Introduction

HubSpot is the perfect website development platform for any business

You’re here because you understand just how important it is for your website to be equipped with the right tools to attract, engage and convert website visitors — and you need a content management system that will not only get it right for your business but can also scale as and when you need it to. While platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Wix and Hootsuite are great for individuals looking to build a blog or small website, for businesses looking to generate more leads and understand how their website activity contributes to both marketing and sales, they fall woefully short. Meanwhile, CMSs at the other end of the spectrum, such as Adobe’s Experience Manager Sites, can be prohibitively expensive and offer many features that aren't necessary or useful to your business. For businesses to actually drive lead generation and understand the paths to conversion, it's increasingly essential for the website to be easy to edit and connect to the rest of the business's marketing and sales activity. But few platforms offer such sophistication. Subsequently, many businesses find themselves having to acquire different tools to manage separate aspects of their website… some may not even be able to readily edit their website without the help of a development agency.

All of this results in unnecessary costs, and marketing executives and managers find themselves spending more time trying to manage the individual tools than actually understand website performance to improve it! However, unlike the aforementioned platforms, the HubSpot CMS is an all-in-one solution. The HubSpot CMS is an integrated platform: one which can be seamlessly combined with the rest of the HubSpot product offering to provide complete control and visibility over marketing and sales activities. The HubSpot CMS can be purchased as a standalone product. This means you'll gain a powerful CMS you can implement immediately, and the ability to scale and expand its capabilities as your business needs grow and change. Your website is your most important asset. To attract website visitors and convert them into leads, it needs to be equipped with the right tools… and here's why…

Why your website is so important

In the digital-first era, every business understands just how important it is to have a presence online; with 81% of shoppers conducting their research online before even considering making a purchase, you would be insane not to!

It’s also important to appreciate the fact that buyer behaviour has changed: gone are the days where interested parties - your potential customers — would have to call up your business’ salespeople to get more information about your products or services. Thanks to the internet — the modern buyer is able to find all the information they need to make informed purchase decisions online.

Today’s buyer is tech-savvy and resourceful. They want to educate themselves on your business and the products/services and/or solutions it provides. They will read blogs and articles relating to your service offerings, check out your case studies, browse your website, download content from your website and much more to make an informed purchase decision.

With this considered, your website must serve as a hub of high-quality information; offering thought-provoking and informative content that helps your website visitors to find solutions to the problems they are facing.

Your website in the modern purchase process is, without a doubt, your best sales employee.

Your website interacts with every visitor, helps them to understand your business, provides them with further information on your products and services, and allows them to engage with you. But just having a website is not enough. It’s important that you incorporate your website into every marketing and sales activity you do.

81% of shoppers conduct research online before making a purchase.

57% of the buying journey is done before a sales rep is involved.

Do you need a new website?

Your website should be your best marketing and sales employee; but if it isn’t generating interest or leads, it might be time to assess its performance. You might need to replace your CMS with something that delivers the functionalities you need— or you might need to redesign your website entirely. Before you make that decision, take a look at your website and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Can people actually find your website?

As the centrepiece of your business’s marketing and sales activity, interested parties must be able to find your website online via a simple search query — if they can’t, how will you generate traffic and, ultimately, get new customers? There are, of course, a number of ways to improve your website's visibility online and where it ranks on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), such as creating high-quality content, gaining inbound links, search engine optimisation of your web pages for specific keywords and much, much more. When it comes to optimising your website to improve its ranking on SERPS, there is plenty that you can do.

2. Is your website providing a fantastic user experience?

You might have an optimised website that attracts your target audience but what about its design? Is it modern-looking and sophisticated? Is it appealing and easy to navigate? Does it feature high-quality content for visitors to engage with? If your website is unappealing, dysfunctional and/or dated, all the time you spent on optimising it for search will be for nought as your website visitors will leave as soon as they arrive. Website visitors should feel as though they are going through a journey on your website; each page or piece of content they read should be followed up with something else of interest that will provide more value and insight.

