Universities face unique challenges, from attracting prospective students and managing complex relationships with alumni to ensuring streamlined internal operations. HubSpot’s Fall 2024 Spotlight brought a wealth of new features and improvements that can greatly benefit educational institutions. By focusing on AI-powered tools, data enrichment, and enhanced user experiences, these updates provide universities with the means to optimize their marketing efforts, student recruitment, alumni engagement, and more.
This article explores the key updates from HubSpot's latest release and how universities can use these new tools to enhance their day-to-day functions.
1. The power of Breeze: HubSpot's new AI-driven platform Breeze overview
The most significant update for 2024 is Breeze, HubSpot's AI platform, which is designed to help universities streamline operations across recruitment, student engagement, and donor relations. Breeze integrates AI tools into every part of the HubSpot platform, allowing universities to automate processes and make data-driven decisions.
- Breeze Copilot: An AI-powered assistant that automates routine tasks, Breeze Copilot can help university marketing and admissions teams by generating personalized emails for prospective students or creating tailored marketing reports. Copilot can also assist alumni relations teams by tracking engagement and suggesting follow-up actions for donor outreach.
- Breeze Intelligence: This data enrichment tool pulls from a vast database of over 200 million profiles to enhance CRM records. For universities, this means having richer, more detailed profiles of students, alumni, and donors. Admissions teams can use Breeze Intelligence to better understand which prospects are most likely to apply or which alumni are most engaged with the institution, leading to more focused outreach efforts.
2. Enhancements to the Marketing and Content Hubs
2.1 Content creation and distribution
Universities often struggle to produce a steady stream of content across various platforms. HubSpot’s new updates to the Marketing Hub and Content Hub are designed to address this issue by offering AI-powered tools to streamline content creation and distribution.
- Content Remix: This feature enables universities to repurpose existing content—such as campus tour videos or recorded lectures—into different formats like social media snippets, blog posts, or email campaigns. This tool reduces the workload of marketing teams while ensuring consistent, cross-channel messaging.
- AI blog & image generators: Creating blog content and marketing materials can be time-consuming. With HubSpot’s AI tools, universities can automatically generate blogs, images, and social media posts, ensuring that their communications remain timely and relevant to prospective students and alumni. This can be especially useful during peak recruitment periods or when promoting campus events.
2.2 Lead generation and conversion
The Fall 2024 updates also bring improvements in lead generation, making it easier for universities to identify and engage with high-potential students and donors.
- Lead scoring: Enhanced lead scoring capabilities help admissions teams better prioritize prospective students based on their interactions with university content (e.g., website visits, email opens, or event registrations). This allows universities to focus on the students most likely to enroll.
- Google enhanced conversions: By integrating Google Enhanced Conversions with HubSpot’s CRM, universities can improve the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. This feature uses first-party conversion data to enhance targeting, ensuring that recruitment ads reach the most relevant prospects
3. Service Hub updates: improving student and faculty support
HubSpot’s Service Hub has received significant updates that can enhance student services and internal university operations. These improvements focus on reducing response times and streamlining support processes for students, faculty, and staff.
3.1 AI-Powered Ticket Summaries
Managing student inquiries—especially those that involve multiple interactions—can be challenging for support teams. The new AI-Powered Ticket Summaries automatically generate concise overviews of conversations, making it easier for support staff to understand the issue without reading through lengthy email chains. For example, student services or IT departments can quickly get up to speed on an ongoing issue, ensuring faster and more accurate responses.
3.2 Help Desk Workspace
Universities can now consolidate their support efforts through the Help Desk Workspace, which connects support tickets, conversations, and other student inquiries into a single interface. This is particularly useful for improving the efficiency of services like financial aid, housing, and academic advising, ensuring students receive timely and accurate support.
4. AI-powered agents for universities
HubSpot has introduced several AI agents as part of its Breeze platform, all of which can help universities automate different parts of their operations.
4.1 Content Agent
The Content Agent can help marketing teams by automating the creation of campus-wide newsletters, event promotions, and social media content. It ensures that all communication remains consistent with the university’s brand voice while reducing the manual workload on staff. For example, a single piece of content—such as a blog post about a research breakthrough—can be automatically transformed into a newsletter, social post, and web content.
4.2 Social Media Agent
Social media plays a vital role in student recruitment and engagement. The Social Media Agent helps universities manage their online presence by automating the scheduling of posts, generating social content, and analyzing engagement metrics. This tool is perfect for handling high-volume periods, such as during admissions cycles or key alumni events.
4.3 Prospecting Agent
For both admissions and alumni fundraising teams, the Prospecting Agent uses AI to identify high-potential students or alumni for personalized outreach. It analyzes CRM data to determine which students are most likely to enroll or which alumni are most likely to donate, helping universities prioritize their efforts.
5. Streamlining payments and financial processes with Commerce Hub
Managing financial processes, such as tuition payments, donations, or event fees, is often a challenge for universities. HubSpot’s Commerce Hub offers new features to simplify these tasks.
- Global Payments: Universities with international students and donors can accept payments in 20+ currencies through HubSpot’s integration with Stripe. This flexibility makes it easier for students from various countries to pay tuition or for alumni to contribute to the university.
- Automated Billing and Invoicing: The ability to automate invoicing for recurring payments (such as tuition installments) reduces the administrative burden on university finance teams. This feature can also be used for managing donations or event registration fees, ensuring that financial processes are handled efficiently.
6. CRM and data enrichment: enhancing university engagement
One of the key strengths of HubSpot’s Fall 2024 updates is the enhanced Smart CRM capabilities, powered by Breeze Intelligence. For universities, this means a more detailed and actionable understanding of student and alumni engagement.
- Automated data enrichment: With Breeze Intelligence, universities can automatically enrich their CRM profiles with additional data from HubSpot’s extensive database. This enables more personalized communication with alumni, and donors, helping universities build stronger relationships.
- Predictive analytics for enrollment and retention: AI-driven predictive analytics help admissions and retention teams identify which students are likely to enroll or which current students may need additional support to stay on track. This data-driven approach ensures that resources are allocated effectively.
Conclusion: HubSpot’s Fall 2024 updates elevate university operations
The Fall 2024 updates to HubSpot provide universities with a powerful set of tools to streamline operations, improve student and alumni engagement, and automate routine tasks. By leveraging AI-powered tools like Breeze, CRM enhancements, and specialized agents, universities can focus on building stronger relationships with students, donors, and alumni while improving operational efficiency.
With these updates, universities can stay competitive in a rapidly evolving education landscape, delivering exceptional experiences to all stakeholders through personalized communication and intelligent automation.
If your university needs assistance implementing these new features or maximizing the potential of HubSpot’s latest tools, feel free to reach out to us or book a meeting with Diogo. As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we specialize in helping educational institutions seamlessly integrate these solutions to enhance recruitment, engagement, and operational effectiveness. We're here to ensure you get the most out of HubSpot’s platform!
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