What I find is that at many companies, technical administrators are the ones selecting a CMS, whereas marketing professionals and sales reps are the ones who'll be using the CMS and working on the website. All too often, marketing departments end up spending valuable time setting up complex systems, or trying to find data and information in a maze of technical applications and tools. A Content Management System (CMS) should in fact support your business by offering comprehensive insights and easy management.
The question I want to answer for you in this blog is: How can you, as a marketing department, contribute to the growth of the business by hosting your website within HubSpot? As a Customer Experience Consultant, I've had the opportunity to set up the HubSpot CMS and website for a number of different companies. In this blog, I want to take you into the world of the HubSpot CMS: when is it suitable for your organisation, and when is it definitely not? Let’s dive in!
HubSpot's CMS is suitable for companies who use their website as a 24/7 sales machine and where the marketing department should be in charge of the website – not the technical department. Having this responsibility means that marketers must be able to be self-manage the website.
HubSpot's CMS also works well when managing a multilingual website. Marketers can easily publish alternatives of the same page in different languages by clicking a button and selecting the desired language. What makes HubSpot user-friendly is that it allows you to create and manage all language alternatives for a particular page from one page in the CMS. Within that page, you can switch to the various languages for a clear overview of all your website pages.
Why is this such a big deal? Every marketer knows that a French customer may have different wishes, or may be susceptible to different arguments, than a customer in the UK. With this feature, you can adapt the website for each country, focusing on the user experience, culture, and different markets. By creating an alternative, you can change the content of that particular page, since they're stand-alone pages. While they're independent in terms of content, they're still technically linked – important in terms of your SEO. This way, you can tell Google that the same page exists in a different language, and the URL at which it can be found.
In HubSpot, it is possible to work in modules, with the website being a large collection of separate building blocks. Every element is an independent building block in itself – things such as an image with text, a form with a photo, a header, a piece of text, etc. You build a website page in the HubSpot CMS by placing all those separate elements on a page in any way you like.
By adding modules and using drag and drop, you can link the building blocks to each other in any number of ways, including adjusting the order. And within the modules you have the option to change things around. You can post a video instead of an image, add or remove a link to a background page, or change the background colour.
Tip: Before you get started on actually building a website page, it is essential that you first decide on the tactics and strategy for your website.
The HubSpot CMS scores extremely high when it comes to user-friendliness. HubSpot is committed to making your life as a non-technical website operator as easy as possible. This means that all things that have technical implications – such as creating an A/B page, personalising content, or publishing a page in other languages – are simply a matter of selecting the option, adding the content, and publishing, all in your HubSpot CMS. HubSpot handles all technical implications in the background, so that your website always complies with the correct code set-up and the guidelines for search engines, and performs well in terms of loading time and user experience.
The ultimate goal of marketing professionals and sales reps is not to build a high-performing website, but to build a high-performing sales machine. Your website is your trade show booth that never closes. Your 24/7 sales rep who never sleeps. Your website can talk to your customers at all times to help them find a good solution.
And because the HubSpot CMS is built for marketers and sales professionals, HubSpot puts them first when it comes to the development of the HubSpot CMS platform. Because, let's face it – as a marketer, aren't you the mastermind with the right ideas? Make sure, therefore, that you can work completely independently without interference from gatekeepers and IT – which is exactly what the HubSpot CMS delivers.
If your company's technical administrator is still interfering with the CMS and the website, it is time that you – the marketer – take charge and start working with the CMS and the website independently. You're the marketer with those great ideas, after all, so show them!
Treat yourself and book a free CMS consultation. This way you'll find out whether the HubSpot CMS is a good match for your company.