Marketers who put their inbound strategy on the shelf in the past year can now put their Inbound conference mugs and SWAG alongside it.
HubSpot renamed its annual Inbound conference, which takes place in September in Boston, to Unbound. A note on the event’s site explains the company’s thinking:
“This evolution is our response to that reality. INBOUND is becoming UNBOUND because growth no longer fits within a single framework or function. Today, it covers marketing, sales, service, and operations across the full customer journey in an AI-driven environment. UNBOUND reflects that expanded reality and the mindset required to lead through it.”
HubSpot is considered a pioneer of the inbound marketing strategy, which relies on content marketing and search rankings to attract eyeballs, which are then given the opportunity to convert once they reach the site.
But core updates from Google seemed to punish the HubSpot blog in recent years, perhaps because its content strayed from core topics like CRM, sales and marketing, and into broad business topics like interview tips.
The inbound strategy more broadly suffered as search moves 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 as a replacement to the inbound strategy. The Loop focuses on helping marketers educate consumers in an AI world.
Now, the company’s event rebranding acknowledges that no single framework works for everyone in the modern world of marketing.
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Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.