The Inbounder is coming back with a World Tour in 2017

by Gianluca Fiorelli

The Inbounder World Tour 2017 will take place this year in four cities around the world

One of the biggest challenges WAM – We Are Marketing and I dealt with during this last year was creating The Inbounder.

I told elsewhere how difficult it was to create from zero a successful Digital Marketing Conference in a city (Valencia), which certainly is not part of the classic circuit of cities where big Web Marketing events are celebrated.

In that post on Inbound.org, I also explained how I and the other co-founders had been able to make of The Inbounder a success since its first edition.

Because The Inbounder was indeed a great success.
Not only it had more than 1,100 paying attendees in its first edition, but everybody in the digital marketing industry put The Inbounder in his own “top conferences to attend” list.

The Inbounder success has been such that, from the day after it ended, I never stopped receiving praises, best wishes, questions about the second edition and – maybe the most meaningful proof of success for a conference -  questions about how to be one of the speakers in the next edition.

 

On the other hand, The Inbounder Global Conference has been very expensive to organize too and, to be totally transparent, the organization did not earn any money out of it, something we considered and accepted since the very beginning, but that would be insane to accept as such also for the future.
Rethinking the mission of The Inbounder Global Conference

We reflected a lot about the future of The Inbounder, and our main objective about it is still the same that made us creating it:

The Inbounder wants to become the most relevant, authoritative and actionable European Digital Marketing event, and one of the most important in the world (you don’t dream cheap dreams, do you?).

This means that The Inbounder Global Conference is here to stay.

 

However, we reconsidered how to achieve this objective, and how to make The Inbounder standing out with respect the others dozens of conferences held every year and not economically dyeing in the meanwhile.

Finally, we found out that the solution has to be found in those same “every year” words.

Practically all conferences have a yearly cycle, and that means that they all talk about the Present, if not even the same Now-Moment:

  • What do we have to do now for having success in Social with applications like PokemonGo?
  • Penguin 4.0 has been rolled out few weeks ago. Now what?
  • Machine Learning is the now in Search Marketing. How can we take immediate advantage of it?

 

In the best conferences, this “now-centric” editorial attitude generates wonderful and immediately actionable talks.
In the worst conferences, it ends up curating inspirational-foggy speeches.

What is missing, though, is a conference that is capable of projecting actionable insights on a longer period, so to makes us really able to have a competitive advantage with respect our competitors.

This led us to the idea that The Inbounder cannot be a yearly event, but a biyearly one.
Only so, it will have the proper time perspective for rightly saying:

  1. Two years ago we all considered this was going to be the future of Digital Marketing;
  2. Let’s see what really happened;
  3. And let’s try to see what Digital Marketing is going to be in the next two years;
  4. And what we can do in the short and middle term so to be prepared to those changes before our competitors.

Consequence: there will not be any edition of The Inbounder in Valencia in 2017, but its second edition has been postponed to 2018, its third to 2020, the fourth to 2022 and so on.

 

Postponing the Global event, then, is also a good news for us as organization, because so we will have more time for finding institutional partners and big brands, which will marry our ideas and desire to support us as main sponsors, so to cover the most expensive cost items as, for instance, the City of Arts and Science venue (we all loved it, and it would be silly not using it again in the future or downgrade the venue).

Does this mean that there won’t be any The Inbounder in 2017?

Don’t worry! The Inbounder is not going to hibernate for 18 months.
Presenting The Inbounder World Tour


One of the purposes of The Inbounder was and is to have on the stage the most relevant and influential Digital Marketing experts from all over the world, and not 50% from the USA, 40% from the UK and the rest from other countries.

There rightly is a lot of talking about gender and race equity in Digital Marketing conferences, but almost nobody cares of the “Country” equity, as if the good marketers were almost all in USA/UK, and just very few (and most always the same ones) from other countries.

 

In the first edition of The Inbounder, apart having an almost 50/50 balance of male and female speakers, we tried also to have a balanced presence of speakers from the most varied countries. However, I personally think this aspect of The Inbounder must be improved.

Also for this reason, we have decided to recover the idea of The Inbounder Roadshows, which so much success has given to us, and created The Inbounder World Tour: a series of The Inbounder local events in 4 cities all over the world, which will:

  1. Help us spreading The Inbounder philosophy and brand;
  2. Strengthen our position in those countries from where we look The Inbounder Global Conference in 2018 will mostly come;
  3. Help us knowing IRL new speakers who, eventually, will be invited to speak at The Inbounder Global Conference in Valencia in 2018. 

 

The cities previewed by The Inbounder World Tour are:

Madrid (Spain) – 17 of March 2017;
London (UK) – 2 of May 2017;
New York (USA) – 22 of May 2017;
Milan (Italy) - 15 of September 2017.

 

Each event

will see from 8 to 10 local speakers see here who confirmed their presence already,
will last one day,
will have a capacity of between 250 and 350 attendees depending on the city 
the quality of its speakers (and ticket price) will make them a not-to-be-missed event. 

So, to conclude, do not be sad if the second edition of The Inbounder has been postponed to 2018, because we decided so for making it an even better and greater event than it was in its first edition.

And be happy, because in 2017 The Inbounder will come to city very close to you!

 

Gianluca Fiorelli
SEO Consultant
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