As a HubSpot Solutions Partner, Trekk has been sending one or two people to the annual INBOUND conference for a decade. This was my seventh INBOUND, and I've come to expect a few things...
- Darmesh will charm us all with his dad jokes and his brilliance.
- The Boston Convention and Exhibition Center will be unreasonably cold. (Bring a sweater!)
- I will leave the week bursting with ideas and inspiration that I can't wait to bring to the whole Trekk team back home.
This year, though, I'll have some help with that, because Trekk sent a whole crew!
We divided up the sessions, we conquered, and I'm here to bring you our freshest insights and our hottest takes, just hours after the close of the conference.
AI is a passing fad
JK!
AI is here to stay, my friend, and if you're in marketing or sales or leadership and still insisting that AI is not going to change the way we work, DM me because I want to have a chat. The first thing I will tell you is this: AI doesn't have to be scary. Generative AI raises some ethical quandaries that need to be worked through, FOR SURE, but the more we understand about it, the easier it will be to put guardrails around it so we can use it for good.
HubSpot leadership kicked off INBOUND by introducing BreezeTM. Breeze is basically all the HubSpot AI products that have rolled out over the last year or so — ChatSpot, AI agents, etc. — packaged together and rebranded. These tools promise to make managing your CRM, selling, and marketing "easy, fast, and unified" — a breeze. Get it?
Breeze Copilot is a little helper that makes the CRM smarter. "Digital coworker" is a little much for me, but what I like about it is that it's designed to surface things that can easily hide within the CRM (unless you are a HubSpot expert who knows exactly where to look for them). We like making CRM data easier to understand and take action on.
Breeze Agents are AI agents that are designed to automate manual work within HubSpot. So far, they are:
- Content Agent
- Social Agent
- Prospecting Agent
- Customer Agent
Then there's Breeze Intelligence, which is a whole other thing and brings me to our next takeaway.
HubSpot is finally doing intent, but they're doing it the inbound way
Our clients love intent products — software that delivers insights on the companies and contacts that are exhibiting digital signals that they intend to buy a particular software or service. We've worked with a variety of intent platforms over the years, and the data our clients get from them ranges from bad to okay. Most of them are geared toward sales teams that do a lot of outbound cold calling or cold emailing, so this data quality issue has occasionally been problematic, particularly when it impacts the client's email deliverability. (Surprise! Sending a lot of sales emails to bad email addresses or people who have not opted into communication does not make it more likely that your marketing emails will get through.)
HubSpot has been slow to get into the intent game (though there are integrations in the HubSpot Ecosystem for many of the platforms I mentioned), but earlier this year, HubSpot finalized its acquisition of Clearbit, a data enrichment platform. As of INBOUND, the Clearbit technology within HubSpot has been rebranded Breeze Intelligence and you can use it to (a) enrich records with data from over 200 million profiles in its database and (b) surface buyer intent. Pretty cool.
The big difference between Breeze Intelligence and some of the other data enrichment and intent tools out there is what it explicitly does not do: it does not enrich contact email addresses or phone numbers, because it's an inbound tool not a cold calling/cold emailing tool. For the sake of our clients' email health and the user experience of everyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a cold email, I love this. Huzzah, HubSpot.
Learn more about all the AI products rolled out at INBOUND 2024 and watch video demos in their Fall '24 Spotlight.
AI is totally disrupting search
We knew this. We knew this from looking at our clients' (and our own!) organic search traffic over the last year+.
The big question I've been asking around the Trekk office this year is: "What is a website for?" And I mean it — in a future when Google can answer, right on the SERP, the customer questions we used to answer with website pages and blog content in order to drive traffic to our websites, what are we doing with our domains?
I have THOUGHTS about this that I'll save for their own post, but we are not the only ones thinking about search in the world of generative AI. Google's AI Overview feature began to roll out in May, and as a result, zero-click searches (when someone searches for something. gets their answer from the SERP, and therefore has no need to click through) are on the rise. SEO marketers are all wondering how to show up — and get cited in — this type of generative AI search result, whether it's on Google or in AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
We attended several sessions led by extremely smart people who test theories around this every day, and we'll be bringing our learnings to Trekk client content strategies as we plan for Q4 2024 and beyond. The long and short of it is: the old way of doing search engine optimization is not going to work, but I'm PUMPED about new and emerging best practices because I think they'll result in a better user experience for target audiences.
One note: these best practices do NOT involve publishing purely AI-generated content, with no human oversight. They can involve leveraging AI tools in the research process, but all signs point to our new world rewarding content that is infused with original, human perspectives — the kind an AI on its own can't provide. I personally agree with the writer Ted Chiang that AI isn't going to make art, and, sure, marketing blog posts were never intended to be art, but if you're trying to completely automate away your human marketers, you've already missed the forest for the trees.
Generative AI is only as good as its data source
"Buy into the hype, but realize the potential is only as good as your data."
— Mike Wilson, Trekk Creative Director and first-time INBOUNDer
Two huge things about generative AI:
- It can leverage unstructured data.
- We can ask it questions in natural language.
This is revolutionary for reporting and analysis! But not so fast. To get good results, your data has to be up to date, and it has to be accurate. This is a huge challenge for large organizations. Data decay is real. Junk data is real. I predict that over the next couple of years, companies will get more serious than ever about data hygiene so that they can get better results from using generative AI tools to glean CRM insights about their prospects and customers.
Video just keeps gaining in importance
As content generated purely with AI proliferates across the internet, video is becoming an even more valuable medium for authentic communication. One speaker even suggested that every company, no matter the industry, should employ a full-time videographer! If you're thinking that would be nice but it's just not possible right now, we've got you covered. And the good news for HubSpot users is that some of the new tools rolled out at INBOUND can help speed up video distribution.
Whew! What an INBOUND. As the five Trekkies who attended continue to marinate in our learnings, I'm sure more takeaways will crystalize. We'll share them here, in our newsletter, and in our brand new podcast, SideTrekked, which drops in Q4. Until then, I leave you with my favorite quote of the conference, something to ground us all in this time of AI upheaval in the marketing space:
"Ads are pretty f**king stupid, and that's okay. It's an ad."
— Ryan Reynolds
And here are Trekkies Robby and Emilee taking photos, along with twelve thousand other people, of Ryan.
p.s. Remember when I said this was my seventh INBOUND? I missed INBOUND 2019 because I'd just had a baby, and 2020 was virtual but I still count it. For a blast from the past, read my recap of INBOUND 2017.
