HubSpot CMS: What it is + how to use it (HubHeroes, Ep. 25)

If you can believe it, we've already dedicated an entire deep-dive episode of HubHeroes to virtually every single HubSpot Hub:

• Marketing Hub
• Sales Hub
• Service Hub
• Heck, even Ops Hub!

But we haven’t talked about one of the most powerful and increasingly popular hubs of all — the HubSpot CMS Hub. Until today, that is! 

Now, like all of our other hub episode deep dives, you don’t need to EITHER be someone considering the HubSpot CMS Hub (but doesn’t have it yet) OR someone who already has it! This episode is for everyone, because we’re unpacking topics around it that are relevant to everyone:

• What are its true superpowers?
• What do most people get wrong about the HubSpot CMS Hub?
• How are most current users still not maximizing its potential?

And that's only the beginning of our conversation. To help us out today, we are joined by the legendary, the one and only growth-driven design champion Luke Summerfield who is also the Director of Product, GTM of CMS Hub at HubSpot. 

Here's what we cover in this episode ...

• Why does the HubSpot CMS Hub exist? Is it really that beneficial to have your CRM and website existing on the same platform?
• What are the most powerful features within the HubSpot CMS Hub and why?
• What are the most common ways companies using the HubSpot CMS Hub are getting it wrong and why?
• How accessible and easy-to-use is the HubSpot CMS Hub really for those with no technical chops? And is that kind of accessibility a good thing?
• Who do we trust more with our taxes? HubSpot or WordPress?
• What do you need to know about smart content, why it's so amazing, how to use it, as well as how not to use it?
• What are some juicy secrets and tidbits about what's the come from HubSpot?
• Will Liz ever stop creating AI-generated haikus that no one asked for?

... and much more! 

YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

There's a lot to love about the HubSpot CMS Hub, but what makes it so special — especially for those who are already using other HubSpot Hubs as part of their MarTech stack — is that its accessibility is unmatched. No more waiting two weeks for a developer to implement a simple change on your site; HubSpot CMS Hub is built for agility.

Just remember, though, with great power comes great responsibility. Like we talked about last week in our HubSpot playbooks episode, processes will matter a great deal here if you want to see success with HubSpot CMS.

RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

• HubSpot CMS vs. WordPress vs Contentful (from a content strategist)
• HubSpot CMS domain setup + how-to (video tutorial)
• HubSpot playbooks: What they are + how to use them (HubHeroes podcast)

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge. Never fear hub heroes.

Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

Liz Moorehead: I think before we get into today's episode, we can all agree that our theme song is straight fire. That's god. Fire.

Luke Summerfield: I I Everything y'all do. Everything y'all do. The quality, the production, the prep work you did for me, the graphics, the everything's a plus plus.

Liz Moorehead: I am a huge I although I think my favorite part of that bop continues to be Max and Devan or Corporate Shills. And if they say something we don't like, god speeding. Good luck to both of you. That aside, I think that's my favorite. That's the bridge that leads to the chorus that brings us here to this moment where every week I tell you all, hello.

I am Liz Murphy. I am a content strategist. I am your hub Heroes Wrangler because we both know George, Devon, and Max need wrangling, and welcome to this week of the Hub Heroes podcast. And we have a very special guest today, the growth driven king himself, Luke Summerfield.

George B. Thomas: I'm so excited.

Liz Moorehead: How you doing, bud? I'm so happy you're here.

Luke Summerfield: I'm I'm doing awesome. And, yeah, we are up already on 2023 at HubSpot, essentially CMS. So I'm, like, excited to talk about CMS, but also maybe shed some light on where we're going the rest of the year.

George B. Thomas: Awesome. It's awesome.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. I'm sorry. Are we saying that people people should probably stick around for a little bit? Maybe we'll have some other goodies to let out of the bag today?

Luke Summerfield: Hopefully. Yeah. I mean, there's only so much I could say at this point, but I'll give you at least directionally know where we're headed, with the products.

Liz Moorehead: So you're gonna be like a little you're gonna be like a little orange fortune cookie. Breaking out little sprocket. Little sprocket. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited.

George B. Thomas: Time. I really feel like it's Christmas time right now. I I was excited. Now I'm doubly excited.

Liz Moorehead: So we weren't enough for you, George?

George B. Thomas: No. You're always enough. You're always enough. Man, I have had this conversation with my wife before too. You're always enough.

Liz Moorehead: Uh-huh. Anyway, fine. We've dedicated episodes to no. Just kidding. We have dedicated episodes to virtually every single hub.

Actually, we have, right? We've talked about why you need to go with Marketing Hub, why you need to go with Sales Hub, why you need to go to Service Hub. Heck, we even brought out ops hub, we have talked about ops hub and yet somehow we have not talked about one of the most important hubs out there and that is CMS Hub, and it's increasingly becoming one of the most popular as well, which is what we're gonna be digging into today. Now I'm gonna give my usual disclaimer that we have for these episodes where we're digging in to a hub at a top level. You can either be someone who is considering HubSpot, CMS hub, or you can be someone who already has it.

