HubSpot CMS Hub: A content management system for growing businesses

HubSpot's CMS Hub takes the pain out of website management, and lets you get back to what really matters: the experience you’re providing your customers.

Explore the topics 

 

  1. What is a content management system (CMS)?
  2. Grow with HubSpot CMS
  3. Who HubSpot CMS is made for
  4. How HubSpot CMS makes your job easier
  5. Why HubSpot CMS is the right fit for your business
  6. The hidden features you don’t see that add even more value
  7. HubSpot CMS pricing
  8. Take the leap


Creating content and having an efficient platform to host it on is crucial to growing any business. We’re firm believers that your website should act as your best salesperson and not just as a digital brochure where you display information about your services.

Your web content management system (CMS) is a critical component of your digital customer experience and taking your website from brochure to lead generating machine. Which begs the question, how is your organization’s CMS holding up? Is it helping you connect with your customers in a meaningful way? What are the signs it might be time for an upgrade?

Let’s look at how your marketing, sales, and service teams can leverage HubSpot's CMS Hub to achieve their goals while you deliver stellar content experiences across all your channels.

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#1 What is a content management system (CMS)?

A content management system often abbreviated as CMS, is a software or interface that enables you to create and manage your website pages without needing specialized technical know-how.

Even more simply, a content management system is a tool that helps you build a website without needing to write all the code from scratch (or needing to know how to code at all). You can find content management systems for other functions beyond websites, like Google Docs document management, for example.

Related post: 7 questions marketers should ask when choosing a CMS

What HubSpot CMS is and why we love it

Working on a traditional CMS can be a real pain. Countless plugins, server configurations, updates, and the constant threat of being hacked are enough to give anyone a persistent headache.

HubSpot CMS Hub is a powerful SaaS content management system that offers speed, security, and scalability while taking away the stress of CMS management. 

SaaS CMS

A SaaS (Software as a service) CMS is software that exists in the cloud and allows you and your team to log in and operate from anywhere. Remote workers rejoice! What’s great about a SaaS CMS is that the vendor maintains the software, handles hosting, and deals with your support queries all for a monthly or yearly fee. 

Examples of a SaaS CMS are HubSpot or Google Docs. 

HubSpot CMS Hub is ahead of other CMS platforms 

HubSpot listens to their customer feedback and developer community and works hard to make the changes that will improve their user’s experience. The best part about these improvements is that you can enjoy all of them right out the gate. You don’t need to configure any plugins or upgrade the software to use add ons - and your developers will love you for it and the secure and reliable hosting.

These features and benefits are working in the background with no need to manually update your site or install any new workarounds. 

A community of developers will maintain an Open-source CMS and its interface includes basics like content creation tools but requires plugins for additional functionality like sitemaps, SEO, analytics, and more. Usually, one party manages an open-source CMS but anyone can access it, which has the potential to expose you to security risks. Yes, open-sourced alternatives like WordPress still offer value depending on the type and complexity of the site you’re looking to build. But the customization options make HubSpot’s CMS Hub a superior choice for growing websites and especially for scaling SMEs or established large-scale enterprises.

HubSpot’s CMS takes the pain out of CMS management and allows you to focus less on your systems and more time focusing on your customers and business goals. 

Related post: Improve your website's user experience with HubSpot CMS Hub

CMS showdown: HubSpot CMS Vs. WordPress

You’re thinking about implementing a new marketing automation platform -what better CMS system to compare HubSpot to than probably the biggest open source CMS platform out there - WordPress.


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WordPress 

WordPress is one of the most well-known, well-used, open-source CMS platforms in the world. WordPress sites make up roughly 30% of the internet. Its interface allows for the creation of content, sitemaps, SEO, and analytics - and so much more - with its open-source plugin library.

HubSpot 

HubSpot is a platform that integrates all of your website tools (web management, landing pages, blogs, etc) in one place.

Sitting alongside HubSpot’s existing Marketing, Sales and Service Hubs, the newer HubSpot CMS Hub gives marketers and developers access to the tools they need to create and manage websites, create content, optimize for SEO and measure the performance of their site and inbound marketing activity from one easy-to-manage place.

WordPress was a blogging tool but has now developed into a full CMS. When you blog using WordPress, you can use free themes and templates, but to optimize content for search engines you need to install plugins. This means that to edit or change the layout, you’ll need help from a developer. 

HubSpot is built for marketers, which means you can create, optimize, publish, and analyze blog posts without needing to install plugins or requiring help from a developer.

#2 Grow with HubSpot CMS Hub

A CMS should make your life easier, it should not cause frustrations. For growing companies, most CMSs lack the advanced technologies needed to scale up.

There are multiple CMSs designed specifically for small businesses. As your organization grows, your marketing needs change with it. As you launch new products or services or enter new markets, your customers are going to want more from your website, which means more from your CMS. 

