Key takeaways from INBOUND 2022: It’s all about connection

INBOUND 2022, HubSpot’s annual marketing conference, was back in person as a hybrid event in Boston after two years as an online-only event. UP members were there to take in the latest news, gather inspiration, and of course, to hear keynote speakers like Barack Obama and Jane Goodall. 

Shari Monnes, Inbound Lead, and Alice Smith, Managing Director of UP for Digital, were awed and inspired at INBOUND 2022.

Although packed with inspiration and some impressive product updates, there weren’t any big new product introductions this year. Instead, HubSpot focused on updating its existing products to be more robust, connected, and community-focused.

Connection was a key theme of this year's conference. In his opening talk as part of the HubSpot Spotlight, Darmesh Shah, HubSpot’s cofounder and CTO, focused on the importance of connected platforms, connected data, and connected people.Darmesh Shaw, Cofounder and CTO of HubSpot, shared thoughts about the importance of building community in an increasingly disconnected world during INBOUND 2022.

That’s why HubSpot has launched a new professional community designed to connect people – including HubSpot users and non-users who want to connect around technology, marketing, or ideas. 

The new community is called (you guessed it) CONNECT. You can join it now to be one of the early members.

Join connect.com

Four key takeaways from INBOUND 22

Over the last 10 years, the INBOUND conference has grown to become one of the premiere marketing conferences in the world. Certainly, one that delivers the most diverse, inspirational, and practical information. This year’s event carried on that tradition. 

• Connection matters

Connection of data. Of platforms. Of people. Connection was clearly the main theme of INBOUND 2022, and what could be more important than using your tech stack to connect your data and your customers in a world that has become increasingly disconnected? 

Customers feel valued and appreciated when you offer them a connected, personalized experience. Experiences designed around their needs, not your metrics, will lead to deeper connections and more growth for your business. HubSpot’s suite of solutions are designed to make connection easy, automatic and insightful.

• Data quality and privacy go hand in hand

HubSpot made it clear that the new era of data privacy doesn’t mean the end of gathering important marketing data. In fact, the opposite is true. Obtaining first-party data (data that you collect yourself and own, following best practices and privacy laws) is powerful and irreplaceable, especially in the era of Google changes and GDPR laws.  

Managing your data quality – to ensure everyone enters data in the right format, that duplicate data is managed, and data objects can be used in powerful ways in reports – are essential elements of data quality management. New HubSpot tools and updates are making this easier and more precise.

• From ecommerce to support, simplified customer experiences win

HubSpot has continued to create tools to create more unified customer experiences – having delivered a Customer Support Hub several years ago and Operations Hub more recently that create a single point of truth for all customer data – from social media clicks, to first website visits to sales calls, to customer service chats. With a powerful, yet simple (and free) CRM at the heart of its system of data Hubs, HubSpot strives to make the customer experience and data management seamless.

• Building your pipeline is the key to business success

Whether you use pure inbound, outbound sales, or paid solutions to gain leads, creating a pipeline that delivers the right kinds of prospects to your business is important for long-term growth, as well as short-term success.  HubSpot’s INBOUND conference continues to present best-in-class ideas and solutions for managing, building and tracking your pipeline. 

Jane Goodall delivered a heartfelt and heart-warming talk at INBOUND 2022 in Boston.

Other key moments at INBOUND, which we can summarize with a few quotes, here:

“Hope is about action, not just wishful thinking. You have to take action to change the world.”  - Jane Goodall

"Everybody wants to matter. And how we see people matters.”  - Viola Davis

“You can’t wake people up if you turn your back on them. You have to listen and respond.” - Barack Obama

And (because we couldn’t pick just one):

“If you have a critical mass of more women in a group, the group will make better decisions."  - Barack Obama

 “Culture is how people make decisions when you're not in the room."
- Brian Halligan

 “Inbound wasn’t a product. It was a philosophy.”
- Darmesh Shah [On what made HubSpot’s approach different]

Brian Halligan, cofounder of HubSpot, talked about the evolution of HubSpot and the events and leaders who inspired him most as a founder.

