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INBOUND is HubSpot’s premier event of the year, a place where over 20,000 marketers descend on Boston to network, get inspired, and most importantly, plug into HubSpot to get a fresh take on the digital marketing landscape.
At INBOUND19, HubSpot announced several new features that they’re rolling out to their marketing automation platform, and we wanted to share with you which ones we think will be the MVPs of 2020.
1. Contact and Company Deduplication
We love a tool that will make our lives easier, and culling contacts can certainly become an onerous, time-consuming task that ultimately ends up being pushed to the back burner. While tools for purging unengaged contacts have existed for awhile, the ability to manage duplicate contacts has recently been added.
Why it’s awesome:
HubSpot fees are determined by the number of contacts you maintain, essentially monetizing your leads list. Having the ability to pare that list down to the really valuable contacts without having to manually hunt through hundreds — or even thousands of contacts — searching for duplicates provides a new, highly appreciated level of efficiency.
2. Social Post Boosting
The next three features all make the lives of social marketers easier by making even more functionality for social media management native to the HubSpot platform. With social post boosting, you can easily see which of your posts are doing well organically and boost them for even greater reach — all within a single dashboard.
Why it’s awesome:
For agencies like us who manage several social platforms for many different clients, having more functionality within a single portal streamlines our efforts and empowers us to analyze data and make strategic decisions in even more powerful ways.
For in-house marketers, however, who are often managing multi-channel marketing campaigns across a multitude of formats, the ability to manage even more through a single portal is still incredibly advantageous.
3. Native Lead Ad Creation
Facebook Lead Ads can be a great source of lead generation, and those companies who do well with them will love this next feature. Lead ads can be overwhelming to learn, and even specialists can find the setup and maintenance of lead ads to be tricky. HubSpot has added the functionality to create and manage lead ads directly through their platform.
Why It’s Awesome:
As with social post boosting, we love anything that makes social media marketing easier. Lead ads can be highly profitable, and HubSpot’s claim that they’ve made lead-ad creation simpler and more user-friendly is exciting. Plus, having this data in the HubSpot portal provides greater transparency into revenue attribution.
4. Publish Anywhere Social Reports
As an agency, we consistently encourage our clients to participate in posting to their company’s social accounts. There’s much that we can do on their behalf; however, if a client is doing a live event, that needs to be shared! And that’s just not something we can always manage for them.
Why It’s Awesome:
HubSpot has now given us the ability to monitor all the activity on connected social accounts, which means for customers who are live-tweeting from an event, that engagement data isn’t getting left out of social reporting! If there’s been a traffic spike on a particular day, there’s no more scrolling through last month’s Facebook page to find the particular well-performing post. (Yes, we have done this.)
5. Live Chat & ChatBot Improvements
HubSpot is already ahead of the curve when it comes to offering excellent chat functionality at a surprisingly low cost. Even the free tier of HubSpot comes with an amazingly feature-rich version of their live chat tools. However, one thing that has always been missing is an integration with Facebook Messenger, and it looks like the wait is finally over. In addition, HubSpot has announced a few smaller improvements to their ChatBot configurations, including availability settings.
Why It’s Awesome:
If you’re employing a live chat or ChatBot strategy, you can’t just ignore Facebook Messenger, but managing conversations on multiple platforms is a challenge for even the most organized sales and customer service teams. By integrating Messenger into your conversations inbox, your team can rest easy knowing that every customer interaction is accessible in one place. And if you weren’t using Messenger before, HubSpot just torpedoed your last excuse!
If you’re interested in reviewing all the product features that HubSpot announced at INBOUND19, check out their blog post which goes into a lot more detail.
If you’ve been thinking about exploring what HubSpot can do for your business, give us a call at (864) 288-6162 or get in touch with us online. Waypost is the only Gold-Tier HubSpot Solutions Partner in South Carolina, and we’d love the opportunity to chat with you about your biggest challenges to business growth. 
