Thinking about designing your website in HubSpot? That’s great news!
HubSpot – as an all-in-one growth solution has everything you need to get your website up and running and turn it into your business’ main lead generator. But while it has a lot of website build and optimisation features that you can take advantage of, laying a foundation before you start designing your website will ensure it’s built properly and in line with expectations.
So don’t rush off and start building your HubSpot website just yet.
In this blog, I'll share five things you should consider before you design your website in HubSpot. These tips will help you to get the most out of HubSpot’s features and turn your website into the lead generator that it needs to be.
1. Design for your personas and their pain points
Before you start designing your website in HubSpot, take some time to review your buyer personas and familiarise yourself with their pain points. If you haven’t built any buyer personas – now is a good time. We have a pretty helpful blog that will help you get started – just click here.
Remember: you are designing your website for your target audience, your buyer personas, so make sure that your website includes everything they need to 1) solve their business challenge, 2) find out how you can help and 3) get in touch if they need to.
High-quality, educational content will help your prospects solve their business challenges (and position your business’ products and services as what they need in the process), whilst calls-to-action (CTAs) and simple navigation will help them to find what they are looking for.
Make their journey as easy as possible!
2. Think about using smart content
Personalisation is a key part of providing an excellent customer experience – and most websites today leverage some form of smart content to show website visitors specific products or services based on a number of factors.
When a brand or business offers a tailored experience to each website visitor’s specific needs, that website visitor is much more likely to continue browsing the website and maybe even make a purchase.
In HubSpot, personalisation is managed through Smart Content (also known as dynamic or adaptive content). Smart Content allows you to show different content to your website visitors based on:
-
Country
-
Device type
-
Referral source
-
Preferred language
-
Contact list membership
-
Lifecycle stage
For example, if you want to show a bottom of the funnel content offer to contacts with a lifecycle stage of ‘marketing qualified lead’ (MQL) on a specific page – you first set up a smart content module (or make a module smart) on that page, select your smart rule from the dropdown menu to specify criteria (in this instance, contact lifecycle stage) and then click create. Having created your smart module, you can then edit the text, save it and test it. The end result is that when MQLs visit that website page, they will see different text compared to a website visitor with a lifecycle stage of ‘lead’.
You can add smart text to your emails, website pages, landing pages and templates, so it’s entirely possible to personalise your entire website for specific website visitors!
Make sure you factor smart content into your design by thinking about what content you want to show people and where on your website you want to use smart content, because you’ll have to integrate modules that allow smart content for it to work!
3. If you plan on using tables or spreadsheets, consider HubDB
If there is any content on your site that you want to display in a table or spreadsheet, you should consider HubDB. Integrating a database into your website is usually a very technical job and would normally require a developer, but with HubDB you can easily create database-driven content that can be embedded into your website (and landing pages).
Using HubDB, you can then style your inserted tables or spreadsheets to match the look and feel of the rest of your website. If that’s not enough to convince you, it’s very easy for you to add
You can then style your HubDB table to match the look and feel of your website. HubDB is easy to add onto your HubSpot website – a dream for any website developer – and is regularly updated.
You can use HubDB to build:
-
Event listings
-
Product listings
-
Resource pages
-
And any content that would use a database to load content!
In fact, we recently used HubDB to list the agendas of conferences on the website of one of our clients; the client team really enjoyed how easy it was to add data to HubDB and how they could make changes in real-time without a developer!
4. Think about whether you need flexible templates with drag and drop modules
Do you need flexible website templates? Do you need drag and drop modules to build your website quickly?
Well, one of the benefits of building your website in HubSpot is the ability to develop templates and build pages using drag and drop modules. This element of HubSpot CMS means that it is super easy for you and other members of your team to make layout changes to web pages without needing to call a developer for help!
So before you dive right into designing your website, think about the modules you want to use on your website – and keep in mind that you can use one module in multiple ways.
5. Translate your website pages
Have multiple web pages in different languages and need them translated for your regional websites?
No problem – HubSpot’s got you covered.
If your website is in more than one language, HubSpot has a page translation feature, which makes the whole process of building your pages in each language very easy. This means that you don’t have to design or plan for multiple versions of the site (winning)! All you need to do in HubSpot is first build out the page in your primary language, then click on the drop-down menu and select ‘Create translation’.
Now your web page is translated. Simple.
Before you start to design your HubSpot website, have a look at all of the HubSpot tools. There are a lot of them but being familiar with how they work and what they can do for your website will help you to create a website that consistently generates leads for your business.
