#Inbound16 - Where Marketers Go To Glimpse The Future

#Inbound16 - Where Marketers Go To Glimpse The Future
HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference was just as lively as ever in November with jaw-dropping keynote speakers and new product enhancements that will change the way we market. HubSpot never disappoints by bringing in the big names such as Alec Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Anna Kendrick, Serena Williams and Michael Strahan. We are still reeling from all of the latest news and wanted to give you a quick recap of the conference and key takeaways for your marketing programs.

Customer Centered Marketing

I was lucky enough to sit in on a number of great sessions including “Build a Data-Driven Customer Journey” with Christopher S. Penn. Christopher pointed out there is an insane amount of content out there and marketers today just can’t win by volume alone. Content marketing needs to be customer focused and driven by data. The software we use such as Google Analytics and HubSpot are just tools and they should not come first. The customer’s journey should come first in all marketing activities.

Cold Calling is Dead and Other News from the Founders

The founders of HubSpot, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, gave an insightful keynote discussing the changes over the years. When HubSpot was first founded 10 years ago, Brian and Dharmesh were really focused on providing a great visitor experience to their clients’ customers. While the focus has stayed the same, the tactics to achieve that experience has drastically changed. After some additional research and real-world experience, a few things that have come to light include:

  • First, cold calling is dead and it’s not coming back.
  • Email is still very important but marketers must keep in mind that less is more.
  • Video is critical when communicating with today’s market.
  • Social interaction is king.

The tech-savvy Dharmesh focused on the evolution of technology over the last few decades. From computers to the internet, to the smartphone, what is next in the technology revolution? For Dharmesh, the future is chatbots. Bots like Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are revolutionizing the way humans are interacting with technology. Chatbots find the answers you are looking for easily and take actions that would normally take a lot of manual work. As a result, HubSpot unveils its new beta project, GrowthBot. GrowthBot can easily pull reports and complete marketing activities simply by asking it to do so. It can search for top articles, grade your website, compile reports and more easily search HubSpot by simply typing in the request or question in natural speech through platforms such as Facebook Messenger or Slack.

The Product Launch

I am really excited about all of the new product features, reporting and applications that Hubspot has launched over the last few months. Here is a quick summary.

  • HubSpot Marketing Free
    • HubSpot launched a tool where companies can place pop-up forms on their site for free to generate leads. It also captures any existing forms you may have on the site and provides reports for your team to measure the most valuable traffic sources.
  • Lead Flow
    • Much like the marketing free tool, HubSpot customers can now place pop-up forms throughout their site. One company found that their pop-up form converted 1375% better than traditional forms for driving blog subscriptions.
  • #Inbound16 - Where Marketers Go To Glimpse The FutureVisual Workflows
    • HubSpot presents a new workflow layout that is much easier to use and understand for today’s marketers. From now on, workflows will have visual branches making the logic much easier to follow. The previous iteration was a bit clunky.
  • Enhanced Reporting
    • Hubspot is also launching a new reporting feature. Similar to Google Analytics, you can now see more advanced analytics on your website traffic such as sessions by device, bounce rate, new vs. returning and geography.
  • HubSpot Ads
    • HubSpot has now integrated additional platforms into the system such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Adwords. You can now build and measure your ads within HubSpot and track from click to close.
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