Hosted by the Cambridge, Mass.-based marketing firm HubSpot, the four-day Inbound conference drew nearly 3,000 professionals, all eager to review the latest in inbound marketing tools and techniques.

Those ninja tips weren’t about breaking concrete blocks, but rather were marketing activities infused with wisdom for inbound marketers. Author Susan Cain spoke about how corporate culture underestimates the value of introverted leaders. And Cyndi Lauper sang new material but also gave the crowd what it wanted: 1980s hits such “All Through the Night.”

HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah used the conference to pitch the company’s latest product: a new version of its marketing software. HubSpot 3 offers an “Amazon.com-like” personalization with 10 new or rebuilt tools that allow users to tailor their websites and marketing to the unique interests of customers.

In one of the many smaller group talks at the conference, Paul Roetzer, founder of the inbound marketing firm PR20/20, advised attendees to revisit their company’s mission and procedures.

Roetzer recalled how his Cleveland-based firm had 15 new campaign clients in 2009. He estimated these new clients would bring his company more than $500,000 in revenue. But within a year, 13 of those clients had left for various reasons and PR20/20 let one go.

That quick churn of clients led Roetzer to review what went wrong. He found the firm had promised too much. Roetzer recognized PR20/20 would have to choose the “right clients,” committing to “people who want to commit to you.” He recommended watching for red flags with clients — like sensing a contact is unhappy in a phone conversation.

Roetzer also advised his audience to take a sophisticated approach to growth by assessing business and marketing strengths, preparing an honest forecast for potential success, determining talent needs and team structures, and allocating resources to avoid burnout.

Jean Tang, founder of MarketSmiths, a copywriting collective for industries and individuals in New York, enjoyed Roetzer’s talk but “respectfully” disagreed with one suggestion: offering clients a questionnaire to assess her company’s performance. She prefers unscripted conversation to gauge their opinions.

Time for a reality check. A big problem for companies using social or mobile technologies for marketing is they forget that the social piece needs to square with reality, said Georgy Cohen, a consultant and the former web content and strategy manager at Tufts University.

Too often companies will make noise on a social channel but don’t have the goods to back it up.

For example, a company can pitch their product to customers using Foursquare, a mobile application that lets people “check-in” with their location. But if they aren’t offering some kind of value, like a coupon, customers will probably not be impressed. Or, a company may display a QR code on a product or collateral material, but the code leads to a boring Web page with no added value. The end result: no compelling reason to buy the product. What’s worse, the customer may feel they just wasted their time.

So, make sure the social piece extends a real marketing plan, otherwise customers will discover what author Gertrude Stein once said: “There is no there there.”

Or as Cohen put it, “Don’t bother being awesome on Twitter if you are not awesome in real life.”

Pass the butter.“Content marketing is like butter,” said, Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. “It makes everything you eat taste better but you wouldn’t necessarily eat it by itself.”

In a presentation, Pulizzi said marketers are often stumped to come up with a content strategy to support marketing efforts. “Stop with the [technology] tools,” he said, “Tools come and go.” To create a content strategy, focus on “what’s interesting about you.”

Recent research by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 65% of companies it surveyed had some kind of blog, up from 28% three years ago. However, “that doesn’t mean it’s all good content,” Pulizzi added.

Phases of mobile marketing adoption: Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Ektron, a content management software company, said many companies still haven’t figured out how to best use mobile devices to reach customers. Some have moved on to a “mobile focus” where they’ve mobile-enabled some pages to be optimized for hand-held devices. When making this shift, companies should make careful, objective content decisions and not try to port the whole web site to smartphones and tablets. He likens many home pages to an episode of “Hoarders” a cable television show about people who cannot throw away anything and jam their homes with stuff, much of it useless. Many home pages will display an overload of content – often clearly the result of content decisions by committee – as well as generic ads that are not targeted and therefore irrelevant to many customers, Wentworth said. He has great hopes that “smart phones will force clarity.”

There is more to it than just your own content. Marissa Peacock, a social media consultant and reporter for CMSwire, a website focused on content management, said organizations can boost their credibility by sharing other people’s content as part of their own content marketing efforts.

“It’s not just about you,” Peacock said, when advocating the sharing of content at a panel discussion.  If companies give the nod to other content producers,  ”that’s how [customers] will look to you to find out what’s important,” she added.