Despite being immersed in inbound marketing content up to my ears with 5,300 other inbound marketing professionals (yes…up to my ears), there are more than 140 speakers including the likes of Arianna Huffington, Seth Godin, Nate Silver and David Meerman Scott, there are several other exciting developments coming out of Inbound 2013. Hubspot co-founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan announced several new exciting features to the platform. Here is a summary of the three biggest announcements, what they are and what they can bring to your inbound marketing experience. 
Content Optimization System
Most websites on the Internet today are static and since the visitors coming to those sites come from a variety of devices and platform, shouldn’t your site adapt to each different visitor? Hubspot’s new COS is optimized for people, not anonymous page views. So, what is it really? It’s the first integrated website, blog and landing page system to recognize the unique needs of visitors and optimize content for each person looking at it.
The COS delivers web visitors with the experience they expect. It’s mobile optimized, which is a must-have in today’s connected world. Sixty percent of adults connect to the web through a smartphone, tablet computer or an on-the-go laptop. Any Hubspot hosted site will be built using responsive design, an approach that repackages the content for devices of any size and aspect ratio. It’s fully integrated. Any interaction a user has with any of your online marketing will be tracked and you’ll have the analytics to prove it.
It allows you to deliver even more personalized content. It allows you to incorporate “smart” dynamic content. Therefore, when a prospect or lead visits your site you’re giving them exactly what they are looking for. Google results have become increasingly influenced by social. Hubspot’s COS is social search ready and features built-in social context like authorship tags.
Lastly, it’s “wicked” fast. How many times have you left a website, because it didn’t load quickly enough? Probably more than you can count. Hubspot uses an incredibly fast and secure content delivery network to ensure your site loads quickly across all devices.
Social Inbox
We’ve been saying for years, “social media is meant to be social.” With that being said, it’s important to focus your efforts on conversations that are most valuable to you and your organization. Hubspot’s new Social Inbox tightly integrates social media monitoring, publishing and analytics with its contact database, enabling marketers to create highly segmented views of the social activity of their leads, customers and biggest evangelists.
Since it is integrated with your Contacts database you can see what a lead was interested in while on your website and provide them with that information in a social post. Anyone who participates in social media understands that it is impossible to weed through all of the data that’s constantly being shared across your social channels. Social Inbox enables companies to quickly, easily set up meaningful searches across channels to bring the content most relevant to you front and center.
Lastly, Social Inbox takes the guessing game out of the ROI on your social media efforts. It allows marketers to see how many visits, leads and customers were generated by each social media channel. This way you know which network is best for your organization and can focus your efforts on what’s bringing you the most return.
Signals
Signals is useful to salespeople, account managers and customer service teams. Why? Signals is a notification tool that tells you when and how to engage with leads and customers. It shows you real-time notifications coming from emails you’ve sent, your website and even social media.
Signals provides lead revisit notifications. Ever have a great conversation with a prospect, but then they said they want to think it over? Wouldn’t it be great to see if they were looking at something like the pricing page of your website? Signals will alert you with that information for you to make smarter marketing choices. It also tells you when someone opens an email or clicks. Lastly, it can be integrated with LinkedIn. You can set up contacts as VIPs so you can see when they interact on LinkedIn.
While I am sure I will gain some great inbound knowledge from this trip, I am eager to dive in to these new product developments and see how I can use them to deliver inbound marketing success for WordWrite and our clients.
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Emma Walter is a senior account executive for WordWrite Communications. You can find her on Twitter @emmasreallytall.
