Content Management System - The ultimate Guide

Unless you define and specify the objectives you'd like your website to fulfil, you won't get the benefits you hope for.

It's a bit like an untethered boat, aimlessly bobbing on the waves in the middle of a lake. With a bit of guidance and effort, that boat could take you to where you need to go.

Traditional thinking about what your website should be:

• An online brochure of your company.
• A necessary output. Everybody does it!
• The place to tell visitors what your company does.

Modern thinking about what your website should be:

• A sales engine for lead generation.
• An investment that generates a positive ROI.
• The place where you can answer questions from your website visitors.

Is your website representative of the more traditional objectives? Would you like to transform it into a lead generating tool?An attractive platform where you can answer your visitors' questions and show them how you can help them achieve their goals?

The buying behaviour has changed radically in recent years!

Purchasing behaviour has changed dramatically with the rise of the Internet. Every day, millions of potential customers search the world wide web for products or solutions, find information on websites, in blogs or use social media to ask questions and solve problems. The customer decides when, where, and what he buys.

As a result, we’ve seen a continuous shift from a supplier to a buyer's market in recent years.

• According to a study by DigitasLBi, 87% of customers in today's networked and digital world research online before making a purchase. 

You ask Google. Google always has a solution, whether it is a website, a blog article, an ebook or an informative explanatory video. Today's online user learns more and more and has access to detailed information before he or she actually deals with the topic "buying".

• According to SiriusDecisions, 70% of the purchase process is completed before the customer has had contact with the vendor.

For this reason, companies must adapt their marketing strategy to the new buying behaviour. This altered buying process led to the invention of "inbound marketing".

In contrast to outbound marketing, inbound marketing aims to attract the attention of potential customers with informative and relevant content and to provide prospects with additional information that offers a targeted solution to their problems or added value. Summarised in one sentence: It is no longer a matter of chasing potential customers with classic advertising such as direct mail, media placement, trade fairs, print publications and telephone campaigns, but of attracting them with content that is unique and of value to them. Time to market is the crucial factor in this context.

Lead generation engine

In simple terms, your website is extremely important. 

Today, interested parties can find your company online – or your website gives the first impression that is often most crucial. It is your most important representative in the digital world, your always available sales team -– a lead generation engine!

• Are you generally satisfied with your website?
• Does the website do what your company expects of it?
• Does it represent your company visually and effectively?
• Is your CMS easy to use, so is any form of content easy to manage?

If you haven't updated your website for more than a few months, it's probably about time to rethink the strategy and goals of the website. Some of the areas to consider:

• Website performance / loading time
• Optimisation for mobile devices
• SEO (search engine optimisation)
• Security
• CMS and hosting fees

Next, we will look at the CMS. The CMS, or Content Management System, is the infrastructure behind your website. It is where the design is defined and edited, the content updates are done, the forms are created and managed, and much more. 

The situation can also be very different with CMS. 

Typical characteristics of a traditional CMS:

• The marketing team cannot simply make updates.
• Security is an addition.
• Design changes are difficult without an agency.
• The system orientation is high, server and software updates.
• The financial expenditure is enormous.

Typical characteristics of the HubSpot CMS Hub:

• A high degree of time to market is guaranteed by the simplicity.
• High flexibility for the marketing team.
• Security is already integrated (standard SSL).
• Design changes can be made easily and without an agency, via drag and drop editing.
• High customer orientation, system scalability, software updates etc. are included.
• Search engine optimisation (SEO) support.
• CRM integration – personalised output.
• Content staging.
• Investment in growth with measurable ROI.

Source: HubSpot

Let's go back to the original question: "What should your website do for your company? 

Your answer to this question revolves around the growth of your business. In other words, is your website helping to build brand awareness, drive lead generation, increase online sales, be used for customer training and optimise service? Then it makes sense to work with a CMS like the HubSpot CMS Hub because it helps you achieve your business goals – it’s easier and more effective!

With the HubSpot CMS Hub, you can create, manage, optimize and most importantly, statistically evaluate all your website activities in one place. And because it's a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, you don't have to worry about server infrastructure, such as operating system and software patches, backups and server performance, PCI compliance, security or backups.

In a nutshell: The HubSpot CMS Hub is the CMS solution for "Less Pain, More Gain!”

There are currently around 300 different CMS solutions on the market. This does not make the choice easier. Which of them suits you best depends on many factors. Many CMS systems are like an iceberg. What floats above the water’s surface looks clear and easy to control at first glance. But the really important topics like hosting, maintenance, security, performance and much more are hidden under the water surface, are massive, extensive and not always realisable without additional software. Therefore, you should always ask yourself:

• Do I want to deal with the invisible part of the iceberg daily? 
• Is this part of my core business?
• Do I spend my available time on things that I enjoy and, above all, things which emphasise my strengths?
• Am I autonomous enough, or do I depend on third-party services?
• What about time to market?

