By now you’ve likely heard about HubSpot, either as a leading marketing automation software or as a hardy Content Management System (CMS). If you’re in the market to rebuild your website, then I have no doubt HubSpot has popped up as an option to consider as your CMS platform.
Trying to determine whether HubSpot CMS Hub is a good fit for your site build is a weighted decision. There are a variety of other CMSs that bring a whole host of benefits with them. Fortunately HubSpot marketing software can integrate with most of them, which doesn’t help make the case for choosing HubSpot CMS.
It does, however, make a good case for the versatility and sophistication that HubSpot as an organisation displays constantly. It enables your digital marketing to be managed from a single repository. You will no longer need integrations and plugins to handle disparate data sets.
As a diamond partner agency of HubSpot and one with a fiercely technical team of developers and designers, we know all about HubSpot’s CMS Hub. We are in the thick of it daily and so we’re well positioned to share our experience with this platform. So, we’re going to give it to you – all the benefits of HubSpot CMS that you need to know before deciding where to host your new website.
Marketing
From a marketing perspective, HubSpot CMS Hub makes out quite well within the top 10 CMSs being used today. When it comes to the management of content, it's an exceptionally easy platform to master. No technical aptitude or background is required to create, publish or update your site pages.
Using the themes and drag-and-drop editor, you can easily create landing- and website pages, and blog posts with the standalone CMS. If you're even vaguely adept with traditional CMSs or even Microsoft Word, you'll be right at home using the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) text editors.
The best news is that site pages you build in HubSpot are responsive by default, meaning they are optimised for mobile, tablet and desktop use. There’s no need to get a developer involved to make sure your content scales across devices.
HubSpot CMS is an all-in-one-platform which now seamlessly connects your CMS platform with your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). You can make use of the smart content features and personalisation which helps you tailor your visitors experience. With these features, as a marketer, you can ensure your content strategy, offers and outreach is aimed at a specific audience’s psychographic and demographic factors. The CMS Hub also comes with conversational marketing tools allowing you to enable a live chat function or a chatbot on your website.
You can also enjoy centralised inbound marketing, sales and service tools with your analytics being housed on one platform. The all-in-one tool ensures better alignment not only between your sales and marketing teams but also with your service teams to deliver a seamless customer experience. The CMS Hub also offers a calls-to-action tool, a content strategy and SEO tool and responsive preview to make sure visitors and search engines love your content.
HubSpot is a comprehensive platform with plenty of tools to learn. The tutorials and online training in the HubSpot Academy provide you with everything you need to gain a deep theoretical understanding of all the methodologies and tools. But to really make the platform work for you, you need to actually get your hands dirty and use the platform.
Development
From junior to the more experienced developer, all agree that they love the freedom and flexibility that the design manager provides. The past few years have seen massive updates to the editing process, as the team at HubSpot focused on providing the best design experience for their users. Recently, HubSpot has upped their game again, with the launch of their CMS Hub with Professional or Enterprise Tiers.
The design manager comes with a drag-and-drop editor that is intuitive and easy to use. You have access to limitless options with many layout possibilities and styling options. The asset marketplace can have you set up with anything from a basic email template to a complex homepage design.
The App Marketplace is also frequently visited by developers. As more and more companies are relying on SaaS based solutions, the need for solid integration capabilities has never been more present. From AdRoll to Zendesk, you have many HubSpot CMS integration partners to choose from, from the App Marketplace. If it's not already a featured integration, developers have access to the HubSpot API to create custom integrations with your applications, quickly and with ease.
By using the HubSpot API, developers can provide seamless data relationships between your CRM and external application. The well-documented platform makes integrating with social media channels, webinar tools or any other platform effortless. It also hosts a variety of API tools like endpoint monitoring and built in OAUth services.
The developers who embrace everything about the platform have learnt to push the boundaries and they specifically appreciate HubSpot CMS for aspects like:
- Local website development: Leverage tools like GitHub to handle version control and make changes to web assets as you're ready.
- Serverless functions: Add interactive elements like event registration, guest books, calculators without configuring an external server, SSL certificate or data transfer processes.
- Website themes: Create a site-wide content editing experience that empowers your marketing team to manage and update the front-end. Start from scratch or leverage a pre-built theme as a starting point. Themes come with core and custom templates, global elements, custom modules, stylesheets and JavaScript files, which can all be customised for your unique website. The CMS comes with default themes, and offers various other theme options you can purchase via the asset marketplace.
- Dynamic content with HubDB: Build data tables that can be updated to push global site updates for content that appears on multiple pages. Great for calendars, product catalogs, pricing data and more.
- Code alerts: Easily identify infrastructure or design bugs that could cause a page to fail, slow site speed or a bad customer experience via errors in syntax, HubL, missing tags, etc.
Envato recently partnered with HubSpot and launched over 250 high-quality CMS Hub themes, built by their community of professionals and reviewed by their web and code specialists. From multi-purpose to niche markets, you'll find the widest variety of CMS Hub themes to suit your needs.
IT
At the core of the CMS Hub is speed, security and reliability, which is what will make your IT team love it. It features 24/7 security monitoring and threat detection. The HubSpot security team ensures the safety of your site with both automated and manual checks for attacks, potential abuse or other anomalies.
HubSpot promises a 99.99% up-time and ensures your site remains active through the global Content Delivery Network (CDN). It's built to handle high volumes of traffic and the Enterprise plan comes with a custom CDN configuration.
Your site will be automatically provisioned with a standard SSL certificate, which helps to create trust and increase your Google rank.
The CMS Hub also features activity logging, site performance monitoring and reverse proxy support.
We speak so confidently about this platform because everything you might experience with HubSpot, we as an agency have been through ourselves. We’ve grown to a diamond partner agency by gaining the technical CMS know-how and a keen understanding of how to fit all the pieces together.
If you're keen to have a chat about getting your company set up on the HubSpot CMS Hub, head over to our contact page and get in touch.