3. Is your content too product-focused?

Your website’s messaging needs to be clear and consistent. Nothing says brand identity crisis more than a website that feels as though it was written by multiple people. Also, the content you write for your website needs to be clear enough for Google to understand — after all, it will be analysing your website and indexing its web pages for search! A good rule of thumb we promote is that if a 14-year-old can’t understand what you are trying to say, then it needs to be simplified. Secondly, your website needs to talk in your visitors’ business language — that means using language specific to their industry as this will demonstrate you understand the space they operate in and the pressures they face. The content you create should not be focused wholly on your products and services but instead, on addressing the problems your website visitors have and providing education. The purpose of your content should be to educate, to help and build trust between you and your website’s visitors.

4. Is your site generating new business enquiries?

Not every website visitor will be ready to engage with your business — and a website that offers no other way for website visitors to engage beyond ‘contact us’ will lose out on potential leads. It’s important to remember that every potential buyer will be at different stages in the buyer’s journey. With this considered, your website must include several ways through which your visitors can interact with your business. For example, Calls-to-Action (CTAs) encourage website visitors to take a specific action on your website, such as download an eBook, signup to your blog, download pricing or complete a contact us form —depending on where they are in their buying journey.

5. Can you edit your website without restriction?

Being able to edit your website is fundamental.If your business begins to offer new products or services, you need to be able to edit your website; if you want to publish new content targeting specific keyword terms relevant to your target audience, you need to be able to edit your website; if you want to add new modules, CTAs, landing pages, forms and other elements, you need to be able to edit your website

Summary

Your website must be able to grow as your business does and a website that is fixed and static is highly impractical for any business looking to attract and engage with customers. A dated website with no new content, no way for website visitors to engage, and no support for other devices (such as mobile and laptop) will not generate leads or interest in your business.

The hard facts

Topic clusters and content strategy tools

In the introduction, we’ve explained some problems that you might be experiencing, or identified some areas where your website might be letting you down. If that’s the case, it might be time to approach the design and the function of your website from a totally new platform — and a new angle…

Here’s why

FACT #1

Your website meets your prospects before you do

It’s important to understand that in the digital-first era, your website meets your prospects before you do. Your website is the nucleus of your marketing and sales activity — and, therefore, a brochure-like approach to your website will no longer cut it. Website visitors (your potential customers) are constantly searching online, looking to connect with your business and learn more about what it is you do — and on that basis, providing a website that is easy to use, content-rich, high-performance and adaptable to any device is fundamental.

FACT #2

Your website is your best marketing and sales resource

Imagine having an employee who worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, provided personalised content to every website visitor and helped to convert those visitors from just ‘visitors’ into known contacts and sales leads? Also, that same employee helped to educate your website visitors about the challenges that they were facing and provided them with useful information that would enable them to make an informed purchase decision. But just who is this marvellous employee? Answer: your website!

FACT #3

When it comes to driving sales activity via your website — It needs to be a holistic process

When it comes to building, editing and enhancing your website, however, there are many options available to you — from traditional blogging platforms such as WordPress to all-in-one platforms such as HubSpot. Ultimately, your choice depends on what you want to achieve via your website. The thing is, there are tons of different CMS platforms out there and each one has its fans. For example, WordPress works really well for a lot of companies — claiming 63.6% of the CMS market share, running 37.8% of all websites in 2020. But do they manage the whole marketing and sales process from end to end?

WordPress claimed 63.6% of the CMSmarket-share for 2020, running 37.8%of all websites.

WordPress, HubSpot or Adobe CMS?

We know it’s not an easy decision. When it comes to deciding what platform to build your website in, there are plenty of tools available. Website design has moved from being something that only web developers and coders can create, to something that any Marketing Manager can readily build. However, you need a system that is going to provide you with all the tools that you need to take your marketing and business growth to the next level. In the introduction of this page, we explained all the different tools you need, and there are loads! To emphasise this, we’ve built this table below to show all the tools that are needed, and that you should be using within your marketing activity.

The benefits of using HubSpot CMS

You can personalise content to different visitors.

You can use Smart Content and calls-to-action (CTAs) that are personalised based on a website visitor’s interaction history with your website. So if a visitor has already downloaded a particular piece of content, they won’t be shown that piece again.

It’s fully responsive to any device.

