Blog

As a senior marketing and marketing operations professional, I've navigated the complex landscape of data-driven campaigns and analytical reviews. In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Recently, I completed a project that has significantly improved my approach to tasks. Let me share my story with you.

Last year we looked at the possibility to integrate Microsoft Teams meetings with the Hubspot meeting scheduling tool. At that time, it was possible to automatically have a meeting that was booked through the Hubspot automatic meetings scheduler sent to your Microsoft Office365 Calendar, but it was not possible to automatically include a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting. 

We have been keeping an eye on this feature ever since we first wrote about it because we have heard that many people are looking for this integration. Spoiler alert, there is still no native integration that allows us to use the Hubspot meeting scheduler tool to send out invitations with automatically generated Meeting links for Microsoft links. But we expect that this will become available very soon because Hubspot has confirmed that they have been working on a solution for some time. So, let’s explore where things stand one year on.

Hubspot CRM is often feels deceptively simple but is getting more powerful every year. It is the datastore that has powered the entire suite of HubSpot's extensive product range for many years. It holds and segments information for all parts of the buyers journey from visitors, interactions to customers and companies. It can power Inbound and ABM strategies and can exchange data with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and many other platforms and tools through its extensive API and integrations marketplace. In short, it is very much at the core of Hubspots functionality. Without Hubspot CRM, none of its other products would be of much use. During Inbound 2020 Hubspot also announced a lot of new features for Hubspot CRM. One of them is the ability to create custom objects. This brings Hubspot CRM on the same level as many other paid CRM platforms in terms of customization possibilities making Hubspot more useful as a full end to end platform and making it easier to use it to replace other CRM products such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This brings new opportunities to organizations that use Hubspot and a third party CRM system. Removing an additional CRM product from your product stack means a reduction in budget and and less integration headaches. The extra functionality in CRM can of course bring extra complexity and this makes it even more important that you manage your Hubspot CRM processes, data and segmentation correctly.  

Note we wrote an update about Hubspot meetings and it's integration with Teams meetings in September 2021. Click here to read our latest update about this topic.

It's September 2020 and most of you are probably scheduling virtual meetings with your clients, contractors, consultants, friends and possibly even family members like never before. Since COVID started hitting our lives globally about 6 months ago many organisations are scrambling to figure out how we can transition many of their interactions with their prospects and clients to online meetings and collaboration. At About Inbound we consider it important to constantly test and try new business apps  so that we can provide the best advice possible to our customers about what software in conjunction with Hubspot might best fit their needs. As Microsoft has recently been making huge progress in their Teams and Teams Meetings functionality we decided it was time to test if it was possible to integrate Teams Meetings directly with Hubspot meetings to replace our link to Skype. In short, the answer is no. Right now it is not possible but it might be in the future. While looking into this, my IT consultant past kicked in and I decided to snoop around and see why not and if there were any workarounds and what would work best. These types of challenges are great reasons for me to dig around and learn about what is happening with the different Marketing tech and IT tools. After some research and testing I've put together a post around Hubspot meetings and Office 365 Teams meetings. I will discuss their uses and why integrating them or using Hubspot meetings with another online meetings tool would be super powerful. 

In this blog post we’ll look at the general operations tasks that you should focus on as part of your marketing efforts. We'll explore the different types of marketing operations tasks and provide you  with examples of tasks that are often missed. We will illustrated what happens when these are neglected. we will also provide you with a checklist to see if you have got your marketing operations under control.

How do you make your online meetings, training or events work best for all your attendees?

It is very important to ask yourself this question before diving in and selecting this tools. If you don't give this enough consideration before you make the switch to online meetings, prepare that webcast or create that online training, you might find it very hard to satisfy your attendees and reach your goals. It could mean the difference between a temporary experiment where your efforts are only appreciated because there are no other in person alternatives and then quickly abandoned when it becomes possible to replace all of the technology by in person meetings and the chance to really embrace the possibilities that all the technologies we have access to bring and move you and your organisation forward.

I am not advocating that we should replace all our personal interactions with online events and training when you don't have to but merely to combine these ways of connecting so that you can create a diverse and comfortable set of channels to connect with people in many situations and make the best use of everyone's valuable time. 

This is part 2 of a 3 part series where we try to ask and answer the higher level questions  about how approach meetings, training and webinars using online tools.  In part 1 we had a look at what the major features of connecting online are and what there benefits are. In this part we will look into how to optimise these advantages so they enable you to be as successful as possible from the start. 

If you are a Marketing Hub Professional/Enterprise or Sales Hub Professional/Enterprise user, your Account Based marketing tactics in Hubspot just got a whole lot easier. Hubspot launched a set of ABM features that will allow you to get started with targeting your best fit companies and create a ABM strategy with just out of the box tools. In this post we will have a quick look at what an ABM strategy is, what Hubspot has changed to make it easier to implement and how you could go about implementing it.

It has been a while since Hubspot has added a new product to its SAAS suite. The last product to be added before CMS Hub was Hubspot Service Hub , which Hubspot added in 2018. Compared to Service Hub though, CMS Hub seems much more focused on attracting new customers with this product release. Many of Hubspots existing marketing product customers already have access to most of the features sold as part of CMS Hub. So, what is part of CMS Hub exactly? What makes CMS Hub interesting as an entry point to Hubspots SAAS product suite and what are the use cases and benefits that Hubspot can offer with CMS hub?

Hubspot started was started in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. They created the company around their concept of Inbound Marketing in 2006. The concept of was turned into a methodology to help marketers change their approach from the heavily outbound focus that was dominant at the time (outbound meaning advertising & cold calling etc.) to a more organic, content driven approach where brands can win customers by supporting their search for solutions and their decision making process and leading them to their brand only if they are ready to buy. They named this approach “Inbound marketing”. Fast forward to 2019 and Hubspot has gone through massive growth and indeed change. Their tool set involved from a smart way to build landing pages, SEO optimised blogposts and get better reporting on your visitors to a full blown SAAS ecosystem of Marketing, Sales, Service and CRM tools that are all tightly integrated.  So how did they get here and where are they headed in 2020? That’s what we will have look at during the following paragraphs

Now that the world is moving largely online as a temporary replacement for in person contact during the Covid19 pandemic, there are questions popping up about how to adopt the tools needed and how to use this way of connecting effectively. I noticed that there is a large amount of practical content being written about how to use online tools at the moment but its harder to find information about what makes an effective strategy is to conduct high quality meetings or training online. Information on how to minimise the disadvantages of online training and meetings versus in person  meetings is also a lot harder to come by. In this  3 part series about online meetings, training's and events, I will try to address some of these deeper questions. We'll start with the defining the key features and look at their advantages in this post. In the second post we will look at how you can make the best use out of the advantages so you can get the maximum value possible out of moving  your events online and in the final post I will discuss some of the disadvantages and how to deal with them