18 Hubspot developments to smash your inbound marketing targets in 2017

It’s that time of year when we get out our crystal balls to see what the new year has in store for us.

Fortunately, this post isn’t one speculating on the future. What I’m going to take you through is definitely going to happen – because it’s already happening. To stay ahead with your inbound marketing – you need to read on.

The announcements for the Hubspot platform at Inbound16 were pretty played down this year.

So I might be alone – but I’m super excited about what’s coming up with Hubspot in 2017 – and I’m going to take you through all 18 of them.

Reason 1 – A complete focus on growth

We chose to partner with Hubspot because we work with established SMEs who are ambitious to be leaders in their market and seriously grow their business. We recognised that was the market that Hubspot had built their platform for.

So when they announced that they had consolidated their systems into a growth stack – it was music to my ears. 

That is perfectly aligned with what we want to achieve for our customers, and I know that with Hubspot’s focus, they are going to continue building a platform that will drive growth for our customers.

This is great news if you want to generate more leads and sales for your business. Hubspot is completely aligned with your goal and they’ve built their platform to help deliver growth for you.

Reason 2 – A suite of free inbound marketing tools

When we are buying cloud-based software we’ve grown very used to a try before you buy market. People like the reassurance that they can dip their toe in the water and get a feel for the software before committing to it fully. There are also loads of businesses out there that can’t afford a fully blown inbound marketing system at the moment and need to start small.

Hubspot have now made each area of their software freely available, so that businesses of all sizes can get the benefit of the software to grow their businesses for free. Amazing!

The free tools are all really powerful in their own right. They are not just watered down versions of the full product. So if you are serious about generating more leads for your business – get stuck in.

Reason 3 – Free lead capture and history

Hubspot’s LeadIn has become LeadFlow and is the basis of the free version of the Hubspot Marketing. If you aren’t using it or haven’t used it before – you need to get it into your life. 

Lots of customers that we work with run Wordpress and they’re hesitant to jump into Hubspot with both feet. LeadFlow is a great place to start. Here’s why: 

1. Its free – so there’s no risk
2. It just takes a small javascript snippet on your site – that makes it quick and easy to install
3. It capture’s data straight out of the forms on your website, so there’s no messing around configuring it
4. It captures loads of data on lead history, which channel they’ve come from, how many times they’ve visited and which pages they’ve viewed. All great insights to see what marketing is working and what isn’t and for your sales team to understand the subjects prospects are interested in
5. Slide ins, pop-ups and hello bars to encourage even more conversions on your site

If those 5 reasons don’t convince you, then I don’t know what will.

Reason 4 – Topic content tools for SEO

Search has changed massively over the last 10 years. 10 years ago it was all about keywords.

• Keywords on your page
• Keywords in your urls
• And keywords in links pointing to your page 

If you played that game hard enough, you’d get great rankings.

10 years on and Google is much smarter. It doesn’t want to give us crappy pages crammed with keywords. It wants to give us pages that we’re interested in, with valuable information, just by the question that we’ve asked.

This change means that as marketers interested in SEO, we need to move our thinking from search terms to topics. 

Hubspot has understood this move and they’re launching a powerful new search tool to help us plan and organise our content into Topics.

I love this. We’ve been working in this way for a while now and we’ve been planning and building our own topic hubs with spreadsheets and mindmaps. Now it looks like Hubspot are going to build the tools that we’ve been looking for right into the system that we use every day.

Happy days…

If you aren’t already thinking in this way – now is the time to change.

Take a look at the graphic below and take a quick guess which company and website is at the end of all of those search terms… 

Just checkout what the marketing team at Hubspot has done. Imagine what that could do for your business.

Now you know why I’m so excited about it and why you should be too. Owning a topic is one of the best ways to generate more leads for your business.

Reason 5 – Mobile has already overtaken desktop and on mobile we like things fast

A bit like video killed the radio star – mobile is busy killing the desktop. We’ve all got mobile access to the internet everywhere we go. If we need to know something - our phone is in our pocket ready to give us the answer.

There are more searches taking place on mobile devices than any other devices. Which is why Google recently moved to a mobile first index.

This means that your site and content needs to be super mobile friendly to perform well.

