The only field where there’s no such thing as “classic” or “antique” is technology, especially where software is concerned. Windows 98 is simply inefficient, and ‘old-fashioned’ would probably be the nicest thing you’d be called for holding on to it. So, when we sign up for services and software, it’s natural to keep up with the updates to get the best out of what you’ve invested in. HubSpot is no stranger to the realm of updates and new features and many amazing updates have been released in the first 1-2 months of the year. Since there are too many features we’re excited about, our team put up a vote. Those on the marketing side had different views from those working on the technical side. We came up with the top 3 for each category. So, without further ado, here they are:
For marketers-
1) Linkedin ads on HubSpot
Linkedin ads on HubSpot are back, and it feels like the resurrection of The Beatles! Okay, if you don’t feel the excitement, you probably didn’t know that it was there to begin with. The reason we’re excited about Linkedin Ads being back is that Linkedin campaigns are huge for B2B marketers. The Linkedin Ad module allows HubSpot users to run campaigns right from their portal, giving you enhanced lead intelligence and information to analyze. Best of both worlds, right? You can sync leads from Linkedin and funnel them directly into HubSpot. You can also evaluate the data of both the synced platforms and make intelligent and informed marketing decisions for both platforms from one place instead of hopping from one to another.
2) HubSpot Video
According to Google Research, 72% of B2B researchers and buyers made buying decisions based on long-form videos they watched. We’re talking about videos that are as long as 30 minutes! And most large companies produce around 100 videos per year! It’s also been known for quite a while that up to 90% of customers who reach out to the sales team have already made their decision. So HubSpot’s video feature allows you to add videos independently (no more embed YouTube videos) and have complete control over editing and choose your thumbnails, frames, metadata, insertion of CTAs and anything along those lines. You’ll have all these personalization tools to target your audience, combined with the powerful marketing, demographic and analytics tools HubSpot offers. Here’s an example- since GoToWebinar has always played nicely with HubSpot, you can upload recordings of webinars directly to HubSpot and your site can host all of that traffic instead of using third-party platforms like Wistia, Vimeo or YouTube. Plus, marketers can see which leads viewed which webinars and can track that data in the Contacts feed.
3) Import Contacts
Speaking of leveraging 21st century technologies to make your life easier, I’m sure if you’ve been into the marketing field for a while. You may recall manually entering information from dozens of business cards you got from events into your computer. Or, maybe you’ve been copy/pasting contact details manually into your HubSpot CRM. I think it’s fairly obvious where we’re going. With a flourish, we present the HubSpot import contact feature! You can sync contacts from your phone right into your HubSpot, or simply scan the business cards with the business card scanner and retrieve all the information without a hassle, leaving no stone unturned in your marketing efforts. Another added benefit is that these business cards can be classified as opt-in subscribers and be enrolled in workflows, sent drip campaigns or marketed to any which way you like!
Now, for the tech geeks-
- Content Staging
Re-designing your website is always something that’ll come up along the way- and it’s unavoidable. There will always be a factor to refresh on a regular basis, whether it’s for technical compliance or a better user experience. These are the three main reasons everyone is redesigning their websites these days:
Catering to:
- The lightning-fast technology advancements
- Marketing needs
- Customer requirements
If your website doesn’t serve the purpose it was created for, what’s it for, anyway? You have to make sure the website is fast, functional and effective.. So for CMS users, we present Content Staging! As the title implies, you can make all your changes and test it, then push it into the live version with one click after you’re sure it’s what you want and that it’s running flawlessly. It’s an excellent tool to avoid blunders that would definitely occur by messing with the live version of the website directly.
2. The latest version of Design Manager and HubDB
Ever felt grateful for the sweet, sweet CTRL+Z option? One of the best features for Design Manager being able to see recently edited files and you can go back to it if you want. It maintains your revision history even on a code level and allows you to restore previously working codes. These include a wide variety of coding languages, including HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery and Ajax. HubDB again, is a feature for CMS users- besides being able to easily store, filter, and display data in your HubSpot website pages, you can now also manage videos on it. Since we already discussed above, videos and images are a big deal these days, and HubSpot isn’t staying behind when it comes to the latest trends.
3. Google AMP
You cannot tell us that you won’t be frustrated if a page takes ages to load. Without even looking at the statistics, I can guarantee that it’s a terrible thing for any website to have, affecting SEO and user experience, if people are just exiting out of frustration to say the least. Now, you can integrate Google AMP with HubSpot, and have our pages loaded almost instantly on any mobile device. This option is only available for all the blog content currently.
So if you’re one working on the back-end, do look out for these top three!
Needless to say, these were just the top three in two categories that we felt we had to talk about. There would be so many features coming up in the year that we might talk about, and so many that have been released that we chose not to discuss. If you think a feature should have been discussed in the article, do mention it in the comments!