This episode is for both of you because we're gonna be unpacking topics like what are the true superpowers of the HubSpot CMS? What are most people getting wrong about the HubSpot CMS Hub? And how are current users not maximizing it to its fullest potential? Oh, I can't wait for

George B. Thomas: that part. I can't wait for that part. I'm just gonna say, I'm so excited.

Luke Summerfield: You are just having a good

Liz Moorehead: day, George. You're just excited, man.

George B. Thomas: I am. I really am.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. But let's set you up for success this week, George, because we can't have a repeat of the last 2 episodes. Who are we doing this for, George?

George B. Thomas: This whole episode is for the humans. Yay.

Devyn Bellamy: There we go.

Liz Moorehead: We did it. We're so proud of you, George.

George B. Thomas: Baby right out the bat for you people.

Liz Moorehead: But, of course, as we already let the cat out of the bag, we are not Max, we miss you. Congrats on your new house. Go over to LinkedIn and say congrats to Max. But this weekend, the chair, we already have told you we've got the one and only Luke Summerfield, who not only is our GDD King, he is the Director of Product and GTM of CMS Hub, and we are here to talk about all things CMS. Gentlemen, are you ready?

Devyn Bellamy: Let's go.

Liz Moorehead: Awesome.

George B. Thomas: So I'm

Liz Moorehead: gonna start with gonna start with a deep existential, like, philosophical question. Why does the HubSpot CMS exist? Luke, talk to me.

Luke Summerfield: Well, here's the thing. I mean, as you all know, one of our our mission at HubSpot is to help millions of businesses grow better. And there is no world where a business grows better without a website. And so when you think about what marketers are trying to achieve, they're trying to generate traffic and attention. They're trying to convert those visitors into leads and then eventually turn those folks into revenue.

Again, there's no world where the website doesn't play some part of that. And so what we found over the years, we've had a CMS for a really long time, actually, since the dawn of HubSpot history, and it's sort of taken a couple different forms over the years to to the point where we relaunched it in 2020 as official hub. What we've realized is that when folks try to work with systems outside of Hub Spot, they run into a lot of walls. And I think we're gonna talk a little bit about that as we go. But we said the best way to the best way that we can empower marketers is to do something all in one and do something that combines with all other tools.

And so that's why we double down on CMS Hub.

George B. Thomas: I love by the way, I gotta jump in here. I love that Luke painted the picture of a journey around the CMS. And and, Liz, that your first question is why does it exist? Because, again, as the person who is not here shilling for big orange rocket, when if you woulda asked me this when it first came out, my answer would have been like, I don't know why it exists, but it's here. Now after 2020, it's real simple for me to make my life easier and to give me more power where it's important.

That's what I would say why the HubSpot CMS exists now today in 2023 and moving

Luke Summerfield: forward. Yeah. And and maybe, actually, to just give a little call like, context on why we decided to invest heavily and relaunch it as a hub in 2020, we saw a couple things. 1, we saw that when we talked to customers who inevitably needed to work on their website and they were using some other system, they were just sort of handcuffed in terms of making any changes to the site. They always had to work through a developer, through an IT team.

It was just really slowing down everything that they could do. And like George was saying, they just were not empowered to be able to get the work done that they needed. The other thing that we saw was if you look at all of SAS, everyone in SAS has moved to a cloud based SAS structure. I should say everyone in software has moved to a SAS based structure. And for some reason, the only software that hasn't moved to cloud based SaaS is the CMS world.

You still have this world of having to self host, having to do plug in updates, having to do maintenance and management, security issues, all these things that really don't help your business grow. And we saw an opportunity as you see emerging CMSs like the Wix, the Squarespaces, the Shopify's who are all moving to SaaS that we could continue to build a SaaS based CMS, and so we wanna do that. And the third thing that we saw, which I think we're gonna talk a little bit more about in the future too, is, you know, that we're uniquely able to solve for what a company needs. Because if you look at the way the world is going, the companies that are able to personalize the experience that they give their customers are the ones that are winning. And so there's no world to be able to create a personalized experience if you don't have all your customer data at your fingertips.

And so that's the other thing that I think we were seeing is that customers were struggling to be able to craft these good personalized experiences when you have your CRM over here and your Google Analytics over here and your CMS over here. And so they're just really limited on what they could do. So all of those things came together along with the fact that we had, at the time, and still have very strong customer NPS on the CMS, really strong usage. We have a ton of folks using multi hubs with it. Just gave us the confidence to go big in 2020.

And, you know, since then, it's changed even a lot more, and it will continue.

