During HubSpot's Inbound17 conference, the company's annual conference held in Boston, USA, they announced that they are finally renaming its HubSpot COS platform (Content Optimisation System), to the HubSpot CMS (Content Management System).
About time!
Even though you have been able to build awesome websites in HubSpot for a few years now, with this change, HubSpot ‘officially’ enters the CMS market and begins its journey to becoming the leading CMS platform.
In its way, however, is WordPress. As it stands, more than a quarter of the web uses WordPress, it is used by 69.89% of websites in the UK, and the fact that it is free to start with makes it an incredibly attractive option for some businesses. WordPress has evolved significantly since its conception in 2003, that much is clear. It now has thousands of templates, plugins, integrations and other features which make it a reasonable option for businesses looking to build a simple, straightforward website.
However, if you are a B2B business looking for an enterprise-grade website, one which enables you to engage with website visitors, edit web pages on the fly, unify your marketing and sales activity, nurture and manage leads, customise content based on website visitors, create ROI reports, track keywords, manage social media activity, implement workflows, and much, much more, we would advise you to choose a more sophisticated platform that can take your marketing, sales and business growth to the next level.
You may not have considered HubSpot for your business, or perhaps you have but are not aware of all its benefits, so we are here to tell you why you should.
In this blog, we will share the five things you really need to know about HubSpot.
1. There’s a huge template library to choose from
Website design is a very complex area of expertise. Web developers often need to know different coding languages, some of which are HTML, C++, CSS, jquery, JavaScript, and PHP (confusing, right?) Each coding language is different in its application and each language varies in complexity. These languages help web developers to build web pages from scratch, allowing them to insert colour to web pages, edit page wireframes, add special effects, add interactive elements, change web page modules and much more. This might sound simple, but it is anything but. One error in a single line of code could lead to an entire web page not working and, for anyone but the web developer, fixing the problem could take a considerable amount of time.
However, by using the HubSpot Website platform you no longer have to hire a web developer or build your website from scratch yourself. HubSpot’s template marketplace offers thousands of pre-built templates which you can purchase and use for your website. All of these templates are fully customisable and as they are pre-built, you do not need to create any modules or code to them. Simply use a pre-built template and edit the template to suit your brand. HubSpot website design is a far more cost-effective solution than hiring a web developer!
2. Every web page is automatically responsive
Remember Mobileggedon? Of course you do.
On April 21, 2015, Google released a new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. Since then, Google has been favouring websites that are mobile-friendly, giving them a small boost in mobile search rankings, over those that are not.
Obviously, you do not want your website’s ranking on Google to be in danger because it’s not mobile-friendly, and you also (should!) want to provide a great user experience for website visitors regardless of the device they use to view your website on.
With this in mind, you need a responsive website. A website that can alter its structure to provide an optimal viewing experience based on device - and in order to do this, you need responsive website design. But just like coding your website from scratch, modifying your website to be responsive is not easy and involves a lot of coding and page modification.
With HubSpot website design, however, every web page you build is responsive by default. All HubSpot templates are designed to be responsive and will alter themselves to provide an optimal viewing experience for any device. You can even see how the web page would look on a specific device by using the preview mode in the template editor.
3. It has a live on-page editor
Every CMS is different and each one takes a different approach to creating and editing web pages. Take WordPress, for example. If you have just created or edited a web page and want to preview it, you would have to save your work, click out of the WordPress editor and open up a preview to see how it will look. If you want to make any further edits to that page, whether you want to change spacing, bolding, text, or styling, you would have to go back into the WordPress editor and do them from there.
With HubSpot's CMS, however, you can edit and view a page as if it were live, HubSpot's template editor allows you to see a web page in its entirety and edit specific aspects of it in real-time. You do not need to leave the page to load a preview of it and you can save and publish your changes in the same environment.
4. Your website is integrated with all your marketing and sales activity
The kind of marketing and sales activity that actually works is the kind that’s unified - the kind that delivers a consistent experience across channels, enables marketing and sales to align their efforts in a single environment, and allows everyone to see every aspect of marketing and sales activity. Disparate, disconnected tools will lead to an incomplete view of your marketing and sales activity and on that basis, email marketing, social media, marketing automation, customer relationship management, reporting, analytics, content creation must come together seamlessly.
And HubSpot can do all of this for you.
With HubSpot, your website is automatically connected with your HubSpot Marketing platform, allowing you to monitor and analyse the performance of your website alongside other marketing activity. You do not need to manage different tools and you do not need to use different platforms or systems to access your marketing performance data.
If you are looking to generate more website traffic, leads, sales enquiries and business revenue - you should be looking for a website solution that allows you to manage everything.
5. What else? All of this is just the tip of the iceberg...
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All HubSpot websites come with a free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) - Security is built into your HubSpot website as standard.
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All HubSpot websites come with live Lead Flows - With HubSpot's Lead Flows, you can easily create engaging lead capture forms to attract new leads. Lead flows are available for any website page, landing page or blog post you host on HubSpot.
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You can implement a live chat service which is incredibly easy to set up - HubSpot's live chat tool will allow your sales team to connect with site visitors, build better relationships and engage with potential prospects at the most opportune moments.
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All HubSpot websites allow you to use Smart Content - HubSpot's Smart Content feature allows you to adjust the content of your website based on who is visiting your website and where they are in the buying process, or in the world.
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Lead Activity Notifications - What if you could know the exact moment a lead revisits your website? With HubSpot's Lead Activity notifications, you will never miss an opportunity to engage with leads. HubSpot will send you an email to let you know, right away, so you can take action and engage with your future customers.
In closing, your website is the most important component in your business’ lead acquisition, business growth and revenue generation. It is the first point at which your potential prospects come into contact with your business, it is your best marketing and sales employee, and it is center of your marketing and sales activity.
You must acknowledge your website as the top of your business’ sales funnel and your marketing and sales activity must be driven through your website and connected to it. In order to achieve success in today’s digital-first, multi-channel world, your marketing and sales efforts must be unified, your website must be editable, and your tools must be in one place.
HubSpot has all of this and more. While we would advocate HubSpot at every opportunity, you should choose it for the simple fact that it is the best platform on the market and designed to help with Inbound Marketing activity.
