Members of our team have finally returned from INBOUND 2017, and it's "all systems grow" for our favorite inbound marketing software.
Here's what's new and what's coming in HubSpot products:
HubSpot Sales Professional
HubSpot's focus on merging marketing and sales strategy has been a spotlight topic for years at INBOUND. On Nov. 1, 2017, they're rolling out a new version of their popular Sales Professional as "the all-in-one sales toolkit to supercharge your sales engine."
Now, experienced users can organize every detail of their customers and prospects using sophisticated automation and management tools. They're also introducing time management tools that allow sales representatives to save hours and work smarter via meetings, templates, sequences, and "a deep inbox integration."
For the cherry on top, the inbound marketing software is leveraging "the power of machine learning to surface the best leads to your sales team with predictive lead scoring." Nice.
HubSpot Conversations
You'll have to wait a bit for Conversations, coming in 2018. It's a brand-new inbox in HubSpot CRM Free that allows you and your team to have better, more engaging interactions with customers.
It's a single, central place for you to view, respond, and manage your conversations with ease. It pulls messages from every channel and allows you to see every detail of a customer with the CRM integration -- giving you context in every conversation.
As for who can join in, include any team member in a thread or set up automation bots and rules to help you manage and monitor conversations on a smaller scale like routing incoming messages and answering simple requests.
Motion.ai
We wondered in our Conference preview how artificial intelligence (AI) would affect our marketing habits. With Google, Alexa, and Siri taking over our personal lives, how will digital assistance transcend purchasing, SEO, and more?
One of the biggest surprises this year was that HubSpot acquired automation bot company, Motion.ai. "The future of marketing is in messaging," as Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, discussed in his keynote. He cited local and international businesses using Facebook Messenger as a means of instant communication with their customers.
With bots that are powered by AI, you can have online conversations with anyone at scale to better engage, convert, close, and delight across every channel.
You'll have to wait until 2018 for this total merge, but you can find an example of the power of robotics at your fingertips here.
HubSpot Customer Hub
Coming in 2018, Customer Hub "enables the inbound way of doing customer service." This lifecycle marketing method, as cited by HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah in his keynote, encompasses the entire customer journey by going beyond delight.
To make customers happier and keep them for a longer period of time, Customer Hub is built on top of Conversations. It makes it easy to escalate everyday conversations into a manageable case by understanding customer feedback through insights tools that you can deploy across Conversations, email, and more.
Its purpose is to go reach beyond solving tickets with padded answers. It's time to employ the human side of helping others quickly and efficiently using sophisticated tools.
HubSpot Marketing
HubSpot wants you to reimagine your marketing strategy not only by completing the lifecycle marketing method, but also by tweaking existing tools to further your engagement and attraction of the right customers. Here's what's coming soon:
- Content Strategy.
Our INBOUND Conference preview asked how we'd leverage content strategy in the new age of content shock and self-publishing -- and HubSpot has an answer. "A new, modern approach to content and SEO that helps marketers get more traffic with less content" means stop wasting time on subpar content for quantity's sake and build quality for the better results.
- Campaign Reporting.
This powerful new reporting engine is designed to tie broad marketing campaigns directly to analytics like traffic, leads, and revenue. Now, you'll know what works and what doesn't much faster.
- Facebook Ads.
Use HubSpot's granular segmentation tools to retarget Facebook Ads to convert more users with new formats like Facebook Lead Ads.
- Instagram for HubSpot.
Added to Social Publishing, Instagram content can be posted, scheduled, and edited in a beta version.
- Native Shopify Integration.
Sync product and sales data seamlessly, benefit from HubSpot's analytics tools, create workflow emails, and more for e-commerce companies.
- HubSpot Collect.
Using Google Docs, you can now clip research from around the Internet and push content drafts into HubSpot with one simple click.
All in all, we're super excited to see how these new HubSpot tools and upgrades will help our clients' inbound marketing strategies in the New Year.
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