What We're Talking About...Hubspot Product Updates 2017

Every year HubSpotters excitedly anticipate the Product Announcement that takes place at Inbound, HubSpot's annual conference in Boston. Lucky for you we had three team members in at Inbound17 this week taking careful notes during the live announcement.

So if you're ready to amp up your HubSpot activties with newly released products, or your contemplating adopting a HubSpot product for your business, here's what we're talking about...

HubSpot Marketing Hub Updates

Content Strategy

“A new, modern approach to content and SEO that helps marketers get more traffic with less content.”

It's 2017 and the way we search for information has changed; we search the way we talk conversationally; and there are thousands of term variations that mean the same thing.

So how about instead of writing content around every keyword, we moved to the practice of covering topics comprehensively? At the center of these topics is a pillar page, around which content is created. The new content strategy product is about helping you get more traffic with less content, and has 4 important elements.

• First, discover fresh content ideas with HubSpot suggested topics.
• Second, bring content to life with ease with HubSpot provided pillar page templates.
• Third, the ability to create content for humans and optimize them for search engines.
• And lastly, track and celebrate the ROI of content with clients and within your team with topic cluster reporting to figure out exactly how many contacts and customers each topic is generating.

In short, this tool helps create content answers for every question, increase visibility and leads, grow sustainable organic traffic, and increase revenue.

Campaign Reporting

“A powerful new reporting engine helps you tie even the broadest marketing campaigns directly to traffic, leads, and revenue.”

If you can't show inbound is worth it, you lose business. You must be able to show bottom line but reporting on revenue alone could miss the big picture of a campaign. However, the more you do for clients, the harder it gets to tie everything together and to tie those tasks to profit generated at end of day.

Although there is already the campaigns tool in HubSpot, which has been sufficient for organizing, it doesn't help much for reporting. Of course there are other ways to get this information such as from agencies, Excel/Salesforce/Google Analytics, but a lot of companies just don't do any campaign reporting at all.

So, when HubSpot asked what people wanted, they said:

• Better aggregate campaign analytics such as a dashboard of all campaign metrics and better snapshots
• Contact influence information focused on engaging existing leads, not lead generation
• Revenue reporting and comparison

HubSpot responded and here's what you'll be able to do and see with the new Campaign Reporting:

• Compare campaigns to each other.
• Chart out campaign performance visually.
• See a list of new contacts created by a campaign --- either via first-touch or last touch. 
• See a list of contacts influenced by a campaign.
• Track down how much revenue a campaign influenced.

Facebook Audiences and Lead ads Integration

“Use HubSpot’s granular segmentation tools to target ads on Facebook. Easily convert more people with new formats like Facebook Lead Ads.”

A new integration with Facebook Ads, lets you use HubSpot smartlists to build targeting audiences and create, track, and sync lead ads with HubSpot. If you are not familiar, Facebook's lead ads allow potential customers to sign up for your offers on Facebook and give you accurate contact information that you can use to follow up.

While this integration has been available for some time as an add-on, it now comes standard with all versions of HubSpot Marketing. With this integration you can now create a lead ad, analyze your lead ads and set up a re-marketing audience all from within HubSpot.

Here's a video that walks you through exactly how to set up Lead Ads in HubSpot: How to Use HubSpot's Facebook Ads Integration Tool.

Instagram Reminders

“Tee up posts and get mobile reminders to publish your content on Instagram.”

For those targeting the over 700 Million users now on Instagram and are also annoyed with having to sign in on their phone in order to post - you are in luck! When live this new feature will allow you to create and schedule photos and video to publish on Instagram to HubSpot, joining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ as publishing option inside of HubSpot Social tools.

Native Shopify Integration

“With new Campaign Reporting, you can connect even your widest-reaching initiatives to your business’s bottom line: traffic, conversions, and most important of all revenue. No more uncounted marketing tactics. Get credit for your work.”

