One of the most important decisions you have to make before building a website is to chose where to build it. Would you use a traditional CMS or should you go for a CMS hub for your digital marketing? The latter is a more specialized option of the Content Optimization System (COS). The thing is, we need to explain the basic differences between the two types of CMS. This way it will be easier for you to decide what to go for. In this HubSpot CMS Review, we’ll talk about the purpose of the system, its benefits, and features.
The very purpose of a Content Management System (CMS) is to enable non- developers to generate and publish their content. As these CMS platforms evolve, they make things even easier by adding more numerous features to help you accomplish any purpose.
HubSpot CMS Review: Overview
Traditional CMS vs CMS Hub
The focus of traditional CMS is to let people manage their websites with little to no development experience. All that is needed is for you to create your content, open the system, and follow the instructions. With that being said, WordPress is the most powerful and popular CMS with a reliable user experience. It offers an infinite number of plugins, features, templates. It fits everyone’s budget so if you don’t need a lot of traffic for your website, it could save you money.
For example, if you just post once a week, leveraging a traditional CMS might be right for you. In fact, having way too many tools might even slow the load time for your website which can be damaging to your views. This requires you to think carefully when you install a new plugin.
In short, for smaller businesses and blogs that don’t aim at too much traffic, traditional CMS will fit perfectly and you won’t have to pay for features you don’t actually need. Please keep in mind, however, that when your business grows and starts demanding more management, the traditional CMS becomes somewhat restrictive.
This is when you might start considering using HubSpot COS
If you produce content at least twice a week and target more traffic, investing in a monthly subscription to handle your marketing is more worth it. With more content, it gets even more worth it, as most of the functions that are essential to online content promotion are automated.
The HubSpot CMS is specially designed for marketing purposes to aid content creators, marketers, and eCommerce businesses. Its specialty is to capture leads, report traffic data, analytics, and boost sales.
With all of this in mind, let’s start with the HubSpot CMS Review and find out is HubSpot the right system for you.
Features
The platform offers a user-friendly experience alongside many tools for automation, so I’m going to go through the most important ones.
- A/B Testing
A/B testing of web pages allows you to test two versions of a page with the same URL. This way you could receive the data in which one performs better with your audience. It works like this: when people visit the page’s URL, half of this audience will see the first version of the page, while the other half- the second variation. You will be able to receive the data of which version performs better by comparison in terms of engagement, conversion rate, click rate and etc.
- SEO Assistant
The success of your online presence relies on the combination of utilized tools and plugins with your strategy. This is why the platform scans all your pages and suggests multiple ways to improve the rankings of each page.
HubSpot’s assistance in terms of integrated tips actually helps you complete the right fields while building your page to get it more Google- optimized.
- Customer Service Integration
In short, the platform offers an easy solution to connect with your customers. The features include customer feedback by measuring their experience and with that knowledge help, you improve it. You can also keep track of your customers’ requests, so you could organize your priorities.
- Analytics
There is built-in Google analytics which capabilities will measure how well your pages are doing. You can have a look at your search engine ranking, channel traffic, session time, campaign success, and more.
- Hosting
Hosting is a standard feature so you won’t need to worry about sourcing it. You can create and host AIO platforms.
- Ad Management
The features include the ability to connect your ad accounts so you could start creating relevant ads for every stage of your viewer’s experience.
The ad management is enabled across multiple networks right from the builder. This way you could create custom audiences to target easily.
Advantages
Let’s have a look at the key advantages of the platform.
- Smart Content
HubSpot CMS delivers targeted content to specific groups of people amongst your audience. Its configuration is based on either the customer’s journey in each stage or your contact list. This way you can put custom and specific messages for new visitors or repeat customers based on needs.
- Customization
As in most solutions on the market, the platform is beginner- friendly and you don’t need to have design experience. HubSpot has a custom template builder that gives complete freedom to customize and manipulate the templates and layout. The drag-and-drop functionality of the builder makes it even easier to customize the layout, while the style manager enables you to make changes to the font, styles, and color without any knowledge of CSS.
Surely, if you have coding experience, you could take full advantage of that freedom and tweak the layouts as you feel like it.
- Responsiveness
This goes without saying. More than 605 users access websites from their mobile devices so responsiveness is an absolute must. The great news is, you or your developer won’t need to manually code the site to make it responsive as the platform already does it automatically.
- Speed
Google includes the speed of the website in the search algorithm, so it’s essential to have faster page loading. It also improves your SEO scores, which is quite beneficial to your traffic. Currently, HubSpot CMS is first in the rankings in terms of speed, compared to other CMS such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.
- SEO Coaching
As I mentioned in the main features of HubSpot, the AIO platform goes a step further with its SEO tools by giving recommendations to help you optimize your pages with the right keywords and tools. It helps you improve rankings and compare them to your competitors.
- Analytics
You will also receive suggestions to grow your marketing efforts by tracking your traffic, performance, potential leads, and suggesting new better-performing keywords, CTAs, internal links, etc.
- User- Friendly
Since the platform is created especially for marketers, it’s only natural to offer a fairly easy learning curve without the need for developing knowledge. In short, it’s non-techy and allows you to get things done easily without even touching the back-end. In terms of the SEO and analytics tools, they tend to be completely intuitive and logically built.
- Support
You have a lot of options in terms of customer support.
You could chat with service reps based in the US that could give you a hand in case you run into a problem and have no luck with your research for a solution. Especially for more complicated technical aspects.
Next is the HubSpot forum support with a pretty enormous community of users and experts.
Disadvantages
It’s only fair to list the things that might be a dealbreaker, depending on your workflow or your requirements in general. These are the downsides of HubSpot CMS you should keep in mind.
- HubL
For developers. The platform uses a language developed by HubSpot, HubL. In case you will prefer to take advantage of the customization by coding by hand, instead of using the editor, you will have to get familiar with a new coding language. It’s important to add, HubL doesn’t offer the same customization level of PHP, for example.
- Search
HubSpot uses the Google search instead of a built-in search function.
- Database Integration Support
The platform utilizes its own database, so should you need to pull information from a database into your website, it won’t be possible.
- Closed- Source
This one is an advantage for some and a disadvantage for others but it needs to be mentioned. Basically, you pay each month for a website that HubSpot owns, technically. However, HubSpot will also take care of it, update it, secure and maintain it for you.
How much does it cost?
Unlike traditional CMS solutions, HubSpot appears pricy with the cheapest option of $400 per month plus a $1000 onboarding fee. For all customer features, you might also want to consider another marketing package. Those come with monthly fees of anywhere from $50 a month with a $600 onboarding fee) to all the way up to $3200 a month with a $5,000 onboarding fee.
It is true that HubSpot CMS is more expensive than most of the options out there, however, depending on the scale of your project, it’s cost-effective and the returned value makes it worth the price. In fact, the tool combines content creator, content manager, customer lifecycle teacher, and marketing manager.
HubSpot CMS Review: In Conclusion
We’ll end this HubSpot CMS Review with this conclusion: From a marketing perspective, the platform is amongst the 10 best CMS platforms for digital marketing in 2020. This is thanks to its powerful built-in marketing tools for SEO, analytics, and A/B testing. HubSpot CMS is easy to use and requires no technical background. The platform is specially designed with a marketing angle in mind. It’s an ideal choice for marketers and content creatives who aim at huge traffic.