Big changes are coming to the world of inbound marketing. Over the next few months, HubSpot plans to roll out a number of new features that will make it easier for marketers to provide web visitors and potential buyers with relevant images and content. As buyers tune out more of the old marketing messages, this smarter, more user-friendly approach to marketing means that you can, in fact, create marketing people love.
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah made the feature announcements this morning at HubSpot's Inbound 2012, underscoring the fact that marketing needs to change. Marketers are less popular than stockbrokers, union leaders, and lawyers. With the new HubSpot features, marketers can make and distribute content that helps web users solve their problems... in a fashion that is more relevant to the user than ever.
So What's Coming in HubSpot 3?
If you read our blog on Tuesday, we mentioned prepping segmented lists for dynamic content. HubSpot 3 will give marketers the ability to create extremely personalized web experiences, with a marketing solution that marries content with context.
Here are just some of the new features that will be included in HubSpot 3 (Feel free to geek out as you read this. I did.):
- Contacts Database: The new contacts database that rolled out earlier this year sits at the center of this new all-in-one marketing. As the user interacts with your brand more and more—through email, social media, webpages and CTAs—you can connect the user's personal interests stored here with the content you are producing. (Plus, you get up to 1,000 custom fields to make it even more personalized overtime.)
- Email: The new email system in HubSpot isn't just designed for your traditional mass email blasts. Using the information that is in the contacts database, you can stop sending irrelevant emails to your contacts and instead provide highly personalized email message that can be based on any of the fields in the contacts database.
- Landing Pages: There's a new landing page application coming that provides a number of attractive, easy-to-use templates. Plus, you can see a real-time preview of your landing page as you make updates on the same page that you are using to edit the page.
- Smart Forms: The new landing pages will feature a drag-and-drop form builder that pulls your database fields. But the real big change will be smart forms that know what questions a website visitor has already answered, so they don't have to answer it again.
- Smart CTAs: The new CTA application puts all of you calls to action in a single place and allows you to update the CTA in the dashboard, which changes the CTA wherever it already is on the website. HubSpot 3 also has built in A/B testing features so that you can see what message your users are more interested. But again, HubSpot isn't stopping there. The new smart CTAs feature allows you to display a call to action based on any field in your contacts database, so no user has to see a CTA they've already interacted with. Talk about extreme personalization.
- Workflows: Just like emails, the old drip-style lead nurturing needs to change to make it more personalized for the buyer. At the same time, that nurturing needs to adapt to the new world of marketing automation. You can update database fields based on an event that takes place when a buyer interacts with your content. And with smart flows, you can also have a visitor enter a workflow based on any field in the database.
All of these features make it easier to use the technology, so marketers can focus on creating the content and offers that improve the buyer experience. More importantly, your potential buyers and even current customers will want to interact with your brand ... so you don't have to interrupt their lives with old marketing techniques.
