At our last HUG of 2023, we held an in-person event in our very own Port Adelaide office to take a deep dive into the biggest HubSpot changes of the year.
This was the first face-to-face HUG event we’ve held since 2019, so we were very excited to have everyone in our office to celebrate the end of the year with food, drinks and HubSpot chats.
For those who have never attended a HubSpot User Group (HUG) event, the event brings users of the platform come together to talk about their strategies and insights on HubSpot to maximise their use of the software.
We’ve been running these events for Adelaide for years but have only had a few in person. If you want to come to the next one, join the community to get notified.
If you missed the event, this blog will be giving you a recap on what we think the HubSpot game chargers for 2023 were. Or if you did attend, here’s your refresher.
All things AI
AI has taken over the marketing world this year, for the better. HubSpot has integrated AI across the platform to give users a lot more assistance when it comes to creating content. The Content Assistant feature works across website pages, landing pages, socials, emails (both marketing & sales), CTAs, conversations and knowledge base.
With the content assistant, marketers can save time and effort by getting ideas on what to write about when they're stuck, or by helping re-write pre-existing content to make it shorter, longer or re-write it in a different tone. The AI-assisted generator helps save time by automatically generating descriptions for workflows, reports, subject lines, meta titles, blog titles, and summaries. This not only makes it easier for people to navigate their HubSpot Portal but also ensures clear and concise communication between teams.
Another great AI integration to come to HubSpot this year is all the data features. This helps to keep your HubSpot Portal clean with regular automated data clean-ups. As well as being able to forecast and get deal insights to get you prepared for the future.
ChatSpot
ChatSpot is now out of Alpha and has been added to HubSpot this year - with a direct link to it appearing in our portals. This tool has received constant updates and improvements to become a marketer's right-hand person.
This powerful tool offers a wide range of features that can greatly assist marketers in their day-to-day tasks. With ChatSpot, marketers can effortlessly perform CRM actions like adding and assigning records, as well as reviewing notes and summaries. Additionally, it provides valuable support to the sales team by enabling them to prospect companies based on industries, size, location, and tech stack.
The tool also offers insights into companies, helps in drafting emails, finding keywords for ads, and even generates blogs and images. With these functionalities, ChatSpot has become an indispensable resource and time-saver for marketers, empowering them to create compelling content, generate new leads, and facilitate seamless communication with clients. Use the image generation tool with caution though, especially if they contain faces or fingers.
CTA tool
The CTA (Call-to-Action) tool has been given an exciting update this year! The new CTA tool allows you to create visually appealing and effective CTAs for your website, including pop-ups, banners, slide-ins and buttons. With the ability to customise these CTAs to match your branding, they will stand out and capture the attention of your website visitors. The new CTA tool also offers associations to records, making it easier to identify employees of a company and access parental information. You can also build them yourself with custom CSS, like our brand new CTA below:
Collaboration & productivity tools
HubSpot has added more features to make collaboration and productivity within the team better. The new collaboration sidebar, for example, allows team members to make comments, notify others and request approvals on marketing content. There have also been improvements to the meetings tool - now people can create meeting links on behalf of others, and people can add attendees as they book their meeting with you.
There is also a new prospecting workspace, which allows the sales team to have a clear outlook on their daily tasks. It shows overdue tasks, schedule, today’s to-dos, sequences and suggested activities. This workspace makes sure that nothing gets missed in your HubSpot Portal and you do all the tasks that need to be done on that day. Even though this is set up for the intention of the sales team to mainly use, others can use it too to manage your daily tasks.
Associations
The Associations feature has also been getting a lot of love from HubSpot this year. You can now access data from associated records in workflows allowing you, for example, to pull some information from the company record in a notification sent by a contact-based workflow.
Furthermore, you can associate records of the same object. This is extremely helpful if your business deals with families, carers or guardians, but also for B2B. You can associate family members with each other, carers with their clients or parent companies with their children companies.
A more organised portal
HubSpot have also released many updates to help you make your portal cleaner and organise your data, making it easy to navigate. They have done this by adding a folder structure to workflows, filters to dashboards and upgrading lists with their own properties and descriptions. It just makes it better for you to find the information you need and saves time by being able to easily locate your work. The recent release of conditional property logic and conditional property options is very powerful too, helping you ensure that users only see the data they need to see at any point in time, and that they fill that data quickly and accurately.
What will HubSpot look like in 2024?
It is hard to predict the future, but two main features we’re hoping to see next year is the Campaigns API - to allow the campaigns tool to integrate with other tools, and the ability to create associations through workflows, which would be a game changer for many HubSpot users. We’re excited to see the integration with Clearbit as it will put HubSpot ahead of the pack in terms of access to third-party data and buyer intent. We’ll see next year if any of these predictions come true. But don’t worry we’ll be here to let you know all the updates and new features HubSpot makes in 2024.
Need support with your HubSpot portal?
If you or your team needs support to use those exciting features and get the most out of your HubSpot portal, our team is here to help. Check out how we helped a HubSpot client get the most out of their HubSpot (and won an award for it!) below.