HubSpot customers now have access to a new, HubSpot built integration with ecommerce leader Shopify. Native shopify integration means all products and attributes sync right into HubSpot, and purchases sync as deals. Features include:

• Marketing Automation for ecommerce: Use your ecommerce data such as deal stages, or purchase pattern as signals to trigger workflows. This means easy abandoned cart nurturing, order processing, and more.
• Email for ecommerce: Ecommerce marketers using HubSpot have access to transactional email. This includes templates to build emails and automation to deliver them.
• Track Products and Orders: You’ll be able to bring orders into HubSpot as deals. This lets you organize and analyze purchasing patterns, customer LTV, and more. It also gives you a signal to build lists and create custom segments.

hubspot Ecommerce Bridge

For teams that aren’t on Shopify or don’t want to switch, HubSpot is working on a new set of API’s built specifically for the eCommerce use case. It will give technical teams an official and streamlined way to connect online stores to HubSpot. Bridge is currently in a limited beta and will roll out over the coming months.

 If you're curious to see what else is new and happening in the marketing world, make sure to get your State of Inbound 2017 Report!

HubSpot Sales Hub

Sales Professional

“Less administration. More conversations.”

It's easy to see results and what is working when you're just starting out, but then you hit a slow down point and sort of plateau. This is when you enter scale-up mode. For the sales team it's hard because they have demand and a sales engine but now you're having a hard time focusing on the right leads, keeping sales cycle short, and upping sales volume. How do you break through and keep momentum going? Enter the massively updated version of HubSpot Sales Professional which let's you...

• Organize every detail about your prospects and customers, using robust automation and management tools sophisticated teams need.
• Save your reps time and help them work smarter with productivity tools like meetings, templates, sequences, and a deep inbox integration.
• Leverage the power of machine learning to surface the best leads to your sales team with predictive lead scoring.

Here are just some the features available to you if you upgrade from Free to the pro version:

1. Email templates - Up to 1,000 per user per month
2. Up to 2,000 minutes of calling per user per monthLive chat
3. Meetings - Unlimited personal and team meetings links, plus additional customization
4. Email tracking and reports - Unlimited email opens and clicks

Very important to note, on November 1st, 2071, the price of Sales Pro will increase to $400/month to make room for even more great features. Buy now and pay only $50/month per user! If you are interested in purchasing, contact us and we'll help you with the details.

HubSpot Conversations

“Gartner predicts that by 2020, 30% of our interactions with technology will be through "conversations" with smart machines.”

One to one messaging is replacing standard communication because it is faster than email and call, it's always on, it works seamlessly on mobile, and it's conversational (emojis and all). Conversations is a shared inbox that helps you and your team have better one-to-one conversations with your customers across channels like Twitter, Facebook, email, Instagram, and more. It will enrich and record conversations, helping you rally around the customer by providing CRM information (name, company, owner, package use, past conversations) within the chat log.

• Stores messages from your prospects and customers in a single, central place so you can view, manage, and reply with ease.
• Seamlessly pulls in conversations from every messaging channel, and allows you to bring any member of your team into a thread.
• Deeply connected to the rest of HubSpot CRM Free, giving you context on every contact so you always have the full picture.
• Automation rules and bots help you manage conversations at scale, routing incoming messages and taking care of simple tasks.

The baseline version of Conversations will be included in HubSpot CRM free.

HubSpot Customer Hub

“Succeed because your customers did.”

The Customer Hub is HubSpot's attempt to address the “delight” portion of the customer journey. Details on exactly what the Hub will include are sparse and will not be released until 2018. But here is what they claim the Hub will do:

• The Customer Hub is built on top of Conversations. This makes it easy to escalate an everyday chat into a case that can be managed.
• Truly understand your customers with feedback and insights tools, that you can deploy across Conversations, email, and more.
• Go from frantically "solving tickets" to actually helping your customers – quickly and efficiently. Serve them even better with sophisticated knowledge center tools.

We'll be sure to keep you updated on any news or updates around this product as they become known.

Need help?

If you are already a HubSpot customer and need any help utilizing these new tools, check out our HubSpot training package and recieve training from Nicole Pereira, who is ranked as a Top Ten HubSpot power user IN THE WORLD!

If you are not already a user of the platform but considering it for your business, contact us and we would love to help you decide (unbiasedly) if HubSpot is a good fit for you.