Liz Moorehead: This leads me nicely into my next question because my response to that first of all, the question is, what do we love about it? And I feel like we're already waxing poetic. We're writing those belated valentines to CMS. And Devin, I'm gonna wanna get your thoughts on this, but first, Luke, you touched on something which I think is the number one thing that I love about it. Because I've been using HubSpot now since about 2013, and I remember just those friction feelings of, okay, because I was at an inbound agency, my client's website is in WordPress, our agency website is in WordPress.

Now I have to shift platforms in order to do from website work to hub site work and back and forth, and I think all of us know and probably people listening know or if you don't you should every time you have disparate pieces, disparate connect things connected together through API's, or permissions or Zapier, you're introducing potential points of failure. But you're also creating the scenario where you have to know 2 different platforms. So I love what you said about like having all of the data intelligence at your fingertips, but even in a more practical way, you have everything in one house. It's data that's all talking to each other. It's not trying to patchwork together 2 separate systems, but make them look externally like it's the same experience for your customers.

And I think number 1 that is one of the big things I like about it. And number 2 that that accessibility feature of I can do some AB testing, I can make some changes on the fly, and not have to wait 3 weeks for a developer to actually get around to helping me. That is a huge check-in my book, but Devin, what do you love about it? What do you love about the CMS? I'm ready for him to spit fire.

I don't know about you.

Devyn Bellamy: Well, honestly, I I feel like the fire has already been spat, Liz. You you absolutely crushed it.

Liz Moorehead: I'm the fire spitter?

Devyn Bellamy: You are the fire spitter. All all the the best that I can do is continue to, to build on what you were saying. The the biggest thing is that I loved about it. And, when I was using it, I built my first CMS Hub website when it was just a website add on in 2015, 2016, something like that. But the the the the thing that I I love about it is that your entire conversion path is in one system, and that's nuts.

The fact that you can do your attract, engage, and delight all in the same place, where before, like Liz said, you would have to jump out and hop into WordPress. And then depending on your skill level will be determined whether or not someone in their right mind will actually let you touch it. And so with with CMS Hub, I mean, you have revision history in case somebody blows something up. This is something that we use regularly at HubSpot when we're troubleshooting things that we've done wrong. Happened literally the other day.

1 of my coworkers is like, I'm trying to embed this code and it's not working. What's going on? And it's like, okay. Let me jump in and I'm gonna help you with the system. And me being having, part of my background is as a developer, I was able to get a little deeper into the weeds on what we were working on.

But it's all the same system. And she doesn't need to be a developer to use it. She doesn't even need to be a designer. She didn't even need to learn CSS from when she was updating her Myspace page back in the day. It's literally you could just go in, and if you can use Word, if you can use Google Docs, you'll be able to survive in HubSpot CMS.

George B. Thomas: It's interesting because when I hear Liz and you, Devin, the word that comes to mind for me is it enables teams. It enables humans. Right? And and a big pay I wanna go in a different direction than what you guys have talked about because there literally is some mental angst that happens when I help clients that have a WordPress, a Drupal, .netnuke, whatever type of website that they're trying to actually just integrate with HubSpot. Because where my brain goes is the idea of something being able to be a campaign.

And it could be the product pages. It could be the landing pages. It could be the blog pages. It could be the form. It could be the email.

It could be the call to actions. It could be the workflows. It could be the list. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a lot of ish. Like but having all of that connected in one place and being able to easily report and able to easily report the success or failure of major buckets of your online presence and sales process is freaking priceless.

And the other thing I'll add here is what HubSpot has done an amazing job at with the HubSpot CMS is it bridges the gap of being as nerdy as the most nerd would need it to be and as simple as the most simple marketer would want it to be. And that that is that is freaking phenomenal to be able to say that about a CMS.

Liz Moorehead: Luke, how did you all pull that out? Because I have to agree. That's what's wild about it. Indeed. You know what I mean?

Like, there are the baked in benefits of like if you're using HubSpot, I don't care if WordPress can do my taxes. Why don't you have your website on HubSpot? You know what I mean? But there is that piece of it for just looking at the quote, unquote features and benefits, our favorite thing in the b two b space. How did you guys pull that off?

Luke Summerfield: Yeah. I mean, like, in terms of of balancing the flexibility for a developer and the easy use for a marketer, I it's, I mean, it wasn't easy, and we're still working at it. And, actually, some of the things that I can hint to in the future, that that's in beta right now actually be taking steps even further. But, you know, I think at the end of the day, it's important that that the reason going back to, like, the why, we built CMS Hub to empower marketers to build personalized digital experiences that drive those business results. And so it is important to note that this is a CMS for marketers, that we are building for marketers to empower them.

But to your point, we recognize that developers and designers are absolutely important, absolutely critical to the process. And so what the way we approach it is we wanna make sure that, designers are not limited in any way. They can design anything they want on the system, and they can pass it off to a developer. And from there, a developer is not limited in any way either. They have all the frameworks, the tools, the local development, the, the revision history tooling, everything that they're used to working with, and they basically can be off to the races.

