“Today, more than 100,000 customers across more than 120 countries use HubSpot’s powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers”
HubSpot propelled a new Content Management System offering, calling it CMS Hub. It comes with HubSpot’s CRM and Conversations and combines with Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub, company officials say.
HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that presents software and support to help companies grow better. The platform incorporates marketing, sales, service, operations, and website management products that start free and scale to meet our clients’ needs at any growth stage. Today, more than 100,000 customers across more than 120 countries apply HubSpot’s powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, employ, and delight customers.
“I never thought I would start a company. Before Hubspot I had joined two startups that did very well and then went to business school. I didn’t plan on starting a company, but I met the perfect co-founder for me and we complemented each other perfectly. and I think we still do, ” Halligan tells Entrepreneur en Español. ” And we had a good idea. We had a very good idea! The time was right. It wasn’t very obvious at first. I had other options coming out of business school and I weighed the risk and value of each. Opening a company It was the riskiest, but also the one that had the most value in terms of impact and fun. So I forgot about caution and did it,” says Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot
What does that mean in the broader context of the marketing technology ecosystem? Does this make HubSpot a player among the more comprehensive marketing clouds? Does HubSpot envision itself in the same whiff as the branded Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) that Forrester and Gartner explain in closely-watched industry reports?
That depends on who you question. HubSpot officials told CMSWire that CMS Hub is not targeting a perception into the DXP conversation, nor does this release mean it’s targeting large marketing clouds. It is, though, touting an “all-in-one connected platform.” “As of right now we’re especially focused on making sure those mid-market companies and their marketers just have a genuinely good CMS that allows them to build websites that create a digital practice,” says Angela DeFranco, director of product management for Cambridge, Mass.-based HubSpot.
Web Building Experiences for Marketers, Developers
CMS Hub consists of two tiers: enterprise and professional. HubSpot gave a CMS before. The new CMS Hub differs in that it produces distinct experiences: developers can get incited and build sites with local development and GitHub combination. And marketers can carve out their experience path, utilizing drag-and-drop editing and themes, for instance. “We’ve really kind of extracted apart the different workflows that marketers and developers have, and we’ve developed tooling that suits them, tools that they want to practice the way that they want to use them,” DeFranco adds.
That integration commitment is a lofty one, of course. And an easily criticized one, too. The truth is, combinations are always challenging for any technology, and marketing isn’t protected. In December 2018, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group assessed that US marketers spent nearly $5 billion on data management and integration products 2018, a 25% boost from 2017, according to a report by eMarketer last May.
Tony White, CEO of Ars Logica, which investigates and researches CMS technologies, said the vision of the CMS Hub present integrating with HubSpot’s other hubs bodes well for those viewing for a suite-based platform. It could make HubSpot a contender in the suite-based digital experience software class, and White combined because they have respectable marketing automation and CRM capabilities along with sales and service offerings. “But those sets all come with same caveats,” White states. “And that’s that creating a digital experience for satisfied visitors or customers is always integration. Integration. Integration. Integration. So the release and report and all of the buzz is about how it’s seamless and it works together and it’s all part of one platform, and there are some benefits, certainly, to that. But I’ve also seen failed implementations because customers purchased too strongly into that and really didn’t understand what’s included in designing optimized customer experiences.”
Still, White called HubSpot CMS a concrete development for the CMS community, and with the right product policy and marketing execution, it should make significant inroads instantly. He’s also learned the CMS Hub is built cleanly and has high marks from an implementation and preservation perspective.
Managing the Art of the Unknown
SJ Hood, client success manager for ClientsFirst, a HubSpot platinum partner, told the best thing about HubSpot’s platform is that each hub works together. “Their complete approach enables all areas of the business to feed into one another and improve each other’s capabilities,” said Hood, a HubSpot certified trainer. “In particular, the HubSpot CMS is at its most compelling for marketers when paired with the free CRM. One of the most interesting parts of the HubSpot CMS from a marketing perspective is the ability to build Smart Content and CTAs. Using existing contact data, you can assist content that is more specific and more relevant to the needs of various visitors to your site.”
