In September, I had the chance to attend HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference in San Francisco, an event that’s equal parts product showcase and networking hub With more than 200 product announcements and thousands of marketers, sales leaders, and tech partners packed into one city, it’s safe to say there was a lot to take in.
But as much as INBOUND is about the buzz, it’s also about clarity: what updates actually matter, and how do they apply to your world? These are the HubSpot updates that matter most for higher ed teams — and a new playbook that could transform student recruitment in an AI-driven world.
With hundreds of updates at INBOUND, it can be overwhelming - but three stood out as game-changers for higher ed marketing and admissions teams, helping your team work faster, unify data, and connect with prospective students more effectively.
One of the biggest challenges for higher ed marketing teams is the juggling act. You’ve got an idea - let’s say a fall open house. Before long, that single campaign has spiraled into a dozen moving parts: emails to inquiries, social posts for parents, ads for transfer students, and maybe even a text reminder for last-minute registrants. Traditionally, that means hopping between tools, chasing down approvals, and trying to piece everything together after the fact.
Marketing Studio changes that game. It’s a central hub where all those campaign pieces live side by side. You can map out your strategy, assign tasks, draft and review assets, and actually launch entire campaigns, all from one visual workspace. Instead of being stuck in the weeds, you get to see the whole campaign picture from start to finish.
What really stood out to me during the demos was how flexible the studio feels. You can zoom into a campaign canvas view to see how each asset connects, flip to a calendar view to keep track of launch dates, or use a board view to check which pieces are still in draft. If you’re like most higher ed teams, short-staffed and strapped for time, HubSpot’s AI can even help you generate campaign assets from a brief, or let you clone a past campaign to get off the ground faster.
For admissions and marketing teams, this means fewer bottlenecks, faster turnarounds, and a lot less scrambling. In short, I see this enabling small teams to create a big impact by quickly turning an idea into a fully launched campaign in hours or days, not weeks or months. Marketing Studio makes it easier to move from idea to execution, which ultimately gives you more time to focus on what matters most: connecting with prospective students.
For students, the journey to enrolling at your institution should feel seamless. One school, one voice, one experience. But behind the scenes, their information is often scattered across multiple systems: an RFI form submitted through your website, an application in Slate, an event sign-up through a third-party platform, a conversation logged in HubSpot, and even the occasional spreadsheet living on someone’s desktop.
The result? Prospects experience fragmented communication. One email might thank them for attending an informational session on your nursing program, while another encourages them to download an eBook about your cybersecurity program. For admissions and marketing teams, this isn’t just embarrassing; it makes it harder to build trust.
That’s where HubSpot’s newly reimagined Data Hub comes in. Its purpose is simple: to connect, clean, and unify data from all the different touchpoints in a student’s journey. By pulling records together from warehouses, CRMs, and even Excel sheets, Data Hub creates a more complete picture of who your students are and where they are in their decision-making process.
For higher ed teams, the value lies in what that clarity unlocks. With unified data, you can segment more effectively (think: tailoring communications to first-gen students vs. transfers), automate with greater confidence (like sending event reminders only to those who haven’t already registered), and finally run reports that reflect the entire student journey instead of just one slice of it.
In short: better data means better experiences for both your team and the students you’re working so hard to enroll.
If Data Hub is about unifying your information, Smart CRM is what makes that information usable day in and day out. At its core, Smart CRM is HubSpot’s AI-powered system that runs quietly in the background, constantly keeping your data up to date so your team doesn’t have to.
That matters because higher ed workflows are rarely simple. Marketing passes along inquiries, admissions follows up, faculty or program staff might step in later. Each handoff is a chance for details to get lost, duplicated, or outdated. When that happens, students end up receiving mixed messages, or worse, no message at all.
Smart CRM reduces that risk by doing the upkeep for you. It automatically pulls in context from emails, calls, and meetings, flags missing details, and enriches records without relying on manual updates. In other words, while your team is busy talking to prospects or planning the next campaign, Smart CRM is quietly working to make sure the data behind the scenes reflects reality.
For admissions and marketing teams, that means smoother workflows and more confident collaboration. Marketing can see exactly when a prospect has moved into the application stage. Admissions can open a record and know they’re looking at the most current, complete history of interactions. And leadership can trust the reports they’re reviewing without wondering how stale the data might be.
And the kicker? You get all of this for a price that’s surprisingly accessible; only $50 per seat at the Professional tier and $75 at the Enterprise tier.
Ready to make recruitment easier for your higher ed team? Connect with us to discover how HubSpot can help your marketing and admissions teams work smarter, not harder.
One of the biggest conversations at INBOUND this year was how search is changing in the new AI landscape. With AI tools surfacing “instant answers,” students don’t always need to click through to your website to learn about programs, deadlines, or financial aid. That’s a problem if your entire recruitment strategy is built around funneling people to a landing page.
HubSpot’s answer to this is the Loop Marketing Playbook. It reframes the old inbound flywheel for an AI-first world, encouraging teams to think of marketing not as a straight line or funnel, but as a cycle that’s constantly learning and adapting.
Here’s what the framework looks like in practice for higher ed:
We’ve always known students move in “loops”, researching, applying, pausing, coming back, asking new questions. The Loop Marketing playbook just gives us a clearer way to think about meeting them where they are and continuously improving how we do it.
INBOUND always delivers a flood of announcements, but for higher ed teams, a few themes rose above the noise this year. Marketing Studio makes it easier for small teams to get campaigns off the ground quickly. Data Hub helps unify the scattered systems behind the student journey. Smart CRM quietly keeps that data fresh so your teams can collaborate without friction. And the Loop Marketing playbook gives us a new lens for reaching students in an AI-driven world of search.
Individually, each of these tools is powerful. But together, they tell a bigger story: HubSpot is moving toward helping small, scrappy teams work faster, smarter, and with more clarity. For admissions and marketing professionals, that translates into less time wrestling with systems and more time focusing on what really matters, building authentic connections with prospects and converting them into enrolled students.
As I left San Francisco, that was the takeaway I carried home: the future of higher ed marketing isn’t just about adopting new tools, it’s about adopting new ways of thinking. The updates I’ve shared here aren’t just shiny features; they’re part of a larger shift in how we engage prospects and nurture them into students. And that’s a future worth paying attention to.