With literally thousands of content management systems on the market today, starting the process of researching one for your business can seem daunting. That's exactly why we spent the last couple weeks diving deep into the HubSpot Content Management System with web design guru, Luke Summerfield—Go to Market Lead, Web and CMS at HubSpot.
In this blog, we take a look at the remaining features included in the CMS, discuss HubSpot pricing and some common concerns.
This is the final post from our website series. If you haven't already, be sure to check out our previous conversations highlighting it's history, future, migration process, and other features and benefits.
More HubSpot CMS Features
We covered this first list below in 'The HubSpot Content Management System: Features and Benefits - Part 1'
- Design Tools, Files & Media Management
- Templates, Modules & HubSpot CMS Asset Marketplace
- HubDB - For creating dynamic content experiences that are marketer friendly to manage and edit
- Marketer-Friendly Drag-and-Drop Publishing Tools, Lead Capture & A/B Testing for Website Pages, Blogs, Landing Pages, Forms, and CTAs
- Personalization & Smart Content
This next set of features was covered in, 'The HubSpot Content Management System: Features and Benefits - Part 2'
- Advanced Optimization, SEO & Content Strategy Tools
- Reporting & Website Analytics
- Content Staging
- Local Development Tools
- Growth-Driven Design
This last list is what we'll be covering now:
- All features of HubSpot CRM
- Technical Support
- Pop-up & Native Forms
- AD Management
- List Segmentation
- Mobile Optimization & AMP Blog Optimization
- Standard SSL certificate
- Google Search Console Integration
- Custom Domains
- User Management
- 99.99% Uptime, Hosting, Speed, Security Monitoring & Threat Detection
- Content Delivery Network
- Conversational Bots and Live Chat
All Features of the HubSpot CRM
The HubSpot CRM is invaluable.
It not only collects contacts for you when visitors fill out forms on your website, but it tracks every interaction the contact has post collection with you or your website and adds it to their very own, personalized contact record timeline.
This recorded timeline includes A LOT of default properties, any emails, social media interactions, calls, meetings, notes and content downloads and the ability to create custom properties if needed.
You'll always know what the last communications were with every single contact in your database, helping you to pick up right where you left off with ease and nurture them further down the buyers journey.
Technical Support
In order to keep HubSpot's free products free, their phone and email support are limited to paying customers. If you're a free user, help is still available in the HubSpot Knowledge Base, HubSpot Community (staffed by other HubSpot users, partners, and employees) and you can use Twitter.
If you're a paying customer, you have access to the support options below.
- Instant Chat: They typically respond within minutes
- Submit a Ticket: They strive to respond within one working day
- Email: They strive to respond within one working day
- Phone Support: Support engineers are standing by to help 24/7 (This is HUGE and Luke agreed)
"24 hrs a day, seven days a week, you have access to a support team all around the world that actually takes phone calls. These people are able to help as much as they can, do research for you, and if they can't answer your question, they will put you in touch with someone that can. So when you look at the price tag, this is something to take into consideration because with 'free' or 'low-priced' options, you wont get this."
—Luke Summerfield
Pop-up & Native Forms
The foundation of your inbound marketing machine.
Use HubSpot forms to gather information about your visitors and contacts by offering educational content, case studies, demos and more.
With HubSpot's pop-up forms, you can catch people's attention even quicker with additional valuable offers.
The types of pop-up forms to choose from include:
- Pop-up form
- Drop-down banners
- Slide-in boxes
Ads Management
The free HubSpot Ads Management tool allows you to create and manage up to $1000 per month with two accounts.
You can compare your performance on between networks, add leads directly into HubSpot, and know exactly which contacts are interacting with your ads.
List Segmentation
List segmentation in HubSpot can help you organize your contacts and leads into specific groups so you can communicate with them in a personalized way. You can base the list on numerous actions and characteristics like:
- Psychographics
- Demographics
- Industry
- Company size
- Webpage views
- Number of downloads of your content
- Demos
Mobile Optimization & AMP Blog Optimization
AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a mobile-specific page format that loads almost instantly on a mobile device. To load the content quickly, the AMP version of your blog won't load any Javascript files, stylesheets, HubSpot forms, head HTML, or footer HTML. When reviewing your blog post performance, you'll see a breakdown of views for the AMP version and standard version of the post.
Standard SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate enables you to build trust with people visiting your site, and ensure their information is safe. The visual cues on an SSL enabled website clearly shows the visitor you value their safety and protecting information from potential hackers.
In addition, Google now factors SSL into their algorithm and publically stated that a website with SSL-enabled may outrank another site without SSL, if all other factors are the same.
*You get an SSL with all Marketing Professional and Enterprise subscriptions and when you purchase the HubSpot CMS.
Google Search Console Integration
The integration with Google Search Console allows you to bring data from Google searches into your HubSpot SEO tool. The HubSpot / Google Search Console Integration is a free tool that can be used for any website in your Google account. The metrics from the integration include the number of views and clicks your website gets for specific search terms. You can also see the average position of where your website shows up on a Google search results page.
Custom Domains
Connect your domain to HubSpot and edit your DNS records so that your landing pages, website pages, email, and blog posts can be accessed by visitors on the web.
