Managing a website can be a pain. With a traditional CMS, you could be constantly worrying about the security and performance of your website. It can be difficult to scale your website as you grow, and making a simple edit to your site can be difficult to do without asking help from a developer.
With the launch of CMS Hub, HubSpot promises content management will be “Less Pain, More Gain”.
Here Comes the New HubSpot CMS Hub
CMS Hub provides you with security right out of the box and makes it easier than ever to create delightful web experience for your customers. This blog aims to highlight the features that make HubSpot’s claim true and make content management easy and effective with the new CMS Hub.
“With the CMS Hub, your team can spend less time managing systems and more time creating engaging experiences for your customers. It lets marketers take ownership of their websites through powerful content creation tools, gives developers the flexibility to use the tools and technologies they prefer, and enables IT teams to ensure their websites are fast and secure at all times.”
– HubSpot
In this blog article my main focus is going to be on the features that CMS Hub offers marketers. Some features for developers and IT teams will be addressed shortly. HubSpot offers two different versions of CMS Hub, CMS Hub Professional for €280/month and CMS Hub Enterprise for €830/month.
Features for Marketers
CMS Hub Professional (and Enterprise) lets you create and manage website pages with as much or as little help from developers as you would like. The webpages can be built by developers using flexible themes and content structures or completely without developers using Drag and Drop page editing and pre-made and customisable themes, templates and modules. Or something in between, like developers creating customised building blocks for marketing team to assemble the website from.
CMS Hub also gives you the possibility to make different kinds of pages which are Website pages, Landing pages and Blog pages. It also gives you tools to optimise the pages for search engines and to analyse the performance of the pages. It is also important to know that CMS Hub and HubSpot CRM system work together seamlessly.
Themes
Themes control the overall design of the website. They can be created or acquired from HubSpot’s asset marketplace. A theme contains a set of templates, all with the same branding.
Templates
Every page published in the CMS is created using a template. But the relationship between templates and pages is not one-to-one, it’s one-to-many. One template can be used to create dozens of different pages. The templates can also be created or acquired from asset marketplace. The template works as a basis for the pages, but can be easily modified with modules.
Modules
Modules are the building blocks of templates. They are easy to add move and manage using the Drag and Drop editor. There are default modules, theme modules and custom modules.
Default modules are included by default in CMS and are standard elements that you would expect see on a website, such as images, CTA’s, tables, text boxes and forms.
Theme modules are modules that are designed specifically to work within your theme. They are built by the theme’s developer and will be included with your theme and match the styles you’ve set for your theme.
Custom modules are built by developers for a specific purpose, such as a custom team member module or banner image module. These types of modules are great for more complex or specialised elements of your website that aren’t served by a default module. They have a ton of flexibility and can be customised by a developer or downloaded from the asset marketplace.
Drag and Drop editor
In the drag and drop page editor, you can also add modules, remove modules, and alter the layout of your pages with just a few simple clicks. So, while templates are the basis for the layout of your pages, they’re completely customisable.
Search Engine Optimisation
As a marketer, you want to get your company’s name out there. You want people to know about all the amazing products and services you offer. But even if you’re publishing content online, it won’t have an impact if nobody can find it. This is where SEO comes in. According to Brafton's study, 95% of search traffic goes to websites on the first page of search engine results.
Here is a great article by HubSpot on CMS Hub search engine optimisation properties.
Analysing the performance
When trying to grow a business’ presence online, tracking and analysing your website’s performance over time is critical. Reporting alone won’t improve your website’s performance, but it will equip you with the information you need to make data-driven decisions. With the right combination of performance analysis and website optimisation strategies, what gets measured can be improved and the performance of your website can be boosted. Tools like traffic source analytics, page performance metrics and a CRM timeline of site activity help you identify opportunities and fix actions that have a negative impact.
Working together in HubSpot Ecosystem
CMS Hub is backed by the HubSpot CRM. This gives you the ability to personalise your content at scale. It also integrates seamlessly with marketing, sales and Service Hub, as well as the extensive list of CMS Apps within the HubSpot Ecosystem. For example, if you already have separate CRM software to manage your contacts, such as Salesforce, it can be integrated into,HubSpot’s platform.
CMS Hub also works together with HubDB. Using HubDB, it is possible to create webpages that reference content within your Datatable. If you change the content in your Datatable, the information will be updated wherever you reference the Datatable – across your entire website. CMS Hub also makes it easy to manage content across multiple languages.
Short overview on CMS Hub Enterprise features
CMS Hub Enterprise naturally comes with all the features presented in CMS Hub professional. I will shortly cover the most important features that CMS Hub Enterprise has to offer.
Serverless Functions
Web apps such as calculators, online forms and event registration systems usually rely on server-side code. Web apps make up for a delightful website experience, but managing servers is one of the biggest pain points of running a website.
With serverless functions in CMS Hub Enterprise, it is possible to build powerful web apps to extend the functionality and dynamics of your website. And your developing team never has to worry about managing servers. Serverless functions become even more powerful when combined with memberships and HubDB.
Memberships
Creating personalized content in 2020 means providing each site visitor with content tailored specifically for them. This means for example providing site visitors with tailored recommendations based on their previous interactions with your company or providing best customers access to premium content. This is all is possible with memberships in CMS Hub Enterprise.
Activity Logs
When you’re a small business, you might have a small team and it is easy to keep track on who is making changes to your website. But as you grow and add more and more people to your team, keeping track of who has publishing access and monitoring website updates as they happen becomes nearly impossible. Activity logs in CMS Hub Enterprise lets you see exactly what changes are happening across your entire site.
Brand Domains
As your business grows, it is pretty common that you need multiple websites, for example you expand into two business lines. CMS Hub Enterprise offers two brand domains and the possibility to buy more when needed. With brand domains you can host multiple domains using one CMS system.
CMS Hub Summed Up
Managing your website with CMS Hub is very easy, but it comes with all properties and features growing business or even a big enterprise needs from their CMS system. CMS Hub lets you focus on what really matters – the experience you are providing your customers on your website. To see what growing businesses or big enterprises like Coca-Cola have accomplished with CMS Hub, check out HubSpot’s Inspire website. Here is also a good blog article by Jonathan Stanis from Weidert Group, comparing CMS hub to the most common CMS systems.
If you are interested in making your content management easy and effective book a meeting with our team! We have year's of experience in HubSpot CMS as well as the latest insights in how to align it with marketing and sales.
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