And that’s where Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) comes in. You’ve probably spotted the lightning bolts on mobile search results. When you click on these results the page that loads is a simplified version and it loads almost instantly. No more hanging around to get that answer you need.

Hubspot are making your blog pages AMP enabled out of the box. No messing around with code or plugins – they’re just ready to go.

Great news for generating more traffic and leads from mobile devices.

Reason 6 – Visual workflows

Most of us find complicated things much easier when they’re made visual. Workflows are probably the most complicated part of Hubspot – and they’re also the most powerful. 

So the news that Hubspot are making their workflows visual is great news to anyone who’s struggled with them in the past.

We should all be building out workflows to automate the tedious parts of our jobs and get more from our marketing. Using workflows effectively is one of the best ways to drive better results from your marketing efforts – so any developments in this area are welcome.

I can’t wait to get stuck into the visual version of workflows and getting even more powerful workflows in place for our customers.

Reason 7 – Full web analytics in Hubspot

Up to now Hubspot has been great at giving high level information in regards to page views from sources, the number of leads and customers generated. Which is the main thing that we’re interested in at the end of the day.

The problem is when you want to go deeper. More often than not there isn’t really anywhere to go. Which is a bit strange when we’re used to Google Analytics with its seemingly endless depth of information.

So what do we do – we have to use Hubspot and Google Analytics side by side to get the information we need. And they use different terminology.

So its exciting to see that Hubspot are bringing fully fledged website analytics to their platform. Consistent terminology with Google Analytics and loads more information for when we want to dig into things deeper. 

Great news for seeing what works, what doesn’t and working out how we can drive even better results from our marketing activities.

Reason 8 – Content collaboration to get your marketing out faster

In marketing we need to collaborate all the time to get work done. We need colleagues to input, review and edit. So how good would it be if that could all be done from within Hubspot.

Well that’s exactly what we are going to be getting. Content level collaboration.

Great news for getting content out of the door faster and more leads coming in through it.

Reason 9 – Content curation made easy

With inbound marketing we need to curate content. Whether it’s for sharing on social or for referencing in our content. 

If you are anything like me, you’ll be using a load of tools to get the job done. If I could do this easily and directly into Hubspot I’d be a happy man. And it looks like Hubspot is bringing me exactly that with Hubspot Collect.

Curation of content directly to Hubspot, so that I can spend more time marketing and less time copying and pasting. Sounds good to me. Bring it on.

Reason 10 – Marketing project templates and management where you need it

There are loads of project management tools out there. Many of them great, a few not so. The one thing that I’ve never found is a great one, pre-loaded with marketing project templates, that will help me get my job done faster. That would be awesome.

Guess what – Hubspot has launched exactly that – right in our Hubspot portals. In my world that’s pretty amazing. 

It means we can spend less time planning and more time making amazing content to attract the leads and customers that will help us grow.

Reason 11– All the marketing and sales information you need, wherever you need it

No more messing about trying to load systems into your browser on your phone, or trying to find another app buried in the sea of apps on our home screen.

Hubspot has consolidated their apps into one single app, so that you can get all of the key things you need in one place wherever you are.

Reason 12 – A free grown up CRM, to grow your business

So many businesses that I speak with still don’t have a proper CRM system in place. And if they do they aren’t using it properly.

If you are serious about growing your business, you need a decent sales system. And a decent sales system needs good data – which is where a CRM comes in.

Now there’s no excuse. The Hubspot CRM is free, it’s easy to use and now it’s even more powerful.

Subtle but important things like merging accounts have been sorted, along with other functionality like granular permissions. This all means that you can now use it as a fully-fledged CRM system for your business, even for bigger sales teams.

My advice is don’t hang about and get a CRM in place for your business. Hubspot CRM is a great place to start.

Reason 13 - Book more meetings in less time

We all know how it goes. You send an invite for 11am on Tuesday. The prospect you’re inviting  can’t make that time, but doesn’t give you any options on times they can make. You suggest a couple more alternatives. They select one and you send a calendar invite. A couple of days later they ask to rearrange, because they forgot about another meeting that clashes. And the cycle continues.

Wouldn’t it be much easier to send them a link to your calendar, so that they can choose a time that works for them.

