In this article, we share the most exciting and important news related to the Marketing Hub by HubSpot. New product announcements made at the annual INBOUND conference on the 22-23 september 2020. While many new cool features and technical function now are available, you'll also get an update on what you need to know in regards to inbound marketing to succeed in 2020 and beyond!
Related topic: Want more content on ALL important news, updates, and product announcements made in 2020 across the entire HubSpot platform? Read this article: What's NEW in HubSpot 2020
Note: most of the tools and features mentioned in this post are only available for Enterprise and in some cases Professional. But you can be sure new features will appear in all of HubSpot license models.
Content Overview
The problem with Inbound marketing in 2020
Before jumping into the new features and functions in HubSpot's marketing hub it's important to set the scene to give you the right context.
You can have the best car (or bicycle) available on the market, but if you have no driving (cycling) skills, you won't get far. And your fancy vehicle isn't worth...much. What I am trying to say is: put the right driver behind the wheels, technology is still just technology. But with the right driver - it's extremely powerful.
This year G2 ranked HubSpot as the #1 product for marketers and “Best Usability” across SMB, Mid-Market, and Enterprise. So you can be perfectly safe knowing you're maneuvering the best tool available.
But as more and more agencies and companies discovered the power and benefits of inbound marketing a problem arose. When everyone is using the Inbound methodology "by the book" then every message looks the same.
This issue was addressed by HubSpot CPO, Christopher O'Donnell, stating:
Many marketers have access to the same marketing tools and playbooks, so customers are flooded with mediocre marketing now and are getting better at tuning it out.
Christopher O'Donnell, CPO, HubSpot
So what solutions lay ahead to approach and avoid falling into the same pit of repetitive messaging that everybody else is engaging in? The key to success is the right balance between creativity (Copywrite, graphics), strategy, and technology.
And a big piece of the solutions lays inside of HubSpot....
CRM Powered Marketing - Personalization is key
To stay relevant, and to cut through the noise personalization is the key to success. Not only to cut through ( you'll just end up being tuned out again) but also to provide true and genuine value, as inbound was meant to function to begin with.
So understanding your customers gives you the ability to communicate in the most relevant ways possible. Personalization is the way forward. To succeed in your efforts you have to power everything with data. Great news if you're a HubSpot user or planning to become one. The Marketing Hub will soon enable CRM powered marketing across automation, email, segmentation, behavioral triggers and more.
This type of advanced personalization tool is a key differentiator. Much of the strength of HubSpot is found in the connection between, CRM, marketing, sales, and service. Now, the tighten integration between the CRM and marketing tools, gives you even better capabilities of personalization, content creation, reporting, and more.
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CRM Powered Segmentation with Custom Objects
A big change made in HubSpot in 2020 is the introduction of Custom objects. And they aren't just for CRM users and sales teams. These new custom objects allows you to capture all of the data properties relevant to your business within HubSpot and leverage that for deeper segmentation.
CRM-Powered, Programmable Email (beta)
If you work with email marketing you know how much effort is needed to get those opens. But just having an inbox, you could probably relate, how often and why do you open marketing emails? Customers want to receive personalized emails with relevant content based on their specific needs and interests.
The Programmable email content is Hubspot's latest addition to Marketing Email. Personalization is made possible in HubSpot today with content tokens and smart content. Now you'll be able to build one, single email template that leverages custom, conditional logic to deliver a unique version to every contact on your list. It also allows you to personalize email within the user friendly drag-and-drop editor and enables developers to unlock more advanced personalization using scripts and conditional logic.
CRM Powered Triggers with Behavioral Events
You want to meet your prospect where they are in their buyer's journey and supply them with the information they need at the right time. Using CRM data and behavioral events, you can set up a trigger that fires off an email to prospects when it’s clear they are trying to decide whether to buy or not. You know this because they for example: visited your pricing page, used your sales calculator, and made a download. This together is a good signal they are thinking about buying and in need of some friendly encouragement. Send an automated email and close that deal.
CRM Powered Ads
The HubSpot ads tool already allows you to directly retarget your leads, customers, or anonymous website visitors on Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn. With the latest update, HubSpot is making your lead generation more targeted. Enabling offline conversion tracking directly from HubSpot with ads optimization events.
Today, Google only knows an ad was clicked on, not what happens afterward. So their algorithms will continue to optimize toward getting users to only click. With ads optimization events, a signal is sent directly to Google every time a contact's lifecycle stage changes, which better informs their optimization algorithms to show ads.
Meaning, Google will know when a user became a lead or customer and can start optimizing toward the most valuable leads for your business.
Advanced Automation - Let's focus your workload else were
Over 2020, we’ve seen improvements in workflows, your HubSpot automation engine. The updates allow you to automate manual tasks, send more personalized communication, and easily build and maintain workflows.