But where Meets is the intersection of all of that sort of back end systems and then the really easy to use UI that we layer on top for marketers, the the in page editors where the marketers do their work. And we've just figured out a way over time, and it it wasn't easy. Some of you probably remember over time where we used to have do a lot more in the design manager and, like, that was, like, okay for the marketer, not as good for the developer. And now we have local development CLI and local development for developers. We have this, like, really slick drag and drop, easy to use visual interface.

That's really one of the big changes when we relaunched it, was to create 2 distinct editing experiences for each group. But it's something that we're gonna continue chipping away at and just make it easier and easier for marketers and give it more and more power for developers.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Liz, I know you've got another question. But before you do, I have to go back a few steps here. And, Luke, by the way, straight up fire. Love it.

Liz, you said, you don't care if WordPress can do your taxes. Liz, I I personally would not want WordPress to do my taxes because, fundamentally, I know that WordPress is not secure. And if you think it's secure, it won't be with some plug in update. And that's one thing else that I love about the HubSpot CMS. They have an entire security team.

I would much rather HubSpot CMS do my taxes than WordPress do my taxes. I'm just gonna draw the line right here.

Liz Moorehead: I completely agree with that. That's one of my favorite things is that I literally have clients where I just watch periodically part, like, I watch it's not if or when when parts of their site will break. Plugins become unsupported, developers become non responsive. If something happens catastrophic with your website, there is no there is no WordPress real customer service that can help you. So that's a good point, but again, even if the value prop was there, George, even if it did my taxes, talk to my girlfriend so I don't have to when their guy does them wrong again over brunch and I could just show up when it's mimosa time.

I genuinely do not care. It could literally be Keanu Reeves incarnate as a CMS platform. If I have HubSpot, why am I not also putting my website there? It just doesn't make sense to not have it all on under one roof.

George B. Thomas: Totally agree.

Liz Moorehead: So yes, I did have another question. So here's what I wanna throw out to the group. One of the things that we've talked a lot in previous episodes, and George you talk about this all the time is the fact that at its core, HubSpot whether you're when you're looking across the hubs is a CRM. So what is that need from a CMS on top of a CRM? What superpowers come with that?

And just so we're all clear, right? CMS, that's our that's your content management system, CRM, that's your, that's your customer relationship management system. I know we're throwing out a lot of acronyms, it's like we're in my hometown of DC, people talking about all the different acronyms that they work for, but Luke can you talk to me a bit about that?

Luke Summerfield: Yeah. And I think it's CMS. And I'm gonna get techie for a second. When you think of any CMS, there's basically 2 layers that you talk about. There's the data layer that's, like, all the information, all the content, all the bits and bytes in WordPress that would be like your MySQL database that's storing all this data inside of it.

And then you have the presentation layer, which is the visual layer that when someone comes to the site, what do they actually see. And so I think it's important that we do have a CMS that's living on top of the CRM. And, basically, what we've done is turned our CRM into that data layer. And so the beauty of that is a couple things. 1, for anyone who's used our CRM, you know that for mere mortals, non techie people, it's quite a bit easier to use than jumping into a MySQL database and trying to make updates to a database.

So it empowers your team to be able to go into the CRM, update data, and sync data from other systems very easily using things like OpsHub to be able to have, like, a source of truth of all of your customer data and have it in a way that's easily usable by your team, easily usable and modifiable. Then we're able to pull that data up into the presentation layer and dynamically change the experience on the site based off of the CRM data that we have. And there's a couple ways that we can do that. We have marketer tools to do that. We have developer related tools to do that.

If I touch on one that, I'll I'll talk about the developer one because I I think probably some of y'all are more familiar with the marketer, the smart content. So maybe one of y'all can chime in if you've used that before. But

Liz Moorehead: I know Devon wants to talk about that for sure. Look at that face. I can't see, but oh my god.

Luke Summerfield: The grin. So the developer side, again, getting a little techie here. Essentially, you're able to use languages like GraphQL to query any data within the CRM and pull that data up into that presentation layer and display it so that's uniquely for that individual. So I'll give you a concrete example for those listening. Imagine that you have a bunch of realtors who are using your CRM, and they have a bunch of things like realty listings, they have the realtors, you have, you know, your customers or your prospects, you know, basically your contacts property, You can now create associations between all these things.

When a customer comes to your website and they favorite one of the properties or they like one of the properties, that gets stored on their contact record. There's an association created between the property, and there's an association that's created between the realtor who manages that property. Then we can pull all that information back up. And the next time that someone visits the site, we can dynamically change everything around it knowing that there's those associations with the person coming to the site. So, again, a little techie, but, kind of the developer angle of how to do some of this personalization stuff.

And where it gets real powerful is, you know, again, if you use the CRM and you use the CMS, and that's it, you don't use any other hubs, you don't use any other outside systems. Like, there's some value there in terms of, like, you can get into the data on the CRM side and update it and make all these connections that we talked about. Gets more powerful when you also have your marketing automation tool, Marketing Hub, also feeding data into that unified data layer, and you have your sales rep and your service reps all using it and all feeding into that unified data layer. Now you can get even more complex experiences on the site. Enrich it with third party data, not 3rd party data, but external data sources, like if you have a DRP.

