Last week, members of Weidert Group's AI team presented to our Appleton HubSpot User Group (HUG) on HubSpot AI tools, emphasizing the growing importance of AI in marketing and sales.
We covered HubSpot's current AI offerings and some upcoming improvements, and we shared practical demonstrations to help users better use artificial intelligence tools. Watch the full video above or read the summary below.
If you're interested in learning more, we plan to host additional "workshop" style events in 2024, each specific to a HubSpot AI tool. Subscribe to our HUG page to be alerted when events are happening.
What we covered during our recent HUG:
AI is complex and ever-changing, so it's best tackled as a team, if you can do that. The constant release of new tools and updates to current ones make it helpful to have many people involved and invested. Plus, different AI tools assist with various marketing and sales disciplines, so having input from different areas of expertise is key to your AI success.
HubSpot's commitment to AI was made crystal-clear during the company's annual event, INBOUND, when co-founder Dharmesh Shah declared his "love" for AI. Recently, CEO Yamini Rangan said AI is the company's number one strategic objective for 2024.
Full transparency: Weidert Group is a HubSpot partner, so we're all-in on AI, too. That also gives us a unique perspective, watching HubSpot become fully invested in AI development, and quickly moving toward a future of HubSpot users seamlessly integrating AI into their daily workflows.
This aligns with HubSpot's mission to help companies grow better by empowering marketing, sales, service, and operations teams to reduce the time spent on repetitive administrative tasks.
On average, marketers spend 5 hours a day on often AI-friendly manual, administrative, or operational tasks.
— HubSpot’s 2023 AI Trends for Marketers
The presentation acknowledged that while AI tools are not perfect, they can significantly enhance productivity. Marketers, on average, spend five hours daily on tasks well-suited for AI, making the potential productivity gains substantial. The tasks that fit perfectly into AI's wheelhouse are data-driven, repetitive, predictive, and generative.
RELATED: How Generative AI Can Empower B2B Marketers
Although many AI tools are in development, it's important to know what tools are currently available in HubSpot. Content Assistant, integrated into the HubSpot portal, assists in generating and refining written content, allowing users to create, compare, and select the best copy. Campaign Assistant streamlines the creation of marketing assets, making it quick and easy to develop landing pages, emails, and ads. And Chatspot, while not directly built into HubSpot, does have access to your HubSpot CRM — pulling data, analyzing emails, and much more.
Discussing these tools is good, but showing how Content Assistant and Campaign Assistant work seamlessly together is better. The demonstrations also included ChatSpot, HubSpot's conversational AI assistant built on ChatGPT. A point of emphasis throughout all of these is the importance of keeping humans in the loop to actively augment, review, and edit content.
Content Assistant is a powerful writing tool integrated directly into the HubSpot portal that easily allows you to generate and refine chunks of copy until you find the best version. Identified by a lightning bolt icon within the HubSpot portal, Content Assistant is also activated by simply typing a slash.
Highlights:
Content Assistant has some limitations — it cannot mimic the tone or feel of previous copy, which advanced language models (such as ChatGPT Plus) do quite well. Content Assistant will surely evolve and catch up with these capabilities.
Closely related to Content Assistant, Campaign Assistant helps create cohesive marketing campaigns. Its strength is its ability to streamline the creation of various campaign assets (landing pages, marketing emails, and ads for Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
Highlights:
Our screen recording showed the seamless integration between Campaign Assistant and Content Assistant in the HubSpot environment.
Unlike general-purpose ChatGPT, ChatSpot is specifically designed for marketing and sales tasks using your HubSpot CRM data. Free for everyone, whether or not you're a HubSpot user, ChatSpot's reporting, summarization, and image generation features are especially powerful.
Overall, the demonstrations showed how current HubSpot AI tools can enhance productivity within the HubSpot platform.
There's a lot more in the works at HubSpot (remember, they said AI is their main priority in 2024). Here's a glimpse into features currently in development, those expected to launch in the near future, as well as an overview of how HubSpot is organizing their AI tools into four main categories: AI assistants, AI insights, AI agents, and additional AI-powered features.
Our goal with the recent HUG was to show HubSpot users powerful AI tools that they can use now to gain an edge in their marketing and sales. With AI being an ever-evolving technology, and HubSpot continuing to invest in AI, we can all look forward to even better tools that will shape the future of digital marketing.
Speaking of the future, Weidert Group has partnered with Databox, a software company that helps businesses improve their ability to see their data in real-time and draw meaningful insights. If you're a Wisconsin-based manufacturer, you're invited to complete our survey focused on the state of industrial sales and marketing.
You can also anonymously connect your website marketing data (Google Analytics and Google Search Console) and see how you compare to your peers’ performance. Click below to participate!
