Marketers who have put their inbound strategy aside over the past year can now pair their Inbound and SWAG conference mugs with it.
HubSpot has renamed its annual Inbound conference, which takes place in September in Boston, to Unbound. A note on the event website explains the company’s thinking:
“This evolution is our response to this reality. INBOUND becomes UNBOUND because growth is no longer within a single framework or function. Today, it spans marketing, sales, service and operations across the customer journey in an AI-driven environment. UNBOUND reflects this broader reality and the mindset needed to get there.”
HubSpot is considered a pioneer of inbound marketing strategy, which relies on content marketing and search rankings to attract eyeballs, who then have the opportunity to convert once they reach the site.
But Google’s core updates seemed punish HubSpot blog in recent years, perhaps because its content has moved away from core topics like CRM, sales and marketing, and toward broader business topics like interview tips.
The inbound strategy has suffered more broadly from the shift of search from traditional platforms like Google to LLMs like ChatGPT, which generate fewer clicks to websites.
In response, HubSpot in 2025 unveiled its Loop marketing strategy replacing the inbound strategy. The Loop aims to help marketers educate consumers in an AI world.
Now, the company’s event rebrand recognizes that no single framework works for everyone in the modern world of marketing.
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Mike Pastore is Head of Content and Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech conferences. For nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike worked as an editor, writer and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers from some of the most well-known brands in B2B technology, creating content for Jupitermedia and QuinStreet marketing campaigns. Before joining Third Door Media as Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.
