Overview
HubSpot recently announced enhancements to all of its product “Hubs.” The key elements of the Marketing and CMS Hub updates focus on improving behavioral targeting and personalization, as well as some new AI tools. Overall, the updates allow for the system to both take in more data types, and analyze different behavioral events – allowing users to improve how they build and manage programs and KPIs. The AI elements are still fairly rudimentary, but offer some productivity and optimization boosts for GTM teams.
GTM Innovation
While all of the HubSpot “Hubs” have been updated, we are focusing on the new additions to the Marketing and CMS Hubs. Apart from some interesting globalization capabilities in the Commerce Hub, the updates across Sales and CRM platforms Hubs were fairly light in comparison.
A quick rundown of the major feature additions and improvements include:
- A revamped Custom Events (formerly behavioral customer events) module improves the ability to track prospects and customer actions across a wider swath of digital properties and trigger workflows across Marketing, Sales and Support Hubs. This is important when we think of both how third-party cookies are going away, requiring better behavioral tracking and data collection in general. In addition, this allows GTM teams to better analyze behavior across the entire customer journey, not simply in traditional pre-sales, marketing-owned experiences like form-fills and campaign email responses.
- LinkedIn targeting improvements include the ability to target audiences based on organization size, industry, function, seniority, geography, and language preference. Targeted posts are then displayed only to the right audience, and engagement is tracked and measured accordingly. This reduces a lot of manual effort in building out target lists and segments in LinkedIn, as well as aids in some ABM and other GTM initiatives by better aligning Conversation Track content with the right identified target at the right moment.
- The Marketing Single Send API will enable customers to integrate externally hosted data with marketing emails designed and maintained directly in HubSpot. This is interesting to us, as it enables HubSpot to be a platform for a more inclusive, full-journey engagement, but also for more full-journey measurement and offering improved GTM KPIs that can consume broader, richer data sets to provide performance analysis and recommendations.
- A new AI Assistant for social (allowing users to create, rewrite, expand, change tone, etc. of social posts) and Gen AI tools for email subject line optimization are now available as well. HubSpot previously announced these plans, but it is good to see the company making progress in making these available to users. The AI race is one that develops quickly, and HubSpot must continue to offer viable AI tools if it wants to stay relevant.
GTM Implications
HubSpot has clearly completed the transition from a “lead management” tool into a full-on CRM (if not a complete GTM) platform. The company understands the need for what we call a Customer Data Value Chain – which goes beyond lead funnel and web activity data to a broader set of telemetry around where the prospect/customer is in terms of the journey. By building out these capabilities, we can engage with the right content and messages – across the right channels – at the right time to fully enrich Demand Experience.
It is also important to note that HubSpot is supporting the building of more robust and accurate metrics tools and KPIs. By broadening the data sets, GTM leaders can build dashboards that are not only more intelligent, but broader in scope – encompassing more of the journey to understand what actions are contributing to revenue lift above and beyond our traditional “marketing” lens. Gaining this broader picture through a Converged Growth GTM series of KPIs can drive significant performance improvements, so it is promising to see HubSpot embrace this development.
Landscape Implications
While HubSpot has done considerable work bulking up its overall platform and applications, it still lags behind the two clear leaders when it comes to GTM execution technology: Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud and Adobe/Marketo. Both in terms of general GTM supporting features and across the addition of AI and Gen AI into the platform.
The company is not a laggard, by any means. It has developed a solid CRM and GTM focused portfolio and has conceivably built a deep enough moat between it and other less “GTM focused” players like Freshworks (who focus best on customer support), Zendesk (support again) and SugarCRM (sales automation is its core strength). Also, Microsoft Dynamics is a product line shrouded in bad GTM efforts by Microsoft itself – continually giving Hubspot opportunity to take over the SMB/SME CRM market. However, as Zoho beefs up its enterprise platform and vision, it will certainly give HubSpot pains in key markets.
The Takeaway
HubSpot clearly understands what it needs to do in order to become a platform that can support full journey GTM orchestration. In recent reports we have highlighted how the company has improved its platform to be more natively integrated. Now, these enhanced tracking capabilities will enable HubSpot to offer an improved full journey orchestration of engagement story in addition to supporting more robust KPIs.
The AI tools are helpful, but still not additions that show us HubSpot is innovating much in the Gen AI for GTM space. We do like that HubSpot is making it easier to leverage more than just Marketing Hub data to better personalize and improve the content and data inside outbound messages – a big upgrade on their personalization capabilities to date.
