken care of these things before you board the plane:

Keep your phone and laptop chargers with you. You’re going to spend a huge part of your day on your devices -- don’t get caught with dead batteries.
Pack enough business cards. Make sure you have some on hand and a stash in your luggage. You never know how many people you’re going to meet.
Bring the materials you need for demos. By no means should you spend the conference pitching to people who don’t want to be pitched. However, if one of those pre-set prospect meetings turns into a real sales opportunity, it’ll be more efficient -- and impressive -- if you can provide a walkthrough on the spot.

Once You're There

You’re here ... Now what? The next few days will be a whirlwind of activity, but don’t be overwhelmed. You’re armed with a goal and a plan -- there are only a few additional things to keep in mind to help you make the most of your time.

6) Register early.

You don’t want to be stuck at the registration desk while everyone else is off to the races. Register as early as possible so you can minimize your time standing in lines and maximize your time learning and meeting people.

7) Divide and conquer.

If you’re attending with coworkers, try and see as much as possible. If each of you attends the same sessions and events, your company might as well have only sent one of you. Splitting up for sessions will maximize how much you’re able to learn and ensure that each of you has unique insights to take back to your company. Plan to get lunch or dinner each day to regroup on key takeaways.

Flying solo also means you’ll each be able to meet more people. Huge conferences can foster pack mentality, but the more attendees you can meet and speak with, the more of an asset you’ll be to your sales team. Discovering how your business fits into the larger industry and how other companies run their sales divisions are invaluable insights. A conference is an unparalleled opportunity to pick the brains of your competition and your market. Don’t waste it.

8) Connect with your customers.

Sure, you might have exchanged emails with your customers in the last few months, but nothing beats a face-to-face interaction. If things aren’t going so well, this is a great opportunity to address any issues before you get a cancellation call. But don’t feel as though you have to solve every problem today; talk through any high-level concerns your customer may have and then set a follow up time for after the conference.

And if things are going well, checking in will not only reinforce your relationship -- it’ll also be fun! Enjoy spending time with a happy customer, and listen for upsell opportunities.

9) Follow up with prospects.

You’ve set up meetings with prospects. Now, put that time to use. Listen to their anxieties and concerns, and demonstrate how your product can help address those issues and bring their business to the next level.

Don’t go into these meetings expecting to close deals on the spot. Like you, your prospects are attending this conference to learn and gain expertise. Use these conversations to set yourself up for future targeted conversations addressing specific pain points or questions. Close each conversation with a list of takeaways, and let prospects know you’ll be following up with relevant materials.

10) Participate in the larger conversation.

Most conferences will have a dedicated hashtag. During the event, make sure you’re tagging your tweets and Instagrams properly. You can also monitor the hashtag throughout the conference to see what people are talking about. Striking up a conversation online is a great way to reach out to someone you’re interested in meeting but haven’t come across in person yet.

(And if you’re not active on social media, here's a primer on why you should be.)

11) Stay organized.

Conferences are information avalanches. Between breakout sessions, workshops, one-on-one conversations, and happy hours, you’ll come away with more notes, names, and numbers than you can possibly remember. This wealth of information will serve you well going forward, but if you come home with a mess of business cards and a set of notes without labels or tags, you’ll spend double the time organizing everything and trying to recall what you discussed with “Jennifer Chicago CEO.”

Thankfully, it’s not hard to keep yourself on track, so long as you strike when the iron’s hot. Write on the back of people’s business cards to remind yourself of the salient points of your conversation, or digitally capture the cards and take notes in an app such as CamCard. Include details about what session or happy hour you met them at -- anything that will jog your memory a day or a week after the fact.

If you take notes by hand, you should at the very least include headings and start a new page at the beginning of every session, lest your notes become one long run-on list of bullet points. If you’re more inclined to keep everything digital, Evernote is one of the apps all salespeople should have. You can create a dedicated notebook for your conference notes, and tag each note with multiple labels to organize any way you want -- by topic, speaker, or even which day the session took place.

Postgame: Once You're Home

Take some time to decompress after you arrive home. ... But not too much, because your work’s not finished. The days and weeks after a conference are when you’ll be able to put everything you’ve learned to use and turn your short meet-and-greets into fruitful business partnerships.

12) Do some housekeeping.

All that information you gathered from customers and prospects? It's time to transfer it into your CRM. Jot down everything you can remember from your conversations so that when you follow up, you're able to view new insights in the context of the larger relationship.

13) Follow up.

Connecting with people you met during the conference is best done in the days immediately following your return. Send follow-up notes and LinkedIn requests while the conference is still fresh in everyone’s minds. Include a personalized message to accompany your request on LinkedIn. Remember, everyone’s inbox will be flooded, so make yourself memorable by reminding your new connection what you discussed. Check out this guide to writing the perfect LinkedIn invitation for more advice.

Now is also the time to make use of the insights you gained from your prospects. Whether it’s sending them content or scheduling a demo, make use of what you learned from your one-on-ones to get them closer to signing on with your company. Make sure your follow-ups are appropriately tailored to what you discussed -- another reason you’ll want to organize your notes.

14) Teach.

The insights you gained at the conference are likely to be useful for your team, so make sure to set aside time to pass on what you learned. Whether it’s leading an in-person session or writing an email or post to document the most valuable information, proactively sharing information will help your colleagues do better work while establishing you as a leader on your team.

There’s no better place than a conference to take stock of the state of your industry and your profession. Make the most of your time, and have fun!

What other conference tips do you have? Share with us in the comments below.