New HubSpot features

Many of this year’s INBOUND announcements and updates were focused on bringing connection to data and systems, as well as to customers and teams. HubSpot is more focused than ever on ensuring a connected CRM at the center of its suite of tools: Marketing Hub, Service Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub and the CMS Hub.  A central focus is to provide connected data in an era of privacy changes and a cookie-less future. 

HubSpot is on it!

New Marketing Hub features

• Campaigns enhancement

For marketers, HubSpot's revision of its campaigns tool is an exciting update.  You can now see tactics and strategies across the entire buyer's journey, understand how to drive engagement at every touchpoint, and optimize campaigns using data from sales and customer purchases.  Your entire marketing team can work on campaigns from one place – helping to eliminate the silos between sales and marketing campaigns. 

• Customer journey analytics

Speaking of buyer's journeys, HubSpot has developed a new way to view the entire journey from beginning to end and get insight into the key touchpoints that drive conversions. You can identify all the touchpoints that contributed to conversions, starting with the initial marketing email delivery. This new visualization of the journey gives an overview in a single picture.

• Ad conversion events

This new feature gives you a way to hyper-target ads without using cookies – which becomes critical as the digital world becomes more privacy-focused. Instead, you can use all of your own first-party data to target, report, and optimize ads. It’s available first for LinkedIn, with other platforms coming later this year. HubSpot is also working on building an integration with Google’s Enhanced Conversions (EC) for web.

• WhatsApp messaging

Now you can connect your WhatsApp Business Account as a messaging channel in your HubSpot inbox to communicate with prospects and customers using video, text or calls. This keeps the conversation visible in the contact record – creating a single source of truth for all your teams.

Data management features

According to Harvard Business Review, only 3% of companies' data meet even basic data-quality standards. With HubSpot, you can keep your customer data connected, clean, and under control, so you can make smarter decisions as your business grows. 

Some new features and functions that make it easier to keep your data high quality include:

• Cleaner import - HubSpot has improved its import experience so that errors are flagged and resolved before imports are published to your CRM.

• Property validations - With property validations –  which can be set to flag specific requirements, such as minimum or maximum character count – data imports become more streamlined and easier.
• Custom object builder - A new feature of HubSpot makes it easy to create custom objects without any coding knowledge, so even non-developers can adjust data models to fit your infrastructure. 

• Automation recommendations - Using artificial intelligence, this HubSpot feature continuously scans your database for problems and recommends automated fixes so you don’t have to do them one by one.
• Data model overview - Within the interactive dashboard, you can see how predefined and custom objects relate to each other. 
• Data quality command center - The new HubSpot data quality command center lets you see your data's overall health at a glance – including areas such as formatting issues or CRM property health. 

Other new features

Other HubSpot updates include new features for Sales Hub such as Inbound calling using a single number, custom goals, and improvements to forecasting and deal management. 

In addition, CRM changes include:

• Right sidebar configurations (to show relevant information to different teams) 
• New activity types (to log customer connection activities from SMS, LinkedIn Message, WhatsApp, and Physical Mail) 
• Customize pipeline cards by stage (select up to four properties to display on board cards of all pipeline objects - deals, tickets, and custom objects) 
• New overview tab (show critical information and customize by teams)

For developers, several new features make working with the CMS and CRM more effective, such as: a new development sandbox that allows developers to build and test concepts before moving them to production; GitHub integration to manage HubSpot’s codebase; debugging using a CRM mid-panel card logging system; and CRM card builder (using an interactive artifact to create JSON payloads).

Learn more

Read more about the product updates in this great overview from Six and Flow.

And check out this HubSpot page to see What’s New and What’s Coming. 

Want to try out the new features of HubSpot?

Have a question? Reach out to UP