Web pages are automatically optimised based on which device they are being viewed on, ensuring whoever lands on your website has the best possible experience in relation to the device they are using.

It’s incredibly easy to edit — even for a beginner.

No developer is needed. Easily build and modify pages on the fly. You can download free templates or purchase templates from the HubSpot marketplace. Pages can be edited live, with your website running in the background, and new modules can be added directly from the editor using the drag and drop interface. You can easily create a fantastic looking website

It has all the tools to be a lead generation machine.

With access to landing pages and forms, you have all the tools you need to convert website visitors into known contacts.

It’s easy to ensure you have a full search engine optimised website.

All the tools you use to build pages in HubSpot include SEO tools, making content optimisation straightforward. The tools utilise a traffic light system to show you whether or not your web pages are optimised correctly so that Google can successfully understand, and rank your page accordingly.

It’s aligned with marketing and sales teams and activities.

Building your website with HubSpot’s CMS means that everything is connected; email marketing, lead management, social media scheduling, blog posting, website analytics, reporting, keyword analysis — everything comes together to form a unified view of your website. There’s no need to log into various platforms to get the information you need.

It’s easily integrated with all your other marketing software.

Regardless of whether you are using other pieces of marketing software, HubSpot supports loads of native integrations. Wistia, Eventbrite, Shopify — the list goes on! All these tools can be integrated seamlessly, ensuring you have a holistic view of all your prospects and customer information.

It’s always up-to-date with the latest trends and technology.

Every year HubSpot creates and implements new product features to help marketers and salespeople to keep pace in the modern world. From live chat and sales meeting links to upcoming chatbots, Instagram scheduling and customer success tools, HubSpot introduces new tools as and when businesses need them.

Understanding HubSpot’s design manager

Don’t waste the capabilities of the HubSpot CMS by developing your website using a traditional approach. Instead of spending 6–12 months developing your website, use Growth-Driven Design and the HubSpot CMS to streamline the process and build a prospect-orientated, lead-generating website.

FIRST THINGS FIRST…

TRADITIONAL WEBSITE DESIGN IS BROKEN.WHY?

Large lump-sum costs

Traditional website builds cost a lot of money upfront. The design/redesign might be split into three key areas — planning, building and testing — but the upfront cost is substantial and impractical for a small business or startup, for example. With GDD, the principle is leasing your website rather than buying it — pay less upfront followed by smaller monthly payments.

Missed deadlines

With so many factors that need approving, from SEO and template design, to content creation, imagery and optimisation, traditional builds can take time to actually get off the ground and build any traction.

Delayed launch dates

As everything needs to be signed off before it can go live, it’s likely that you will miss your initial deadline. If you have a large website, this is much more likely — and it will come at a considerable expense to your business.

Poor results

Traditional website redesign means locking your existing website in its unsatisfactory state while it is stuck in development hell. Over that time, you receive no new sales enquiries or engagement with your business via your website. Instead of traditional website design, choose Growth-Driven WebsiteDesign!

GROWTH-DRIVEN WHAT?!

Firstly, did you know that, usually, 80% of your website traffic comes from 20% of your website?

That 20% represents your website’s most ‘high value’ pages — and these are the ones you want to focus on first — and that’s where GDDcomes into play.

Growth-Driven Design (GDD) provides you with an alternative, agile,methodical and potent approach to the website design/redesign process. Rather than attempting to recreate your existing website page for-page (depending on its size), you should identify and analyse your high-value pages (HVPs), those which drive the highest lead generation activity, and create an MVP (minimum viable product) website basedaround those pages. This is what we’d call phase one of a Growth-Driven Design project.

Yes, you can start small, and grow smartly over time.

Above you can view some examples of websites that we have built by applying GDD principles. These websites are now going through the growth-driven process of adding new web pages on a monthly basis to increase their size and effectiveness.

This process gives you the opportunity to spread the costs of the website build over a 12-month period. Once your MVP website is live, you then use real-time analytics and information gathered from it to inform future website design decisions, allowing you to refine your prospect-orientated website so that it has the best opportunity to convert visitors into leads.

