Last week we made our annual return to Boston for UNBOUND, HubSpot's annual conference. After a year in San Francisco, the return to Boston was symbolic as it really felt like the conference itself had returned to it's roots in format as well as location.
Here are some of the key insights and takeaways from our team who attended the event.
After two years of excessive product releases, many of which were not market ready, it was a nice to see HubSpot reign it in to release fewer, stronger updates. Here's the ones that stood out to us:
HubSpot CRM can now update itself - taking data from info auto-logged into the CRM from your emails, calls and meetings.
For years we've been getting questions about managing projects in HubSpot - and now they've built out the functionality! Setting up HubSpot Work will push you to set up the Work space with AI... and that can be a bit tricky and nuanced, but we're excited that this can remove another layer of the tech stack for some of our clients.
If you're advertising on Microsoft or ChatGPT you'll be able to integrate these channels into HubSpot with the new product releases 🥳
Accessing all your data tables with SQL is something we've been building APIs to manage for years. Having this now available in the portal opens up a lot of possibilities!
As an agency, we build all kinds of dashboards and workflows and need to rebuild them in our client portals when rolling them out. Now we Portability we can easily deploy them from one portal to another. This will save projects time and budget!
Ever merged two records that shouldn't have been merged? What used to be a nightmare to untangled can now be solved with a simple click of the 'Unmerge' button.
With a fantastic lineup of speakers, there was no shortage of things to learn, ideas to share, and strategies to discuss across any role in your organization. Collectively, we attended a ton of sessions and we summed up our takeaways as:
HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan opened the conference keynote with the warning that Bad Context AI Use is Worse than No AI Use. But quickly followed that AI use with great content is delivering fantastic results. This theme was echoed throughout several sessions in different variations:
Again, having strong brand guidelines will go a long way to shape the output of your AI content that can be generated for your brand. The more specific you are, the more unique your content will be.
Being Weird While Being Authentic Works leaning in on your brand quirks can help you stand out and make you memorable. Having your core brand values will be your North Star to guide you on when to lean in and get weird or when to avoid the conversation. Otherwise, the content you're producing is going to look the same as all the other AI content that's being produced.
Structured heading tags, underlined links, bullet points, and text rich content was the staple of the early internet, the key drivers in SEO, and remain the top performance drivers for SEO/AEO, email marketing and social media. Your AI assistants like easy-to-read, easy to consume content with good markup and that's what your readers have liked all along, too. Emphasizing sequencing (do THIS and then THAT will happen) is still working well.
By far, our key hight across the entire team was meeting up IRL. Catching up with each other, our HubSpot colleagues, other agencies and partners, and all the friends we've made along the way makes UNBOUND one of those things that you're just really excited for each year.
While we can't predict the future, here's where we see HubSpot headed as we come out of Unbound and get ready for Q4 and 2027.
Were you at Unbound? What are your takeaways?