HubSpot's CMS is a system that is a combined tool incorporating CMS and CRM in one platform. It enables personalization of the entire customer journey and creates better user experiences from the first visit onwards. Visitors to your website are not static, so why is it ok that your website be? As your relationship grows and changes, your website should too.

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The CMS Hub has two different tiers for you to choose from Professional and Enterprise. This gives you the freedom to choose a CMS offering best suited to your company’s stage of growth. You're also free to upgrade your tier at any point, as your business needs change. 

CMS Hub Professional offers users drag-and-drop page editing, which puts marketers in control of your content and campaigns. 

CMS Hub Enterprise has additional features such as adaptive testing, memberships, the option to include a second brand domain, the ability to integrate directly with third-party APIs, and additional performance monitoring capabilities.

Expand your reach to a global audience

A multi-language website allows you to expand your reach and contact a much wider audience. With HubSpot’s CMS Hub, you can compare the performance of different language variants of a page against each other using a more powerful version of A/B testing (more on this later).

#3 Who HubSpot CMS Hub is for 

HubSpot CMS is a top choice for web building newbies, content creators, and marketers. Teams working on sites with an e-commerce angle, and basic web pages.

If you’re in the market for a tool that is user-friendly and allows you to edit and publish without needing to deep dive into a coding course or backend technicals, you’ll get a lot of value working on HubSpot’s CMS Hub.

Why our marketers love working in HubSpot  

If your company doesn’t have simple tools that allow you to make simple edits to your website it can be very frustrating. You will constantly need to tap your developer or IT manager on the shoulder for help - which is just inefficient. With HubSpot’s CMS Hub, you don’t need years of IT experience or a background in coding to make necessary edits to your website without getting stuck in bottlenecks. This makes it easy for your company to grow and prioritize your customer’s experience.

 

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Let’s look at a few key features that marketers love in HubSpot.

The marketer-friendly drag and drop editing tools 

With the drag-and-drop page editing feature, you can change the layout and content on your web pages with ease. You don’t have to be a developer to do the building. You can be 100% self-sufficient and bring your vision to life with these drag-and-drop publishing tools. 

Not only are drag-and-drop page editors a win for your marketing team, but they also free up your development team from handling one-off requests from the marketing department. Without the need to ask your developer to rearrange a page template so you can publish, it frees developers up to focus on more mission-critical growth projects that can move your business forward.

A flexible editing experience with themes  

Using pre-installed themes in CMS Hub, website builders can create a flexible editing experience that gives marketers full control over their content. This includes not only drag-and-drop page editing but also the ability to change the color, fonts, and imagery on your website without ever touching a line of code. Themes also allow for custom modules that marketers can drag-and-drop onto a page just like any other module.

A more powerful version of A/B testing 

Adaptive testing is more powerful because it allows you to have up to five variants, whereas A/B testing only allows you to have two. Even better - HubSpot will route traffic towards the most successful variation for you. 

Related post: Why Marketers love HubSpot's CMS Hub

Why our Developers love working in HubSpot 

No matter how collaborative or cooperative you and your team may be - it can get quite frustrating being (virtually) tapped on the shoulder multiple times a day with slack messages - especially when it’s helping with (what you might consider) a very simple IT task.


developer-astronaut

These days developers are so tied down with security concerns, GDPR, server issues etc. (the list can go). Therefore HubSpot CMS Hub empowers devs to do the work required to get the best results, all while ensuring they don't hit walls trying to get work done. So, without the constant requests from the marketing team to update this and then that, it becomes way easier to succeed. HubSpot lets your developers stick to solving the complex problems they love.

With HubSpot's CMS Hub, you can monitor the health of your website and take action to ensure that it constantly provides the best possible experience for your website visitor. In this way, it becomes more of a partnership as it grants all departments their wishes.

It enables a faster load time

If your website loads slowly, your visitors are going to leave. HubSpot is constantly working behind the scenes to optimize your website and improve your site speed. To help your website load quickly, HubSpot has built its own global Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure. This allows your pages to load quickly, no matter what device your visitor is using. Other ways HubSpot has optimized for a faster load time include:

  • Javascript minification
  • CSS combining
  • Browser and server caching
  • Domain rewriting
  • Text and image compressing
  • Accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
  • HubSpot automatically provides a  free SSL-certificate

The last thing any business wants is to have a security breach on their website, but did you know that lack of security can also hurt your search rankings? So, HubSpot CMS has SSL woven right in, and the Web Application Firewall prevents hackers from accessing valuable data. If you’re still concerned about security - HubSpot’s security team constantly monitors the network to give you 24-hour peace of mind

HubSpot ensures your website is reliable

Downtime doesn’t just cost you revenue it tarnishes your reputation and can create distrust with your customers. There is very little chance of suffering from any downtime with HubSpot CMS. If the data center does, for whatever reason, go down the system will switch to a redundant system keeping your site live.  