Having that unified data layer, again, is just like your your source of truth, your snapshot, and gets super, super powerful for bubbling that up to the experiences you build on top of, you know, your website.

Liz Moorehead: That's amazing. Now let's let's go back to the other's piece of this, though. George, I know you wanna chime in here, but I wanna have Devin talk for a moment about the thing that loop teed up, which is smart content.

Devyn Bellamy: Smart content is, to me, one of the greatest unsung heroes on the Internet, let alone Hub Spot CMS. If you wanted to have a message and position it in 2 different ways for 2 different groups of people. And they go to the website, you know, someone has dropped information on a form, and so now you know that this person works in vertical a where another verse person works in vertical b. You can change the content based on their form submission, which is, like, the sexiest and simplest thing that a marketer with no developer experience, someone who's who doesn't have custom objects set up, someone who doesn't have anything special going on in their their setup, this is something you can do out of the box. And you can do it even without having the cookie dropped.

You can do it by region. You can do it by time zone. You can do it by language, though I don't recommend that one because issues with, SEO can prop up later. I'll give you an example. I used to work in and I I talk about this a lot.

I I I used to do marketing for a shower base manufacturer. And I know that the military has completely different nomenclature for shower bases than a university, and they both have different nomenclature for shower bases than, a mental health institution. And so we have all these different verticals, have all these different nomenclature. What I can do is I can make it so people can identify which vertical they're in, and then tailor the language, not completely change it. Just tailored enough that it makes sense to them.

So instead of saying shower base, I'll say shower pan. A very small change, but it means the world to the people who are working on it because I they say shower base actually means something completely different to someone else. They think it means the floor underneath what they call a shower pan. If you're shopping at Home Depot, Home Depot calls them shower pants. But regardless of what they call them, what I want is I want messaging that I can put in that will resonate with them.

If it's someone who is a repeat visitor, who has downloaded a whole bunch of my stuff, who has landed themselves on a smart list that says I should possibly be more aggressive with with my calls to action, Their website experience can be completely different than Joe Schmo off the street who is just pulling information off my website. That is one of my favorite out of the box, non nerdy things that you can do, like and what I mean nerdy, I mean nerd like like Luke, not nerd like George. But Woah. Woah.

Liz Moorehead: George is gonna have to lay down on his Davenport after that. Dang. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. I moved it out to the veranda after last week, by the way, too. So I'm good to go.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. George, stuck on the weather. It's not your turn yet. We'll get to you.

George B. Thomas: Alright. Let me put my cane to the side and get my candy.

Devyn Bellamy: I actually use a cane, but only when the weather is bad, my osteoarthritis acts up. But the thing is is that you can make an experience that resonates with your target audience out of the box. It's it's a functionality you don't need a developer for. And it's something that people know about in landing pages, something that people know about in email. But it's so criminally underutilized in the CMS product that you can, you know, change your website based on like, we could talk about Netflix, for example.

Most people don't know this, but if you look at my Netflix, and then look at, say, George's Netflix, it's going to be 2 completely different experiences, even if we're being recommended the same title because Netflix makes subtle changes based on demographics. Case in point, I'm going to see a whole lot of black people in the thumbnails even if it's a black guy who was in the minute in the movie for 6 minutes. And the reason is is because Netflix knows, surprise, I'm a black guy. And I'm probably gonna try and get content that resonates with me, as opposed to George is not. And so he's going to have content that has people with him in it.

And that's a thing that most people don't think about because they're so into their own experience, but my Facebook looks completely different than George's Facebook. My Internet experience is different than his just because of how we use the Internet and who we are demographically. There's no reason why you can't do that too in order to create something that resonates with your audience.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Put me in, coach. Put me in, coach. Come on.

Liz Moorehead: Put me in. It's time to rise off the Davenport. Rise off the Davenport. Let's do it. George Lettrick.

George B. Thomas: A nap. I took a nap. I'm excited. Listen. Here's the deal.

Like, if you're listening to this and you still think of your website as a brochure, even if you just think of your website as just a website, you need to listen to the words that are about to come out of my mouth. Everything in your being, your fiber needs to realize that, no, it is an experience. And if you start to think about experience and what Devon laid down about smart content, and And if you listen to what Luke was talking about, which by in my simple brain, if I simplify it, it's literally streamlined intelligence. And if you can take that intelligence and that smart content, you can start to create these experiences specific to the humans that you're actually helping. And by the way, when you customize experience for the humans, I'm just saying that's when the cash register rings and you start to drive revenue, ladies and gentlemen.

Let me tell you. I got a little bit of a story here. Because, Devin, you talked about the content, the language. Let's imagine for a second there was a website. I don't know.

