INBOUND Blog

For years, marketers have been trained to think in rankings: rank on Google, drive traffic, optimize conversion. Repeat. That model influenced an entire generation of content strategy and defined what we wrote, how we structured it, and how we measured success. But at INBOUND 2025, Aja Frost, Senior Director of Global Growth at HubSpot, made it clear that this model is being replaced with AEO (the practice of optimizing your content so AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews can find, extract, and recommend your brand in their answers). AI is compressing what used to be a multi-step journey into a single, synthesized answer. If your brand isn’t part of the answer, you may never enter the consideration set at all. Frost knows this firsthand. HubSpot saw the shift early, pivoted their content strategy, and is now the number one most visible CRM in AI engines. Here's the playbook she sharedcheck and what you can start doing today.

Sports marketing has a blind spot. And it's not small: it's 30 million people and growing, to be exact. For decades, brands have treated the Latina consumer as a niche, a secondary audience, or worse, an afterthought. At INBOUND 2025, Karina Martinez (CEO) and Jennifer Yepez-Blundell (COO), co-founders of DRAFTED—a sports culture media company centering Latinas and the next generation of fandom—joined Sonia Thompson of the Inclusion and Marketing podcast to make the case that this audience isn't niche at all. She's the new general market. Here's what they shared, and what marketers can start doing differently today.

For years, marketers have been told there’s a “right way” to do things. Follow the best practices. Copy what worked before. Don’t deviate from the playbook. At INBOUND 2025, Jay Schwedelson shared why so much of the advice marketers rely on today is outdated, misleading, or actively holding teams back. In his session Best Practices Are Garbage: In Marketing and Life, he challenged career clichés, questioned how we measure marketing impact, and reframed common fears around AI. So how do we move past best practices and actually grow through change and constant pressure to perform? Read on for the top takeaways from Schwedelson’s INBOUND session.

Marketing today is about behavioral fluency and if you’re building strategies based on how people say they make decisions, you’re already behind. Behavioral science tells us that up to 95% of decisions are made subconsciously. In practice, that means your audience is often choosing without realizing why. Nancy Harhut, behavioral science and marketing expert, says that these decision defaults are automatic responses rooted in habit, emotion, and cognitive efficiency. At INBOUND 2025 she laid out 9 counterintuitive marketing tactics every marketer should have in their toolbox to identify and exploit common decision triggers. Here’s a breakdown of each tactic, plus tips for how to start applying them to your work.

Search has changed. Have you? Google is no longer just a ranking engine and if you're still optimizing for blue links and waiting for traffic to land on your site, you may already be invisible. At INBOUND 2025, Fire&Spark’s Dale Bertrand challenged marketers to adapt to how AI is changing search behavior or risk being written out of the conversation entirely.

On the Main Stage at INBOUND 2025, Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital, came with hard data that challenges where we're all spending our marketing time and energy. His topic: 30 Charts That Will Change the Way You Do Marketing. His message: Most companies are focused on the wrong things and missing real revenue opportunities because of it. If you’re navigating search behaviors, AI-generated content, or performance plateaus, here’s what you need to know from Patel’s session and how to act on it now.

What if the difference between good and great marketing isn't just doing more of the same? At an eye-opening INBOUND 2024 Spotlight session, HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar and Asana CMO Shannon Duffy shared invaluable insights on elevating marketing teams from merely good to truly exceptional. Their conversation revealed how emotion, instinct, and embracing change might be the missing ingredients in your marketing strategy.