The ability to have two top-level brand domains

If you have multiple brands or business divisions under the same parent company, it's useful to run multiple websites through just one HubSpot portal. You can do this with the Enterprise CMS.


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You can have different user permissions 

The partitioning feature allows you to assign different user permissions to different team members so that individuals only have access to the content that’s most relevant to them. You can also limit access to portions of your website based on user smart lists. You can use this feature to delight your visitors by providing them with personalized website content. 

Create and run integration scripts directly in HubSpot

With serverless functions, integration scripts can be created and run directly in the HubSpot CMS. This reduces the number of platforms you need to run your website and makes it easier to maintain integration properties and authorizations. 

Website themes make it easier to build

Developers used to write CSS locally and then code the modules and templates in the browser-based HubSpot Design Tools. The themes feature allows developers to create modules, templates, and styles in their own local tools and then via the CMS command-line interface (CLI) push them to HubSpot. 

While the CLI aspect of themes might not affect marketers using the platform, it makes it a lot easier for developers to build on the CMS. If you’re a marketer using the platform, themes will help you maintain brand consistency and easily set colors and logos across your website without having to tap developers on the shoulder every 5 mins.

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#4 How HubSpot CMS Hub makes your job easier 

Offering a comprehensive list of features is great, but how user-friendly is HubSpot’s CMS?

HubSpot CMS is streamlined and efficient. Marketers built it for marketers, so it's not overly complicated to learn. The analytics are easy to understand; it has customer communication built-in, and the lead life-cycle is highly intuitive.

Building the pages themselves is well thought out, and HubSpot coaches you on everything you need to create a beautiful site, with the best chance at ranking on Google.

With HubSpot CMS Hub you’ve got everything you need in one place - you never have to leave the HubSpot control panel! Usually, you would have to go from platform-to-platform to manage your social media, analytics, email, CRM, website design, blog posting, etc. This can be time-consuming and, to be honest, a real pain. All those separate tabs and different log-in details. We say no more! 

user-friendly-cms-1

HubSpot is a platform where everything is in one easy-to-manage control panel. This allows you to access everything you need with just a few clicks. From your design elements to emails and even social media. 

Not only does it help to have everything in one place, but it’s a closed-loop system, so it acts as its own analytics tool for ease of reporting. This helps improve your marketing efforts because you’re able to see how well a blog, email, or landing page is performing, carry out A/B tests, and receive clear feedback all in one place.

SMART content is one of the most powerful features of CMS Hub. Personalizing content and buttons on your page based on what you already know about a prospect means that you can take the user experience to a whole new level.

#5 Why HubSpot CMS Hub is the right fit for your business

The best CMS for you will depend on what the purpose of your website is. 

A SaaS CMS like HubSpot isn’t the best fit for every style of business. Some businesses don’t like the idea of outsourcing the security of their data to a third-party company - if you’re dealing with sensitive data regularly this is something to take into consideration. That being said, the HubSpot website platform is an excellent choice for e-commerce businesses and ones that implement inbound marketing. This is because HubSpot CMS is excellent at capturing leads, and reporting on web traffic data. This enables you to nurture sales and have insight into your customer and audience analytics.

HubSpot CMS is designed to help you skyrocket your organic search traffic

HubSpot CMS Hub makes it easier for marketers to create, publish, and promote content and change website pages. But - you can write content until your fingers cramp and it won’t really benefit your business growth unless you’re optimizing it for search engines.  

HubSpot comes with a list of tools that will not only help you scale your business, but also help ensure that you optimize your content for SEO and that your site is performing quickly. Speed is a Google ranking factor that can improve your chances of climbing up the search rankings. 

If you’ve used Marketing Hub before you’ll know about HubSpot’s SEO tools, but if not (or just as a refresher) let’s look at them below:


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SEO recommendations

HubSpot’s SEO tool can give you a complete list of SEO recommendations for your entire website. The tool can analyze all the content you host on HubSpot and recommend ways for you to improve it and improve your chances of ranking in search results. These recommendations could be anything from meta titles and descriptions to tags and URLs.

SEO optimize panel

Whenever you create a piece of content on HubSpot, whether it’s a landing page, website page, or blog, you’ll receive suggestions on how to optimize the content before publishing it.

You can also access these suggestions while you’re busy editing the content. HubSpot will present some SEO considerations and the tool will then tell you whether you have optimized the content correctly, or if you need to make further changes.

Content strategy tool

We think one of the BEST tools in the SEO toolkit is the content strategy and planning tool which makes it simple to plan and execute your pillar page and topic cluster strategy. Using this tool from HubSpot's Marketing Hub, you can identify the primary keyword that you want to focus on, and then use the tool to plan SEO-optimized content around it.