We'll call it hub heroes.com. Let's imagine that you could actually get badges. And because you got a badge, you got added to a list. Not only could I change the language, I can change the color scheme, the sections you see and don't see, the new content that you're provided because you're a member or not a member. Like, the power that you have to create any type of experience, it's not a website.

It is literally your 247 store, your 247 sales rep, your 247 theater that you can bring people into. I'm gonna cut it down. Somebody else take the mic.

Liz Moorehead: I don't know about you all, but did did we just go to marketing church? Did that just happen?

Luke Summerfield: I'm gonna riff on what George was saying for a minute because I think this was, like, a big epiphany for me and a big epiphany for us at HubSpot was for years, we've sort of grown up that, like, hey, the website is to generate leads, generate visitors. It's for, like, top of the funnel marketing and, like, that's where that's where we're gonna that's where we're gonna focus our energy. And it's kinda like blinders on as marketers. I I grew up as a marketer. It's like kinda blinders on as a marketer that that's like the purpose of the site.

And although that's true and although that's probably the best place to start depending on your goals, that's such a limited view on the power of how you can leverage your website. What we found is that we think of the terms of digital experiences like George was talking about. Those digital experiences aren't limited to just the main corporate.com marketing site. And so what we've seen at HubSpot with our customers is folks using CMS Hub for all kinds of different types of experiences from building event platforms on top of it, to building members' subscription sites like George was alluding to, dedicated regional sites or product launch sites, learning management systems, and course sites. You could have intranets.

We have customers that do internal sites for their employees, for employee onboarding and employee enablement sites, portals, partner relationship management portals. If you have a partner program and you need to, like, onboard new partners and give them access, you can build those are all, like, different experiences that you can build that CMS can power. And right? So there's there's this whole idea of, like, we have a lot of customers that, like, their main corporate.com. They're like, we just redesigned it.

It's gonna be a massive thing. We're, like, not ready to, like, tackle another redesign right now. Totally cool. You could still use CMS Hub in all different ways to empower these other teams and just think about other parts of the flywheel where there's an experience that you need to power. So I think, you know, George, you're spot on with the different different ways to think about your site in terms just think of it like an experience, not just a marketing brochure.

Devyn Bellamy: And and you can do all of those things without having bloated JS and bloated CSS in the background. You can do all of these things with the I don't know if any of you guys remember what it was like buying a computer in the nineties and early 2 1,000, but it came with everything you don't need, and it was immediately slow. If you bought a computer, the first thing you did for the first three hours was take everything that the manufacturer installed off of it. That's what it's like running with a lot of the free web 1,000 things that you use the different aspects of the website for, which is how you 1,000 things that you use the different aspects of the website for, which is how you slow down. With HubSpot, that's not something you have to worry about.

Liz Moorehead: So I wanna pivot the conversation here. I wanna pivot a bit because we have waxed poetic about so many incredible things about the CMS hub. Right? We've talked about security. We've talked about drag and drop.

We've talked about accessibility. George talked about membership and doing all of these really fantastic things. We talked about smart content, but I wanna talk about some of the ways it can go wrong, some of the mistakes that people can make. And I actually wanna start this discussion because it actually piggybacks off of the thing that I said I love, right? It is so easy to use.

It is so accessible. It reminds me of Jurassic Park sometimes of just because you can doesn't mean you should. How many of you have ever succumb to this urge yourself or work for people who do not understand that this is something that's not good? You do testing, but you don't run the tests long enough. You're constantly tinkering and changing, you're not making smart iterations based on data, feedback.

You're doing it on guts and assumptions. So I think the most common mistake that people make is that before they get the keys to the HubSpot Corvette that is being pulled up to their driveway, they're not sitting there having the conversations about how we're not going to crash it. How are we going to make sure that when we decide to make changes that's with proper governance, it's with proper reasoning and feedback. I'm not saying introduce tons of bureaucracy and red tape, but I have seen things where it's like my dudes, my sisters and brothers in HubSpot Church, can we please stop touching something and let it run? That's the one of the number one things I've seen.

George B. Thomas: Man, I don't know who wants to follow that. I think that was, like, church 2.0 right there for a minute. But but here's the thing. I do wanna double down on some things that I think go in this place of mistakes too. One is I'll be like, hey.

Are you using the HubSpot CMS? And they'll be like, yes. And I'll go and look, and they'll actually be on old school HubSpot templates. And I'll be like, oh, honey. Let's talk because I'm about to change your world.

And and, honestly, like, probably a good 70% of my business since I started George b Thomas LLC has either been migrating people to HubSpot CMS or migrating people from templates to themes. Because going from templates to themes dramatically changes the things that you're maybe doing wrong. But, also, even when I get people into themes, there's still some things I wanna talk about HubSpot CMS and what they might be doing wrong. 1 is maybe a feature that you don't know exists is that they are not going into the content tab and actually renaming their sections and modules so that they make sense to what people why there's 3 image modules. Well, those there's there's supposed to be certain things you can rename them.

