HubSpot Marketing Hub is moving up to better serve larger marketing teams

There were two inescapable messages on Thursday at HubSpot Spotlight in New York. Neither message should come as a big surprise to marketers, but for martech vendors, they speak to opportunities.

The first message is AI. 

It’s everywhere, it’s maturing quickly and it’s not going to stop. If anything, AI will go from the thing everything is talking about to another fundamental technology users expect and probably don’t even notice.

The second message is that marketing teams are overwhelmed. In this case, AI is both a cause and a fix. 

There are so many AI tools emerging at such a rapid pace that it’s hard to keep up. However, AI can also help provide relief by eliminating busy work and automating routine processes.

Few marketing teams feel this as much as those at businesses at the larger end of the SMB market. 

“We’re hearing a lot from these larger up-market customers within the SMB that they’re feeling just as overwhelmed with all of these changes,” Angela DeFranco, VP and general manager of product for Marketing Hub, told MarTech.

Large enterprises have more resources. Small teams have resource limitations. The larger SMB teams are often at companies growing quickly and where marketing is expected to lead the charge.

For a vendor like HubSpot, the larger end of the SMB market is the group of customers at risk of graduating to another platform. Last year, Salesforce introduced a version of its Marketing Cloud for SMBs, bringing its enterprise product close to HubSpot’s sweet spot.

“We’re making a concerted effort to make sure larger marketing teams are successful and they’re moving faster,” DeFranco said.

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New features for HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise

Thursday’s HubSpot Spotlight marked the company’s first in-person product launch outside its annual Inbound conference.

A lengthy list of Marketing Hub updates was unveiled at the event’s opening (perhaps the longest list of any HubSpot product). Still, three updates to Marketing Hub Enterprise target advanced marketers at larger SMBs. All three are currently in beta globally.

AI-powered Lookalike Lists to help find new customers

Lookalike Lists in Marketing Hub Enterprise help marketers find more ideal customers from existing contacts. Breeze AI analyzes lists in HubSpot’s Smart CRM to identify contacts who share attributes and actions similar to those of a user’s best customers. This creates a new list of high-potential prospects to use in campaigns.

Journey Automation for modern buyer journeys

Today’s customers are more unpredictable, leading marketers to use several tools to build and manage journeys. That’s not only inefficient, but it creates more complexity for marketers. For example, each tool has its own reporting, with no in-line analytics.  

HubSpot’s new Journey Builder helps demand gen experts easily build automated, multi-stage customer journeys that adapt to individual behaviors. Its Journey Analytics offers real-time reporting to see where leads drop from the funnel. Journey Governance helps marketing teams work together with the correct permissions and oversight.

Multi-account management for multiple lines of business

Marketing teams at the large end of the SMB category often deal with multiple lines of business or create regional teams. 

The new Multi-Account Management in Marketing Hub Enterprise helps businesses manage multiple accounts from a single HubSpot organization using copied assets, mirrored customer data and centralized management. Asset Copying enables marketers to share high-performing assets across businesses for faster execution. Data Mirroring helps marketers share customer data for better customer experiences without touching the underlying data model.

“Your marketing Ops team is going to love this,” DeFranco told the crowd at Spotlight.

There’s more AI to come in Marketing Hub

DeFranco expects HubSpot to adopt more agentic AI and for AI in general to become foundational in applications, moving beyond its status as an add-on or novelty feature. 

“The future belongs to teams that can move at the speed of opportunity,” DeFranco said during her session at Spotlight. And HubSpot will use AI to help them get there.

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