Growth-Driven Design is a cyclical and iterative process where you plan to improve your website, develop it further, learn from the data it has acquired and then transfer and analyse that data to inform future improvements.

So, how can you build a new website using Growth-Driven Design?

Building a website using GDD

What are your goals?

Before diving into redesigning your website, what are you hoping to achieve? More website traffic? Leads? Conversions? Identifying your goals prior to website design (or redesign) will ensure that the activities you partake in are for the express purpose of achieving those goals.

Establish your buyer personas.

Once you have established what you want to achieve — be it more website traffic, leads or conversions — you need to design or redesign your website to meet the needs of your buyer personas, i.e.your target audience.

This part of the process is fundamental, as designing, tailoring and personalising your website to meet the needs of those you wish to sell to will improve visitor engagement, retention and conversion.

Identify your highest-value pages.

As mentioned, GDD focuses on building an MVP website utilising your highest-value web pages. If you’re redesigning your website, you should have existing website performance data to help you to identify your best web pages.

The pages you go live with should be those that drive the most website traffic, conversions and leads for your business, and they will lay the foundation for your new website.

Determine the function of your highest-value web pages.

The pages you have chosen all need to incorporate relevant calls to action to increase conversions and move website visitors through the buyer's journey.

At this point, you need to decide on the principal purpose of each webpage — some might be purely for education, whereas others might be focused on advertising a particular service.

Don’t waste time chasing perfect

When it comes to designing your new website, forget about 'perfection' and ‘completion’ — you want to get your new website live as quickly as possible, set up analytics, assess its performance and improve it over time.

Spending time trying to perfect every individual web page will push your website’s launch date further and further back, whilst costing you more money.

The idea behind GDD is to launch the most strategically effective website in the shortest possible period of time — a website that will generate the most results for your business.

Once that website is live, you improve it over time and add an agreed number of pages on a quarterly basis to bolster the website's performance.

Remember, your website will never be perfect — instead, you should always be striving to improve it and turn it into the lead generating nucleus it should be!

Set up analytics

GDD is an iterative development process, you identify your best pages, redesign and optimise them, analyse them, improve them and then decide on what to do next.

Setting up analytics will allow you to monitor the performance of your website and individual web pages. More advanced platforms, such as HubSpot for example, will allow you to monitor those pages at a granular level, including everything from page views and conversions to specific leads generated and how.

You can use all of this information to further refine your web pages. Perhaps one web page gets a lot of organic traffic but few conversions — maybe it’s time to look at the content on that web page and include more compelling CTAs.

Build, Assess, improve, repeat

GDD is an effective strategy for modern websites because it is a cyclical process. A traditional website build stops at the point the website is built and put live. The website is then left for two years before someone in the business decides it needs updating!

GDD, however, ensures the website design and development process focuses on the short and long-term goals of the business, whether that increasing organic traffic or generating more leads.

Analytics facilitate the means for businesses to check the performance of their website and analyse them — in intricate detail — to find out what works and what doesn’t, so they can optimise web pages on that basis.

You must take the same approach to your website. It’s entirely impractical for you to leave your star player out of the squad!

So, ask yourself, when did you last update your website?

Ask yourself — do you want….

- An old website with a confusing user journey?

- A website that doesn’t rank well on Google’s ranking?

- A site which is struggling to generate new business?

- A site which is a copy of your product brochure?

or do you want….

- A new fantastic user journey with a modern-looking website?

- A website which will grow in size and Google ranking over time?

- A site which is generating you quality sales leads 24/7?

- A website which is acting like your best sales and marketing employee?

How we can assist

Huble Digital is a full-service business consultancy with offices in the UK, Singapore, Germany and South Africa. We’re one of the few consultancies that both understand the need for Growth-Driven Design backed by a powerful CMS, and that have the skills to help you get there. We offer services related to a full CRM and CX solution. And as an Elite HubSpot Partner, we’re experts at using the platform to solve your business challenges, with access to specialised training and an invaluable professional network. By working with us, you benefit from the experience, expertise, capabilities and outstanding services that only a select few HubSpot agencies can offer. We’d love to help you develop and roll out your strategy and website, integrate with other software, and build, manage and optimise your customer journeys.