Manual and repetitive tasks are one area that really can make a huge difference for your organization. The Workflow engine has according to HubSpot been given a complete under-the-hood renovation, allowing you to automate many more tasks in contact workflows than you could before. These include triggering Slack notifications and updating CRM (deal, ticket, quote) properties when a new lead is created or changes stages.
Build & Maintain Complex Marketing Automation
Workflows in HubSpot makes it possible to create incredibly powerful automation. A redesign has been made to the Workflows editor, making the process much easier for complex campaigns. With the new workflows editor, you can build multi-branch workflows that allow you to add multiple conditions to a single if/then step, so your workflow can take more than two paths from a single if/then action.
Custom Report Builder - Dashing dashboards
The out of the box reporting wasn’t cutting it for many of HubSpot's customers. That’s why this year, HubSpot gave access to the beta for the new custom report builder. The new custom report builder is built to give you access to all of your data in one place — no spreadsheets required.
Now, you can access your contact, company, and deal data alongside your marketing email, landing page, and blog engagement data (with many more data sources to come throughout the beta) right within the custom report builder. This is a streamlined way to answer your key questions.
The new custom report builder is built to give the user access to all data in one place. Now, you can access your contact, company, and deal data alongside your marketing email, landing page, and blog engagement data (with many more data sources to come throughout the beta) right within the custom report builder.
Flexible Dashboards
When you have to scroll through an endless series of reports to access your most important business metrics, motivation tends to decline and time gets wasted. Now HubSpot launches flexible dashboards to give you a beautiful, customizable, and data-dense dashboard that allows you to easily build and share dashboards with your tea
Marketing Contacts: Scalable Pricing for Marketing Hub
Another significant modification underway for the marketing hub is the pricing model. There are a plenty of reasons to have contacts in your CRM that you can’t market to. Bounces, unsubscribes, partners, sales contacts, one-off customer success tickets...the list goes on. Focus your budget on the contacts that you send marketing emails and target ads to -- and enjoy free storage up to one million non-marketing contacts for all the rest.
This feature will be launched on the 21st of October 2020 - read the details here.
The New Account-Based Marketing Tool in HubSpot
Like all new features and tools revealed, the ABM tool is also built to "thrive in the new normal". Meaning, it is built to cut through the noise with personalization.
HubSpot’s new ABM tools are designed to help marketing and sales teams work together to prioritize the right accounts, personalize outreach, coordinate engagement, and easily measure performance.
You'll have the ability to personalize content and tailor how you engage with stakeholders within an account. With new account-level targeting added to the LinkedIn Ads integration, you can now target companies by target account status or tier, and contacts or subsets of contacts at target accounts. The account overview sidebar, the ABM playbook for sales reps, and a native integration to link your HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts, help further deepen your relationships with people over time, helping build more authentic connections with stakeholders within each account.
And as mentioned previously, if you're using marketing/sales professional or above, the ABM tool automatically suggests target accounts to follow up based on the data in your system.
Can't get enough of ABM? Read this blog post as well - deep diving in HubSpots ABM Software and account based marketing.
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What's new in the CMS Hub - HubSpot's CMS
The ambition for CMS Hub is to be " A developers dream without being the marketers nightmare". Pushing the boundaries of how marketers and developers teams up - a lot of efforts are made to give the marketers the power to customize, drag and drop, edit and work more efficient. Solving this issue is a dream come true, for any marketer (yours truly) who knows how frustrating it can be.
Other improvements announced that's being developed is enhanced SEO tooling (The SEO tool is already extremely helpful in my opinion) now, you'll get even more in-depth recommendations on how to improve SEO across your entire website. Efforts will also be made to improve themes with more drag and drop capabilities. Improved Mobile styling is also in the works enabling marketers to create fully responsive pages for mobile, no code needed.
Read more on how we help our customers with website development
Conclusions - Inbound is not a shortcut, but it is the faster way to success
Much effort must be focused on personalization. Understanding your customers gives you the ability to communicate in the most relevant ways possible. Just as HubSpot in developing the solution for supplying bot power and ease of use - you as a marketer must solve the dilemma of being personal at scale.
Inbound at its core is about a more empathic and genuine approach to marketing and selling your product or services. The basics of Inbound is to attract customers rather than disrupt with unwanted messaging. But in many cases, leaders do not have the patience or feel uncomfortable handing over the power to the buyers. And what's the result? A feed looking like a telemarketing conference.
The lesson we need to learn again is that there is no shortcut to success, it demands effort and hard work. You will not see overnight success with an inbound strategy, but implemented correctly, with the right technology, decent creatives, and the right approach, it is the fastest road to success for your business.
Want more information about the new and improved Marketing Hub in HubSpot? Let's talk!
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