Right? So do doing that. Also, the amount of people that are not using saved sections to actually duplicate parts of their website across, like, pages with ease is absolutely mind blowing to me. When I go in and show people, look. I can create an entire pillar page functionality section that you can now drop on the next 5, 7 pillar pages that you create over time with that nice little sticky table of contents that you don't have to worry about building.

They're like, oh my god. It's the second coming of Jesus or something. No. It's a saved section in HubSpot. That's all it is.

And here's the other thing that drives me nuts. When you have this much power that we've talked about is that you're not thinking mobile first and not to beat a broken drum, but the fact that user experience properly, and you're not thinking about experience and the mobile user because we're all busy and we're all on the move.

Luke Summerfield: I'll I'll definitely second the, the templates and themes. Again, in 2020, when we relaunched it, that's when we switched to the theme concept, and it is it is literally a different product, 2020 and beyond. So if you haven't taken a look at it, if you looked in the past, if you built your site pre 2020, it's worth another look at what it does today. I'll give one quick quick pet peeve of mine, in addition to what George was saying and then Devon, you got something to add. The the one that just and this is not CMS specific.

This is not CMS subspecific. It is using bad best practices for speed and performance, uploading 2 megabyte images, having, like, 6 widgets all triggering at the same time on a page, having a video embed with a chat, with 4 CTAs in a form and this and that. There's just very, very simple we hear the feedback a lot of times. We're like, man, my site's running slow. Like, what can I do to improve it?

And it's 9 times out of 10, it's just use good best practices because the things they're tripping up on are gonna trip you up on any CMS, not necessarily exclusive to CMS Hub.

Devyn Bellamy: Yeah. Absolutely. And to go along in the same vein, waiting for the site to be, quote, unquote, finished before you launch it. Hey. Your site's never going to be if you're doing it right, your site's never gonna be finished.

Your site is something that's supposed to grow and be iterated upon, and you can get stuck in analysis paralysis and try and nitpick until you're done. If only there were some sort of methodology that you can, I don't know, apply the growth driven mentality to your design, then

Liz Moorehead: just if you need a, like, a launchpad? Yes. And then you move on from

George B. Thomas: there.

Luke Summerfield: Sort of like a

Devyn Bellamy: launchpad website that covers the core of what it is that you need in order to function online and then iterate and grow from there and and and just, you know, progress in sprints. That I think that's that's a really helpful idea. And and like like Luke, said, these these aren't just specific to HubSpot CMS. These are best practices in general. If if you want to be successful, it's basically like waiting to get in the water before you learn how to swim.

It's it's like you you or learning how to swim before you get in the water, I should say. It it doesn't it it's not gonna work. You can't do it. You you gotta get out there and then build. Now, on the flip side, like Liz said, what you don't wanna do is over iterate and constantly tinker and toy with this thing.

You you wanna build, wait, analyze, repeat. But, yeah, that's that's, I'd say, one of the biggest mistakes people make in general along with the absolute gold of 2 megabyte images uploading to the website, like non optimized images, uploading GIFs that are 3 megabytes that could just as easily be a vector file. It's like

George B. Thomas: Ladies and gentlemen, first of all, learn what, WebP and SVG graphics are, please. If you don't do anything else after this episode, learn what those are. And by the way, Devin, the icing on the cake, it would be great if we lived in a world that you could actually get a certification on that whole, like, launchpad growth design thingy. That would be amazing. HubSpot Academy should think about doing a growth driven design certification that people could take to do what we're actually talking about today.

Luke Summerfield: That would be nice.

Liz Moorehead: There is one. I'll link it. I was gonna say something quippy, but at that point, I think the shtick had already gone too far. Okay. So, two two points of order here because I wanna bring this conversation to a close.

Number 1, all is in favor of Luke coming back and talking about this mythical, wondrous, beautiful thing called growth driven design. All please say, I.

Devyn Bellamy: I. I.

Liz Moorehead: Motion carries. Fantastic. We'll have you back with Now, Luke, you were promised you're gonna crack open your little orange sprocket fortune cookie for us. What's the future hold for HubSpot, CMS? Whatever you got, Muffin.

What do you what do you wanna share?

Luke Summerfield: I mean, I I think a lot of the things that make us unique is really what we're gonna continue doing. Right? It's it's helping marketers, empowering them to build personalized experiences that drive business growth. It's finding balance between the power for developers and the easy use for marketers. And so there's a number of areas we're exploring.

One area exploring, I probably anyone listening here, you probably have are sick of chat gpt at this point and what generative AI possibilities are out there, but that is a world that we're looking, and exploring into on how we can empower HubSpot customers in CMS Hub, but also across all of the platform to empower them, through some of these new technologies. There's another area that's booming right now, which is the world of digital commerce, ecommerce. And I think there's a lot of opportunity that we can help our customers do commerce better, whether they're doing it a 100% in HubSpot or whether they're using dedicated tools. There's a lot of work for us to do there, and so that's a big place that we're exploring as well. The, some of the other areas, I think, that's exciting maybe for some of the more techy folks down here.