You can do that and a whole lot more besides, all with Hubspot Sales Pro. From my experience if you have one or more dedicated sales people in your team, the time saving features of Hubspot Sales Pro are massive. Including calls lists, email templates and meetings.

If you haven’t tried it yet, then make some time and sign-up for a trial.

Reason 14 - Chat-enable your website

We’re all getting very used to chatting on our mobile devices and desktops. From Facebook messenger to What’s App – its all about chat.

The great thing about chat is that you know your message has been received and you’ll usually get an immediate answer. No waiting around to receive a response to your email.

Sure there are loads of chat apps out there to install on your site, but it takes finding one, installing it and configuring it. You should do it, but the chances are that it’s not top of your must do list. 

So it’s great news that Hubspot has launched messages as part of Sales Pro. Now you can have chat enabled on your website easily, as part of the system you are already using, with all of the chat history dropping directly into the relevant contact’s timeline.

Easy to use and efficient. That’s a big tick in the box for all of us who are busy growing our businesses. And more importantly it’s great for customer service.

Reason 15 – Make the most of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The chances are you have a LinkedIn account, but you aren’t using it that actively for lead generation. Which is a big opportunity missed.

LinkedIn is massive for B2B. Most workers at manager level or above have a LinkedIn profile account and they’ll check it at least weekly for one reason or another.

That’s a lot of marketing and sales opportunities for your business. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the LinkedIn account designed for sales professionals. You can set-up the most advanced searches and automate them to notify you whenever a new prospect matches your search criteria. Plus a whole lot more besides.

Now imagine all this power available in your favourite CRM system. That’s what I’m hoping Hubspot’s partnership with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is going to bring us. Apparently they are one of only 3 CRM systems to have been awarded with this partnership so far.

Watch this space. It should be a massive benefit to all of us actively using LinkedIn as a tool to grow our businesses.

Reason 16 – Exploit the power of Facebook Ads right in Hubpsot

At Inbound16 Facebook advertising for B2B was a hot topic. There was hardly a presentation that I attended where it wasn’t mentioned.

Pretty much everyone has a Facebook account. And most of us will check it at least daily. We have all also shared a lot of information with Facebook. Which makes it the perfect place to get in front of the right people.

The ability to easily integrate that with our Hubspot data is a huge opportunity.

What better way to make sure your content gets in front of the right people. Facebook advertising give us a great opportunity to nurture prospects along their buying journey with us. We can target them with highly relevant resources targeted at their specific challenges and their stage of the buying journey right in Facebook.

This will really help the Hubspot advertising tools gain more traction. They are a bit lacking as it stands. From my perspective this Facebook integration will take them to the next level.

Reason 17 - Database driven pages in Hubspot websites

The Hubspot COS is great, but it has its limits. If your site is just a typical information based lead generation site – you won’t find much better. But if you need database functionality up until now you’d need to find another solution.

The launch of database functionality for Hubspot web pages is a super exciting development.

Now if you need to develop a product database, a contact database or other searchable content right in your Hubspot site, you can.

This is great news for all of us who want the time saving and efficiency of running all of our marketing in one place and want to push our Hubspot websites to the next level.

Reason 18 – Multi language pages

It’s a wide world out there. A lot of our customers do business across Europe and the world, and they need to speak with their customers in their own language. 

Up until now this has been holding Hubspot websites back for those of us running websites in multiple languages. Fortunately this isn’t an issue any more. Hubspot has now launched Multi Language Pages, to make managing multiple language sites simple in the Hubspot COS.

If this has been holding your website move back, now’s the time to look at Hubspot again to get more of your marketing in one place. 

Make the most of these developments

Hubspot is a great system that’s powerful and easy to use. Up to now there’s been a few things that have held it back for more demanding users. For me many of these are being addressed in these developments.

If you are serious about growing your business through inbound enquiries and leads, you need the right tools in your toolbox. Hubspot is massively expanding that toolbox and sharpening the tools it offers, so that as marketing and sales professionals we can get on with the job of generating more leads and customers for our businesses.

We can’t wait to find out how Hubspot users around the world are making the most of these developments to grow their businesses.

If you are thinking about inbound marketing or have taken the plunge and would like a second opinion on where you could be getting better results – take our free inbound opportunity assessment to identify what you could be doing to generate more leads and sales for your business: