JackSpot: Benefits of HubSpot's Standalone CMS

At this year’s INBOUND conference, HubSpot announced that its CMS platform would be available to buy as a standalone product. What’s great about this is that it makes HubSpot’s standalone CMS the first and only to incorporate a CRM alongside it - without the need to purchase a HubSpot subscription. This means that, instead of offering your prospects a static, impersonal experience on your B2B website, you’ll be providing them with an experience that offers much more value.

The benefit of the standalone CMS with the inclusion of a CRM makes it easier to build B2B websites that continue to nurture your prospects long after they’ve become customers. It offers a real sense of integration and communication between the products like never before.

Watch our video or read the rest of the blog to find out:

What does the standalone HubSpot CMS include?

Will you benefit from the standalone CMS?

What does the standalone HubSpot CMS include?

With the standalone CMS, users will be able to create a free portal - only paying when you want to take your domain live. This is great for those who want to spend some time developing and designing a website without incurring any costs until you take your website live. Read on to learn what else is included in the standalone CMS.

Content and SEO tools

• Website, blog, landing page creation
• Smart content
• SEO tools and content strategy
• Design manager and marketplace
• File manager
• Domain manager

Conversations

• Notes, emails, calls, follow-up tasks, support tickets
• Live chat
• Chatbot builder

Lead capture*

*As a side note, smart content cannot be used on forms or CTAs with the standalone CMS

• Forms
• CTAs
• Lead flows

Reporting

• Web analytics reporting

Contacts

• HubSpot CRM
• Lists

And all this for only £245.00 ($300) per month - great for small businesses or start-ups looking to kick of their website projects.

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Will you benefit from the standalone CMS?

While the standalone CMS is a great product for all that it includes, it makes a great offering for smaller businesses, however, medium-enterprise businesses may find it to be missing some of the vital elements that would be required. For instance, the standalone doesn’t include:

Full email marketing

While you are able to use the free marketing package, it’s quite limited in functionality. For example, you would only be able to write and send very simple follow-up emails for form submissions. On the other hand, the full product will allow you to do so much more with customisations, templates A/B testing and more.

Workflow nurturing

For true nurturing of your leads, prospects and ensuring customer advocacy, workflows will allow you to personalise your marketing processes. You’ll be able to deliver timely, personalised and relevant information to your contacts based on numerous triggers such as website interactions.

Social media management, monitoring and analysis

While the standalone CMS includes conversations, which allow you to manage and reply to customer conversations across your social media channels - you’ll still be lacking the social media management and monitoring tool. This tool will allow you to do everything from scheduling and publishing updates, monitor mentions and activity and best of all, you’ll be able to benefit from analysing the performance across your social channels.

Analytics dashboards and attribution reporting

There is a limited amount of analysis that you’ll able to do with the standalone CMS such as looking at the performance of your content. However, you’ll not have access to any source or attribution reporting tools which will really help you dig down into the detail and understand what channels generate your business more leads, where your visitors come from and you will be unable to get an overall view of your marketing performance as a whole.

Attention-grabbing lead flows

The lead flow functionality is available as part of the HubSpot CMS, however you will need the free marketing package from HubSpot as well in order to use it. Lead flows are another useful way to provide relevant content based on criteria when a user visits your web pages and can be used to grab the attention of more passive visitors and getting them to engage.

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Conclusion

So there we have it. The standalone CMS promises to be a great contender and is the perfect option for companies who are solely looking at building their website that will help them to align their sales and marketing. However, in order to truly benefit, we believe that including a HubSpot subscription - either professional or enterprise - will help to increase the effectiveness of your website. With either package and combined with HubSpot’s CMS, you can ensure that your website and your business will benefit and will provide your customers with a continuous level of nurturing over time.

If you’re in the midst of a website redesign, download our free website brief template and gain a full understanding of your website project’s requirements and how they inform whether you’ll require a standalone CMS or a full package.