To help you make the right CMS choice, we've collected the essential factors that will affect your decision:

• Hosting, Maintenance and Security

• Design

• Marketing Analytics

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

• More Content Tools and Features

• Development

And the winner is HubSpot

HubSpot was ranked number one in both market presence and customer satisfaction according to the G2 Crowd's Grid for web content management software with a total score of 89 out of 100.

G2 Crowd, the world's leading enterprise software review platform, releases its Web Content Management Grid once a year. Based on thousands of reviews of the G2 Crowd website, the Grid ranks the world's leading Web Content Management (WCM) systems by both customer satisfaction and market presence.

HubSpot achieved an average of 4.4 of 5 stars. HubSpot had already been named number 1 in customer satisfaction in the G2 Crowd's Winter 2016 Grid for Web Content Management.

There are numerous USPs like price, usability, fast implementation cycle etc. that recommend the CMS Hub. But the most important one from our point of view is that the CMS Hub is an integrated part of the all-in-one inbound marketing solution of HubSpot. Thus the CMS Hub can directly access data from the CRM Hub and provides a high degree of personalisation along the customer journey.

Today, companies attract customers by offering them a significantly better customer experience than their competitors.

• If this customer experience can be personalised based on CRM data, it is unique.
• HubSpot is therefore unbeatable as an all-in-one solution for inbound marketing with the CMS Hub – in terms of investment and usability.

It is important to understand that the CMS Hub should be used when digital marketing is being talked about in the simplest possible way – time to market – and the goal should be traffic, leads (conversion) and growth. A lead generation engine, that’s it!

Source: HubSpot

The HubSpot Content Management System is basically built on the traditional CMS infrastructure. This has been enhanced by integrating HubSpot's CRM, marketing, sales and customer service tools to go far beyond just content management. These tools and additional features include:

• Design tools, file and media management.
• HubSpot CMS Asset Marketplace for custom modules and templates.
• HubDB to create dynamic content experiences that are easy for marketers to manage and edit.
• Instruments of local development.
• Growth-driven design.
• World-class hosting in terms of speed, security and reliability.
• Marketer-friendly drag-and-drop publishing tools for any content.
• Personalisation and smart content.
• Advanced tools for optimisation, SEO and content strategy.
• Reporting and website analysis
• Content staging.
• Integrated with HubSpot CRM.
• Instant chatbots – unique for content management systems. 
• Chat, email, HubSpot community and 24/7 support.

What does the new HubSpot CMS Hub offer for developers?

The HubSpot CMS Hub is designed to improve the user experience of developers working on the website by developing themes and usable templates.

When developers create modules in the CMS Hub that are repeatable and editable, marketing professionals can make changes at any time. This relieves developers of the gatekeeper role for the website, reducing frustration for all parties involved and allowing everyone to focus on the work where their individual strengths can be brought to bear.

Design tools, file and media management

HubSpot's Design Manager combines all the tools needed to create state-of-the-art websites. At the same time, it offers marketers the flexibility they want in content creation.

Tools included in the Design Manager:

• Search function: An area to create and organise your files, templates, modules and folders.
• Layout Editor: A drag-and-drop editor to structure your page, blog, email and system templates.
• Inspector: Here, you can edit the properties of a layout, module or group. 
• Code Editor: An integrated development environment (IDE) for all your front-end code, such as CSS, Javascript or even your own HTML templates.
• Module Editor: Reusable custom modules that you can set up to add advanced functionality to your website that can be managed by non-technical users.
• File Manager: A file hosting system for all assets and media on your website.

Asset Marketplace

HubSpot CMS templates determine the layout, style and function of your pages. HubSpot offers integrated templates from CMS developers – these can be downloaded from the HubSpot marketplace.

Modules are the building blocks of templates. These content blocks, which include images, forms, CTAs, rich text and much more, make up your templates.

HubSpot enables a "one-to-many relationship", which means that the same module can be used for many templates and you can add your templates to many individual pages.

There are three types of modules that can be added to your templates:

• Standard modules: 33 are available for templates in the Design Manager. Each module type can be customised with styling and content options in the Inspector.
• Special Modules: In addition to the standard modules, each type of system template has a special module that can only be added to this type of template. For example, a password request module is only available when creating a password request template.
• User-defined modules: You can create custom-coded modules to add custom or advanced functionality to your blog, pages or emails. The module editor has three editor panels for writing HTML and HubL, CSS and JavaScript.
• Custom modules provide a wide range of functionality so that content can be fully customised within the page, email, or blog editor.

