Beyond HubSpot CRM: Using HubSpot CMS Hub® for Managing Your Website

Launching a new website requires significant amounts of research and planning, not to mention major investments of time, energy, and resources to see the project over the finish line. We totally get it! 

Anything that simplifies the process and accelerates your organization’s website launch gets your team fully focused back on your business’s main priorities sooner – ideally, with your new dream website helping you bolster your sales and outreach efforts. If you’ve been using HubSpot CRM for managing your customer relationships, making the transition to building out your new website on HubSpot’s CMS Hub is definitely an option worth exploring.

As a proud HubSpot partner agency, we wanted to share some key aspects clients ask us about using HubSpot’s CMS Hub® for building and managing their websites and online content. We sat down with our in-house web guru, Melissa Nault, to learn what businesses and organizations should know about using CMS Hub for building and hosting their new website. 

We have collaborated with hundreds of businesses and organizations to develop SEO-optimized content, videos, social campaigns, and custom websites that utilize the many interlocking aspects of the HubSpot platform, and we’ve learned a ton along the way!

INTEGRATED, USER-FRIENDLY, AND FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE

Whether you’ve been using the HubSpot CRM for years or are just exploring the benefits of HubSpot, you’ll quickly learn that their mission and reason of being is to provide an integrated platform built for aligning sales and marketing teams, and moving all your tools into one, easy-to-use centralized location. Not only does this make day-to-day business easier, but having all of your marketing in one place also helps you make more insightful marketing decisions.

“Hubspot is more than just a platform,” Melissa explains, “it integrates your entire business life from easily tracking your customer interactions to hosting content. It keeps everyone on the same page.”

Websites built and managed in CMS Hub are easy to edit (the features are drag and drop, thanks to HubSpot ‘themes’ that serve as templates for all kinds of pages) and designed with everyday users in mind. As with all of the HubSpot offerings, businesses can assign different levels of feature permissions on an individual basis. This allows marketing teams to edit and publish content without needing any coding experience or training. 

“We design websites for our clients that are incredibly easy for anyone to edit and update,” says Melissa. “If you have an in-house coder, they can customize as much as they want, but if you don’t have a coder, you can make it really simple – your marketing team doesn’t need to know anything about web design to be able to add new content, publish new blogs, or create landing pages.”

Housing all of these marketing assets in HubSpot also means that you can collect data on how your marketing is working in real-time. The HubSpot platform’s data-driven tools help you measure the ROI of your marketing efforts so that you can make informed decisions moving forward.

DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF FROM THE COMPETITION

CMS Hub’s ability to customize every aspect of your website gives you freedom to get creative, thus allowing you to stand out from competitors in your industry, which isn’t often the case if you choose to work with an industry-specific website services company as a partner. 

“Every business type has a platform and they think they have to go with this template to fit in with the industry,” says Melissa, “that’s definitely not the case.” Oftentimes, website services companies use a template that gets slightly tweaked and replicated for dozens of clients. As a result, many websites in a particular industry all start looking very similar. 

“You see so many websites that are copied from a template site,” explains Melissa. “Take a private club, for instance. If the partner does platforms just for private clubs they might just swap out photos,” explains Melissa. “By designing in HubSpot, you can change everything you want.” (We frequently see this in the private golf club space, but it’s true in many industries!) 

FULL RANGE OF PRICING OPTIONS, BUILT TO SCALE

An additional benefit of hosting on the CMS Hub is that there are a range of pricing packages available, based on the size of your business and the breadth of your needs. Although CMS Hub works great for larger businesses, we’ve found that smaller and mid-sized businesses stand to gain even more from a sales and marketing-optimized website. 

For example, for a start-up business or a smaller business, the CMS Starter grants you up to 15 web pages, and access to many of HubSpot’s essential features for only $270 a year. Of course, there are limitations – no CTAs, fewer automatic SEO recommendations, but truly, a very adequate package for many clients’ needs. As a business grows, they can easily upgrade to access additional features and services.

In the age of Google, designing your website with SEO and inbound marketing top of mind is crucial, and that’s true for large e-commerce companies as well as smaller ones. 

“You don’t have to be a strictly inbound marketing-focused company to benefit from HubSpot, but it’s built to support an inbound strategy,” explains Melissa. This is especially important for growing businesses who want to play against larger corporations that are household names. 

“With the right inbound strategy and data-driven website, you can achieve top ranking for keywords on Google even though you’re not a Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 company,” explains Melissa, “that’s the power of a marketing and sales-optimized website. Your target customers can find you online.”

ACCESS TO EXCEPTIONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

Perhaps one of the most important features of hosting your website on CMS Hub is that they offer 24/7 customer service to help you troubleshoot or answer any questions that arise. “They have such great customer support,” says Melissa. “From technical support to marketing support – it’s always a real person who’s waiting to help you at all hours of the day. I don’t think I’ve ever waited longer than 60 seconds. Middle of the night, Sunday morning. They are there if I have a question about the websites I’m working on.”

Many larger tech companies nowadays make it difficult to access customer support, but HubSpot has made it a pillar of their service. 

“I was on there all the time while I was new to CMS Hub,” says Melissa. “It’s just so easy to send them a link and work on a page together, whether via chat or a phone call. They’re fantastic.”

GLOBAL CHANGES LET YOU STAY FRESH AND UP TO DATE

What is “in style” and “on trend” online constantly changes, and as a result even a new website can start looking outdated really quickly. “I recommend that a website be redesigned and freshened up every two years,” says Melissa. “Not a major overhaul, but tweaking things like font, images, colors, that kind of thing. You want to keep your site looking fresh and modern.”

Within the CMS Hub, you can easily make global changes across your entire website. “If you want to rebrand and change colors, you can do that from one place,” explains Melissa. “Things like changing the size of the H1, adjusting colors, fonts – that way your website stays looking up to date.” 

It’s perhaps stating the obvious, but websites today need to work well on mobile phones. “HubSpot themes are built on a grid system that makes them automatically mobile responsive,” says Melissa, “now, you don’t have to build an entirely separate mobile-friendly site, which saves a ton of work now and down the road when you need to make updates.” 

We know that deciding to launch a new website is a big decision – it’s exciting but also potentially stressful. If you have any questions about an upcoming website redesign, CMS Hub, or how to optimize your website to implement an inbound marketing strategy, we’d love to hear from you.