Related post: How HubSpot CMS will help you rank higher on Google


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Is your website sales-ready?

HubSpot gives you the flexibility to move fast when you are scaling up your business.

It’s optimized for devices and conversions: With a sales-ready website in HubSpot, you easily create and manage website pages personalized for different visitors - and optimized for devices and conversions. 

It’s a tool stack for growth: Two key reasons selecting the right tools is crucial to the success of your website redesign - First, choosing the right tools opens up your team’s ability to drive results in ways they never could before. Second, an integrated tool stack will help you gain new insights into user behavior because you’re collecting the right data and connecting data from multiple sources into one story. 

With HubSpot CMS Hub you get that setup, probably in the most user-friendly CMS tool on the market, which empowers your marketing team and increases your scalability potential.

It allows for an improved customer experience: With HubSpot CMS Hub, you will have a complete view of each user’s interactions and journey. Your website will provide powerful enablement information for a salesperson trying to close that prospect or a customer service rep who’s trying to understand the history of a specific customer.

#6 The hidden features you don't see that add even more value 

There are certain qualities of HubSpot that you don’t see in their list of features that really add tremendous value. Here are some bonus features you can explore should you take the leap. 

Gain Access to the world's largest inbound marketing network

HubSpot has the largest network of like-minded marketers compared to any other marketing platform. There are endless forums, blogs, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and countless communities of people across industries who also use HubSpot. 

This gives you endless opportunities to learn from people using HubSpot to achieve the same (or at least similar) goals as you. This also gives you an instant platform to share your experiences and start developing your own network.hubspot-inbound-marketing-network

 

HubSpot offers endless (and free) learning resources

HubSpot offers countless free learning resources - and these aren’t just for customers to take advantage of! 

Although much of these resources are created specifically for HubSpot users and provide step-by-step instructions to maximize the effectiveness of the features, anyone interested or looking to improve their inbound marketing methodologies can take advantage of them. 

HubSpot provides hundreds of free resources in their Marketing Library and thousands of articles on their marketing blog. 

If you want to upskill yourself, grow your career and your business, then HubSpot Academy is your new classroom. With their Learn, Apply, Grow approach to online training, you can learn everything you need to know about the latest business topics. Attend their bite-sized lessons or dive into any of their comprehensive certifications to maintain your competitive edge in the digital age.

#7 HubSpot CMS pricing - is it worth it?

HubSpot CMS is pricier than most other options out there, but the returned value makes it well worth it.

The cost may kick HubSpot CMS out of the running for some businesses, but just remember, your investment will essentially give you the peace of mind of:

  • A streamlined all-in-one-platform
  • A reliable website with no down time
  • A secure website experience for you and your customers
  • A faster load time and therefore a better user experience
  • The governance of implementing different permissions
  • Marketer - friendly editing tools
  • No need for plugin maintenance

So, when you divide the total cost over the multiple tools, suddenly the price seems a lot less scary. 

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Buy into the HubSpot ecosystem

Investing in HubSpot is more than just purchasing marketing software. You’re investing in an ecosystem. The more you immerse your business into the HubSpot ecosystem, the more your inbound marketing will improve. 

For many of our own clients, the HubSpot CMS has been a stellar choice. They can publish content quickly, measure the effect, and trace user interactions, which is helping them to close more deals and grow their business.

Sign up with a partner agency 

A HubSpot Partner is a company that has agreed with HubSpot to sell and service HubSpot software. To do this, they join the HubSpot Agency Partner Program. It requires them to meet a set of training and implementation criteria.

One of many benefits when you sign up for HubSpot through one of HubSpot's partner agencies - like iGoMoon, is that you can waive the onboarding fee. The agency you choose to partner with will handle that for you. 

HubSpot partners have experience with many implementations of HubSpot software. At iGoMoon, we specialize in HubSpot CMS implementation and have experience with multiple clients and HubSpot applications. By working with a specialist HubSpot partner agency like us, we’ll help you fast-track your business growth. 

#8 Take the leap 

Buying HubSpot is not a small decision for most businesses. 

If you're still debating whether it is right for your business, check out at our blog Why HubSpot CMS is the right fit for your business. In it, we look at the five common factors that show whether HubSpot CMS could suit your business needs. 

If you still have questions or aren’t ready to commit just yet, let's set up a demo. Book a meeting with our crew who can give you a walk-through of the HubSpot portal and answer the lingering questions you may have. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by exploring the tools and seeing which ones will offer actual value to your business.

You can also set up an exploratory meeting with our crew, and we’ll help you discover areas of unseen opportunity and aim to spark an idea for how you can use HubSpot to grow your business.

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