HubSpot seems to really encompass what Hood’s company has been calling “The Art of the Unknown.” “What they have accomplished to do by creating this fully connected platform with an immense ecosystem of integrations,” she added, “is develop a system that has endless possibilities in terms of functionality.”
Where Customer Data Coincides Content Management
HubSpot’s DeFranco, when addressing integration, says websites, perhaps more so than ever now, are becoming more limited of a vanity thing and more an integral part of business and how businesses operate. “It’s acting like a CRM in that means that it’s the system of content, and then your CRM is your system of record,” DeFranco states. “And these two things interplay like crazy.”
She added that having various hubs in the same suite means all the design patterns on the UX interactions are equivalent, taking off the “cognitive load” that requires marketers and other suite users to think about shifting back and forth between systems. “As you go further deeper and you start to think about what these businesses are asking for when they want to do this tech concentration and when they want to transform the digital experience, then you start to recognize some of the smarter features come into play like Smart Content,” says DeFranco.
Smart Content provides targeting for website pages, landing pages, emails, CTAs, and forms based on particular criteria stored about contacts. It leads to a “digital experience for these companies of people without really having to dig really far or spend a lot of time, resources and energy,” elucidates DeFranco.
What Is the Product Target?
According to Tony Byrne, CEO, and founder of Real Story Group, HubSpot has been making a play as a mid-market set for some time. Byrne said the HubSpot CMS Hub is likely to be of interest only to surviving Hubspot licensees and not the business more broadly. “Even then,” he adds, “RSG always counsels never defaulting to a resolution just because it comes from an obligatory vendor. Other WCM platforms can combine with HubSpot’s CRM and MAP (marketing automation platform) sacrifices as well.”
Kipp Bodnar, chief marketing officer for HubSpot, told CMSWire his company’s CMS Hub could “stand on its own two feet,” but believes it’s better if the product is applied in tandem with other HubSpot hubs. He describes HubSpot CMS as a standout in the midmarket space. One site — crowdsource site G2 Crowd — agrees, placing HubSpot on top of the midmarket CMS space ahead of several dozen others.
“In building the CMS Hub product, we desired to create an awesome CMS product because we thought there’s just a big gap in the market,” Bodnar states. “You’re either employing WordPress which is a good product but requires a ton of customization and a ton of development activity and a lot of maintenance and security issues. Or you are using Adobe or something at the high end of the market. There’s nothing really in the middle that could really be a large compelling SaaS CMS for both marketers and developers. When we created this product we were thinking there is going to be people who just come in and purchase this product right away. We witnessed that on the first day. We had a couple businesses come in and buy this without talking to us and they were not a customer of any of our other products.”
The vision of a DXP?
When asked if HubSpot is moving toward making a digital experience platform, DeFranco states that while that kind of product line makes sense from a branding and analyst point of view, it does not jive with HubSpot’s product trajectory for now. “We asked customers if they knew what a digital experience platform is or are they utilizing one, and we didn’t get a lot of clients that recognize that term,” DeFranco adds. Customers, she says, want to create and craft a digital experience so that clients can have a “unified feeling of walking through everything.” With that, DeFranco said she could see why some vendors go with the DXP branding.
“However, from our branding aspect of it, we distinctly chose to call the enterprise version of this a CMS, because at the end of the day, that’s what it is: it’s an enterprise CMS that’s for scaling businesses that are tired of being held back by website management.” DeFranco did say HubSpot won’t stop investigating the DXP storyline but now is focused on helping organizations create great digital experiences through its product hubs, no matter what you call it.
Content Hubs and CDPs in HubSpot’s Fate?
White of Ars Logica says he wouldn’t be shocked if HubSpot feels that “content hubs” is the next repetition of DXPs and digital experience management. He’s heard of a “number of leading” DXP merchants working toward a rebranding as “Content Hubs,” or “something similar.” HubSpot, he said, would “buy into it 110%.”
White even notices HubSpot throwing its hat into the customer data platform ring like other marketing technology have; Acquia acquired CDP AgilOne in December. “They have many of the pieces,” White says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they submit a reply for a Wave or Magic Quadrant for CDPs.”
