Building a Community with HubSpot’s Private Content Tool - Part 2 🏡💻

A big emerging theme from INBOUND 2022 has been Community-led Growth being the next big wave. 🌊

Both Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan made it a point during their keynote to speak about the importance of strategizing and building a community for your business.

HubSpot has created the perfect tool to customize a gated, private user portal to host your community on. Today’s video highlights this tool and how it can be implemented in your HubSpot portal! This is part two of a two part sequence on the topic. Haven't seen part one?

In this HubSpot Tips & Tricks video, we'll discuss the private content tool, a feature available in HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise at the time of this publishing. 

Disclaimer: HubSpot & INBOUND own all rights to the INBOUND clips included in the video.

TRANSCRIPT

I've tested it out, and it works really well. So this is the master list. It's the community members. Any of yes, and Community Persona is known, that's going to be attached to every single page that you've created for that user portal under this advanced option setting. So we save that and we publish it, that fires off the email. The user experience from one gated page to another gated page is very clean, they don't have to sign in again. It's just like a normal website experience.

So that's essentially the flow for a user creation, how they become a member of that list, and then how you set up those lists on all of the pages, how you set up all the settings. Then you need to delete the user. So and you may or may not want that to be possible, but in our use case, we did. So we have a profile page where a user can go in, they can update their information. We're trying to build in a profile picture functionality, [a place where] they can request a new password, or they can delete their account. And essentially, the delete my account functionality is triggered by a CTA. So we've created a CTA called delete my account, we've coded that into the page, we're working on adding in almost like a 2FA where they have to like, you know, confirm that they want to delete their account by typing something in or right now we have a gated by a pop up. But we're still looking to improve that.

And then this is a new feature in HubSpot to delete a contact. But this is necessary in order to really control this user flow. So what's going to happen is: this allows for the contact to then re-register. But if you did not delete the contact, it doesn't allow them to re register. So you have to actually delete the entire contact from your CRM. One of the things that we're going to be doing before that though, is you can connect your Google Sheet integration. And then when somebody deletes their account, you can populate all their data into a Google sheet before you delete their record, so that you at least a capture a static record of everybody who's ever deleted their account. If you ever need to upload that back into HubSpot, or go back and find somebody’s record, you'd then be able to do so. That is pretty much everything there is about the private content.

Incorporating Smart Rules into Private Content

The other thing that is really cool about it is once you have that page setup, you can then come in here and you can then add smart rules. So we again are going to base that off list membership. And then we can use any of our persona lists. So we can say is any of persona one, persona two, persona three, and persona four. And then you can come in here and you can edit the content. So putting Hello first name, then you could customize all the content for persona one, you can then switch over to persona two. Persona two would see different content than persona one, and so forth. So that's another really cool functionality you can add. With the smart content, you can also use personalization tokens. So any of the data points that you keep on your contacts or your companies, you can then display that back to them. So yeah, if you have this connected to other systems, you can display stats. The possibilities of this are pretty much endless, you could probably create a forum, I don't know exactly how that would work. But you may be able to create a system where users can connect with other users, they can get access to different products that you might offer, the things that you can do with private content is pretty wild.

So I hope this got some people's minds stirring and thinking about some ways that you could use this. Again, this is a huge, huge topic that's coming out of INBOUND, and they've created the perfect tool for it. So I figured that I would shed a little bit of light on this tool because it's something that I've become very familiar with over the last several months. And some of the features and functionalities are just mind blowing. And it's really, really cool what we're able to build. So please drop all your thoughts, your comments or questions or concerns in the comments below. I really appreciate everybody's continued engagement and I hope you find the content useful. Thank you very much. I hope everybody who's attending INBOUND has a great day, final day of sessions.