HubDB

HubDB is a way to create dynamic, data-driven content that is easy for marketers to manage, much like a spreadsheet. Data can be retrieved in many different ways, depending on what you want to achieve. You can also retrieve the data externally using the HubDB API or use HubSpot's HubL markup tags to drag data into the CMS.

Local development instruments

With these tools, you can create an entire site locally on your computer, a Staged Site only in your own local environment. So developers can get CMS accounts that are free. It is a sandbox account that includes all CMS features and functions, the CRM and all free tools. It doesn't let you connect the DNS records and go live, but you can still test everything with it.

Growth-driven Design

With its Growth-driven design, HubSpot makes it easy to create and optimise a world-class website that drives business growth.

World-class hosting

• Speed
  Visitors leave websites if they load too slowly. Therefore, HubSpot's CMS is designed to load very quickly. This is made possible by HubSpot's own global Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructure. The CMS optimises image sizes and image compression to make them look good on devices and load quickly.
• Security
  Security breaches have a negative effect. Therefore HubSpot CMS has the SSL certificate directly deposited. The global CDN of HubSpot automatically prevents DDoS attacks. And the Web Application Firewall prevents hackers from accessing data. Furthermore, HubSpot has a security team that constantly monitors the network.
• Reliability
  The availability of HubSpot CMS is 99.999%. Should a data centre ever fail, the system can switch to a redundant system and keep your website up and running.

What does the new HubSpot CMS Hub offer for marketers?

Marketing professionals no longer need to worry about using the technology and can simply log into the CMS without instruction. Whether it's correcting a portfolio page or SEO-optimising a product page, changes can be easily made without having to constantly consult with the developer.

With access to the new tools and assets available in the CMS Hub, marketers can more easily work with developers to create an engaging marketing experience on their site that increases traffic and generates leads.

Marketer-friendly drag-and-drop publishing tools

You can build your website without a developer. Realise your vision with drag-and-drop publishing tools - 100% self-sufficient.

• Websites: They are the cornerstones of your corporate website and should show a comprehensible menu structure.
• Blogs: It has never been easier to create compelling content that educates your audience about your company and its products/services. If required, multiple blogs can be hosted on the same subdomain.
• Landing Pages: Visitors can be converted to leads using forms embedded on these landing pages.
  Forms & Pop-Up Forms: These can be used to collect information about visitors.
• CTAs: A call-to-action is a button to encourage potential customers to take a certain action on your website.
• A/B Tests: This allows all the above-mentioned areas to be tested in detail.

Personalisation and smart content

With smart content and personalisation tokens, HubSpot helps you deliver clever, personalised content tailored to the needs of your customers. In other words, they take into account where a prospect is in the buying process. Or you can deliver content that is targeted to the people who visit your website for the very first time. In principle, all data stored in the CRM for a particular contact can dynamically change the customer experience.  

Advanced tools for optimisation, SEO and content strategy

HubSpot adopted the topic cluster SEO methodology some time ago because search engines today reward websites whose content is organised by 'topics' and not just by 'keywords'. With the content strategy, you can discover topics for Pillar Pages for niche sub-themes. 

The tool displays topic suggestions based on relevance, competition and popularity, and monthly search data. In addition, there is a visual content clustering feature to help you create your internal linking strategy. HubSpot also makes it easy to perform on-page SEO.

When you create blog posts, landing pages, websites and emails, you can access built-in to-do lists that show you exactly how to optimise. No third-party SEO plug-ins are required.

Reporting and website analysis

You can use HubSpot's standard reports to design dashboards for every employee or department in your organisation. These can be the same for everyone or customisable for up to 200 people. So you can focus on the analysis. 

With these reports, you can drill down into any metric from marketing, sales or service tools, any data set from HubSpot CRM or data from any integrated application you use through HubSpot App Marketplace.

You can also create custom reports using HubSpot's library of report templates or create your own custom report using the Reporting Add-On Tools. 

Web analytics tools give you deeper insights into how visitors find and engage with your content and how it converted from visitor to customer.

HubSpot website analytics provides information on activities such as sessions, traffic, engagement, device types, sources and more. The Google Search Console can also be integrated to gather even more data.

Content Staging

HubSpot has a content staging area where you can clone any page of your website and make changes in a staging environment that is not live. 