Below are the types of domains you can connect:
- Primary: a subdomain used by default for hosting the selected content type(s) in HubSpot.
- Secondary: a subdomain available for hosting content in HubSpot, but not set as primary for any of your content types (Marketing Hub Enterprise only).
- Redirect: this subdomain isn't used to host any content, but automatically redirects to another primary domain connected in HubSpot.
- Email Sending: the subdomain you're connecting will be used to add another layer of authentication to your HubSpot emails. Learn more about how to connect an email sending domain.
User Management
You can have add and edit users permissions, create new users, customize user permissions, and remove users from your HubSpot account.
99.99% Uptime, Hosting, Security, Speed, Monitoring & Threat Detection
HubSpot takes prides in offering top of the line security features so your website will always be safe and perform at it's best.
In addition, HubSpot has been hard at work to improve the CMS’ speed performance, and they've made some major improvements. Below are just a few of the areas that make the HubSpot CMS’ page performance competitive with any other CMS on the market today.
- Automatic Image Compression and Optimization: As the CMS renders a page, HubSpot automatically resizes images for you.
- Minified Javascript: HubSpot automatically remove any unnecessary spaces, line breaks and comments from your Design Manager JavaScript files to ensure the quickest delivery and parsing of your JavaScript files.
- Combined CSS Files: HubSpot automatically minifies and combines all of the included CSS files on a single page into one CSS file. This results in minimal HTTP requests and the speediest delivery and parsing of CSS on your website.
- HTTP/2: is a replacement for how HTTP is expressed “on the wire.” The focus of the protocol is on performance; end-user perceived latency, network and server resource usage. All SSL traffic on HubSpot hosted websites is served using HTTP/2.
- Page Caching: HubSpot automatically caches pages and files on both the server and browser level to ensure the speediest delivery of all page assets to your website visitors.
Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The benefits include:
- Speeding up your website
- Protects against outages
Conversational Bots and Live Chat
When you purchase the HubSpot CMS, you get live chat, team email, and an easy-to-use chatbot builder to have personalized conversations with leads and customers.
HOT TIP: This is a pretty unique offering and the HubSpot CMS is one of the only content management systems that comes with conversational bots and live chat.
HubSpot Pricing for the CMS
Now that we've gotten through all the HubSpot CMS features in 3 blogs, we agree that it's pricing is an awesome deal.
The price for the HubSpot CMS is $300 per month and again a recap of all features are below:
- Design Tools, Files & Media Management
- Templates, Modules & HubSpot CMS Asset Marketplace
- HubDB
- Drag-and-Drop Publishing Tools, Lead Capture & A/B Testing for Website Pages, Blogs, Landing Pages, Forms, and CTAs
- Personalization & Smart Content
- Advanced Optimization, SEO, & Content Strategy Tools
- Reporting & Website Analytics
- Content Staging
- Local Development Tools
- Growth-Driven Design
- All features of HubSpot CRM
- Technical Support
- AD Management
- List Segmentation
- Mobile Optimization & and AMP Blog Optimization
- Standard SSL certificate
- Google Search Console Integration
- Custom Domains
- 99.99% Uptime, Hosting, Speed, Security, Monitoring & Threat Detection
- User Management
- Content Delivery Network
- Conversational Bots and Live Chat
Common Concerns with the HubSpot CMS
Common Concern #1: Price
This is where Luke had some more insightful analysis to share.
"When you start to compare the HubSpot CMS pricing with other similar options, its actually quite competitive."
—Luke Summerfield
He reminded us that if you are looking at professional or enterprise level website platforms that are going to have the ability to not only help your businesses grow—but grow with your business—you are no longer looking at the 'free' or 'low-priced' options on the market.
These types of businesses need a more substantial level of features and benefits, hosting, security, integration and plugins, and typically a developer or website management agency to ensure everything is staying up-to-date and safe, and all these fees start to add up.
Common Concern #2: Proprietary System
Luke said the second most common concern about the HubSpot CMS, is the fact that it's proprietary software, also called 'closed-source' software, meaning that it is copyrighted and has limits against use, distribution and modification.
"People are always worried about getting locked in or stuck, and frankly it's a valid concern."
—Luke Summerfield
But Luke reminded us that no matter what system you move to and from, it's going to be a lot of work, regardless if it's open or closed, proprietary or not.
With that said, HubSpot has been creating more and more API's in the last couple years, so the system is much more open than it use to be. You can pull information in and out, back things up, move stuff around, etc.
In addition, HubSpot has content and data exporting features, allowing you to export things like:
- Landing pages, website pages and blogs
- Anything from your file manager
- URL mappings
- Sitemap
- Analytics
- Contacts, companies, deals and tickets
- Contact-based workflows
- Custom reports
- Dashboards
- Marketing email analytics
- CTA analytics
- Page and blog analytics
- Lists
- Tasks
- Sales data
- Sales documents
- Customer feedback
- Social posts
- Form submission data
"It's really much easier than people, you're not getting married or stuck for life if you want to change platforms and take your website with you."
—Luke Summerfield
Conclusion
Again, we want to thank Luke Summerfield for this amazing, in depth chat about the HubSpot content management system's history, future, features, benefits, pricing and common concerns.
We now have officially given you everything you need to know about the HubSpot CMS.
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