You know, again, trying to do more for the developers. There's a world we're working towards, see when we get there, that we're exploring where, you know, today, you can build that presentation layer that we talked about using a lot of the things built into HubSpot today, things like Hubbell and, obviously, CSS and HTML. And we're working towards a world where you can build the entire front end in JavaScript, and you can have fast static front end presentation layer websites all built in React. And so that's, like, an interesting thing that we announced at the last developer day in October, and we're making good progress on a beta there. And so, I don't think if there's any other, like, juicy ones I could I could, throw out here for you.

Are there any, like, areas

George B. Thomas: Get in trouble. Don't don't get in trouble.

Luke Summerfield: Are there any, juicy areas that are on your minds that you're like, man, I love seeing myself to be able to do this?

George B. Thomas: I I mean, to be honest with you, when you said, like, ecom and HubSpot CMS has started to like that gets me excited. Like, for years, I'm like, I wonder if there'll ever be, like, an Ecom hub that you can actually, like, plug in. And I love payments, by the way, and and and steps that were going with payments, and I think maybe that's the the child that might grow up to a teenager and an adult in the future. So that excites me. So Yeah.

Luke Summerfield: It's early early days. I mean, we're we're there's a lot you can do in the commerce space from, you know, events to full blown shopping systems to

George B. Thomas: subscription system. There's a lot we can do.

Luke Summerfield: So it's early days, but

George B. Thomas: we know that

Luke Summerfield: there's a lot of

Devyn Bellamy: I almost started drooling. I may have, at one point, had to design an entire product catalog using Hubbell and HubDB in order to have a dynamic product catalog of shower bases. So that, and and shower accessories. So the idea of, ecommerce and the product catalog website having native functionality in HubSpot CMS, it it brings me great joy in and around my heart.

Luke Summerfield: I'll give you one last quick hit one that just came to my mind. The other thing that we've been investing a lot in the last year is our ecosystem around our marketplace and the themes and the assets that are available in the marketplace for you to download for free and paid. We are working on the ability to, I would say, by the end of the year, to be able to do individual modules. So if you need an individual module, pop in there, find the module they need, download it in. So it's just gonna open the door to, like, basically, you know, adding and adjusting and and, you know, building out your site iteratively, as you need 1 module at a time.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. We might need a minute after that. But here's the thing. Liz, before we close, I wanna reask this question because you asked what does the future hold for HubSpot CMS? Where I wanna go with that is I want the listeners to ask themselves, what does the future hold for HubSpot CMS if it's my website?

What are all the things that I've heard the hub heroes tell me, the hub hero in training, the hub hero in my organization that I can be like, man, the future with HubSpot CMS would equal xyzabc123 for me. That's what I wanna leave him thinking about.

Liz Moorehead: That's way more profound than what I'm gonna leave everybody with. Because guess what I did? Luke sparked Luke sparked a fire with me in me to bring back my great chat gbt haiku writing machine. I feel like this is gonna become a periodic feature. So I had chat gbt while you guys were spitting fire, write haikus about each of you.

Write me a haiku about Luke Summerfield and HubSpot. Amidst HubSpot's growth, Luke Summerfield's brilliance glows, marketing magic. We got 2 more. I'm very excited about these. Write a haiku about Devin Bellamy being my favorite hub hero.

Devin Bellamy, my favorite hub hero shines. Bright like inbound stars. Finally, write me a haiku about George b Thomas and Werther's Originals candies. George b Thomas rocks. Werther's Originals in hand.

Sweetness in his talks.

George B. Thomas: Oh, yeah. I'll take that, but Oh,

Devyn Bellamy: that's okay. Came out pretty dope. Yeah. I'm

Liz Moorehead: a little mad about it, but it works. I almost wrote back be meaner. Try again, but I'm not gonna do that. I don't wanna say he's old. No kidding.

Anyway, and with that, thank you so much for joining us today, Luke. You are amazing. There was a lot of fire spit in this episode. Luke, if anybody wants to find you, connect with you, ask you more questions, where can they find you?

Luke Summerfield: LinkedIn's the best. You can shoot shoot me a message on LinkedIn or connect on LinkedIn, and and, would love to love to chat with folks.

Liz Moorehead: Fantastic. And to all of our listeners out there, thank you as always for listening to us each and every week. If you have a topic you want us to cover, let us know. If you have a haiku request let me know. If you wanna tell us how stinking smart and amazing we are go do that in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your provider is because homies we love reviews and I told you I have a goal of 50 reviews this year.

Let's get that number happening so more people have the chance to become hub heroes like you. And that's it, guys. Get off my recording line. Goodbye.

George B. Thomas: Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes dot com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials, and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.