In this staging environment, you will be given a preview/staging URL that you can share with others to customise the content and make changes before the page is published. Once this process is complete, you can go live with the finished page immediately. 

Integrated with HubSpot CRM

HubSpot's CRM has been selected as Alignable's No. 1 CRM for SMBs. And it integrates with the HubSpot CMS. You can track contact details, create contact lists and track a user on his way from visitor to customer.

Displayed pages, clicks, downloads, funnel stages, contact owners and many other incredibly rich data will help you make effective improvements to a website and really personalise the experience.

The CMS, in combination with the CRM, ensures that you have all your lead and customer data in the same place as your website. You can easily use this data to personalise communication and content through email, your blog, social media channels and more. 

Source: HubSpot

Any organisation can use the CMS Hub. The implementation of the solution is easy, and the handling of the functions is quick to learn thanks to a clear user interface. A website is built up in a structured step-by-step concept – even newcomers can work with it. 

For small and medium-sized websites, the "Professional" version is a good choice; the Enterprise CMS solution is also suitable for very large pages. In particular, companies that are experiencing rapid growth benefit from the simple management of their website and, thanks to marketing automation in conjunction with the website CMS, can act as required at any time. New content can be published quickly and easily, requiring fewer resources for these activities – resources that can be used elsewhere for the core business and further growth. 

You don't have to worry about hosting and maintenance of the CMS, as HubSpot CMS is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. These services are covered by the monthly licence costs for HubSpot use. 

NEW: CMS HUB STARTER

For only 23 EUR / month you get the following features:

SECURITY FOR YOUR WEBSITE

• Premium hosting
• Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Standard SSL certificate
• Web application firewall (WAF)

BUILD YOUR WEBSITE EFFICIENTLY

• Website themes
• Drag-and-drop editor
• Local website development
• App and asset marketplace

LEVERAGE THE FULL PLATFORM

• All free tools
• Live chat
• Forms
• Reporting dashboard

The CMS Hub was developed as a tool for marketing professionals to redesign their own website from scratch and improve marketing best practices. In contrast, the WordPress CMS was originally created as a blogging platform. Therefore WordPress requires a huge technical stack of other platforms to cover the marketing basics – at HubSpot, all this is already available in the HubSpot CMS and the Marketing Hub.

The coding in WordPress must first be learned – time that marketers can better use to deal with potential leads. Website updates and corrections by developers can also be time consuming and inconvenient for both marketers and developers. 

We have found that marketing teams using WordPress often rely on these technologies as well:

• Email tools like MailChimp, iContact or Constant Contact.
• Social media tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social or Buffer.
• Link trackers like bit.ly or Google UTM.
• Separate analysis functions like Google, Crazy Egg or Hotjar.
• Video hosting sites like Vimeo, YouTube or Wisita.
• Individual ad management platforms such as Google, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Especially when a company is growing rapidly, there are more important things for marketers to do than jump back and forth between the backend of their website and countless other separate platforms. These plug-ins and additional features slow down the website, which damages search engine optimisation and discourages potential leads. We, therefore, recommend that you prefer to use software that covers everything: HubSpot's CMS and Marketing Hubs.

Always remember this question: Do you want to inform with your web presence, or do you want to generate revenue?

To inform:

• Integration into surrounding systems, i.e. the CMS is mainly used as a presentation layer.
• The CMS Hub can also do this, but it is not the primary requirement.

To generate revenue (Growth):

• This concerns everything that has to do with digital marketing: This is where the CMS Hub comes into play, as it is geared towards goals such as increasing traffic, generating leads (conversion) and growth. Traditional Enterprise CMS solutions do not achieve this without a significant increase in effort and a significant delay in time to market. The primary focus of the HubSpot CMS Hub is on CTAs (Calls-to-Action) that lead to conversion - via product pages, landing pages, blog posts, etc.
• Personalisation along the customer journey: Personalised content and smart content can be played directly from the CRM hub. This leads to a much better customer experience, which will set you apart from the competition and help you attract more customers. 
• Time to Market: Websites and content can be implemented quickly and easily. Marketing and content contributors can easily work with the CMS. 
• Price, usability, fast implementation cycle are optimally designed.  
• Seamless analysis between CRM and CMS data: All necessary tools are an integrated part of the HubSpot family.
• Performance and security: No additional apps/plugins for SEO, security, performance etc. are necessary. Regular release cycles ensure that the data is always up-to-date. 
• GDPR: The more Apps Plugins have to be used, the greater the effort to comply with the regulations. HubSpot offers integrated functions that make compliance extremely easy.

You would like to have all data as PDF? No problem. Here you can download our CMS Guide: