Episode 198: HubSpot CMS Hub

Welcome to HubShots Episode 198: HubSpot CMS Hub

This episode we chat about HubSpot’s new HubSpot CMS Hub tiers - Professional and Enterprise. Plus an interesting fact about what Google does with descriptions.

Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/198-hubspot-cms-hub

Welcome to HubShots - APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast - where we discuss HubSpot tips & tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

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Recorded: Thursday 09 April 2020 | Published: Friday 17 April 2020

Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Connect with us on LinkedIn

Connect with Ian on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjacobau/

Connect with Craig on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigbailey/

Shoutout to Alex and Henry - thanks for listening!

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

HubSpot CMS Hub

https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/cms

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/introducing-cms-hub

There is now HubSpot CMS Hub Professional and HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise.

We are very happy to see this - we’ve chatted about this previously in episode 188:

https://www.hubshots.com/episodes/episode-188

Overview:

• Existing HubSpot CMS = HubSpot CMS Professional
• HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise = a bunch of new features including: reverse proxy support, serverless functions, code alerts, Plus some Marketing Hub Enterprise features including Memberships, Content partitioning and Multiple domains

Note: there’s no Starter version

Here is something common most people would ask about between CMS & Wordpress

https://www.hubspot.com/products/cms/best/wordpress-alternatives

Shot 3: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

HubSpot Quotes

Nothing new in the last few weeks, but happy to say they are really working well now. If you’ve previously held off using Quotes because they weren’t as feature-rich as you were hoping for, perhaps it’s time to take another look.

All our key frustrations have been resolved including the ability to recall and edit.

We’re still waiting for automatic tax lines to be added.

Shot 4: HubSpot Extra of the Week

Good to see the HubSpot team still pushing out the product updates videos from their homes

https://www.hubspot.com/product-updates/march-2020-hubspot-updates-in-less-time-than-a-coffee-break

Shot 5: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Multiple HubSpot login accounts?

How to consolidate multiple logins?

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account/how-do-i-change-the-email-address-of-a-user

Shot 6: Marketing Tip of the Week

Desktop traffic on the increase, mobile dropping

https://twitter.com/izzionfire/status/1247184232310603776

Check your ad campaigns - you likely have optimised for mobile previously, check your stats and consider testing desktop again. Also important if you’ve let FB decide about what to target - machine learning may have carryover trends that still focus on mobile.

Adobe Summit

It is online and free

https://www.adobe.com/summit.html

Shot 7: Insight of the Week

Scanning patterns - how people ‘read’ web pages

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-people-read-online/

Key takeaway: people don’t read detail, they scan

Interesting thoughts about targeted advertising

https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/

Meanwhile advertising revenue looks to be on the decline due to advertisers pulling back on spending

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/facebook-google-ad-revenue-loss-coronavirus-1203544502/

Shot 8: HubSpot Prediction of the Week

HubSpot CMS Hub sells really well.

Shot 9: Resource of the Week

Paddy Moogan’s Link Building Book

https://www.aira.net/link-building-book/

Google Rewrites Meta descriptions 62% of the time:

https://ahrefs.com/blog/meta-description-study/

Snap Camera:

https://snapcamera.snapchat.com/

Shot 10: Quote of the Week

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful...that’s what matters to me.”

• Steve Jobs

Shot 11: Bonus Links of the Week

Auction of your expiring domains:

https://nameliquidate.com/

Where Google sources its Knowledge panel data from:

https://tools.kalicube.pro/trusted-sources

Via Jason Barnard

https://twitter.com/jasonmbarnard/status/1242863171339268097

Marketing is hard right now:

https://sparktoro.com/blog/marketing-right-now-is-hard/

How to analyse Google Analytics trends

https://www.lovesdata.com/blog/google-analytics-trends

Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript of the Episode

- [Ian] Hi everyone. Welcome to HubShots episode 198. In this episode we talk about HupSpot's CMS tiers new professional Enterprise, plus an interesting fact about what Google does with descriptions. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot focused podcast where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing yourselves and marking results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you Craig?

- [Craig] Oh really well. And wow, what a race it has been to the end of the week. Of course, Easter coming up, we're recording this on Thursday the 9th of April. So tomorrow's a public holiday. It's just been full on lately. How's your workload been? It seems like clients just want to get a whole ton of stuff done before Easter.

- [Ian] It's definitely ramping up, I have to say. And let's believe and hope this is going to continue.

- [Craig] Absolutely. And you know, I just want to give a shout out to Alex and Henry, our new listeners to the show. You know who you are. I said I'd give you a shout-out. Thanks for listening guys.

- [Ian] Personally thank you to everyone for connecting with us and again, we would love to say please do connect with us on LinkedIn. Send us a message say you listen to the show. It really does make our days. And we'd also in this time love to help you guys out wherever you need help. So please connect with us on LinkedIn. Now Craig, we'd usually have an inbound thought of the week. But we're going to call it the HubSpot marketing feature of the week right. Because HubSpot has delivered a new CMS product essentially under the cover of darkness.

- [Craig] Yeah, a soft launch that everyone in the company is talking about to everyone so I always find that interesting. But I love the way HubSpot promotes their stuff in the market. But yeah, this is their CMS, HubSpot CMS. And I think they're just re-badging it, spitting it out into a Pro and an Enterprise tier, which I think is excellent. We covered this back in episode 188 how we'd like to see this. It positions it much more clearly for mid-market and Enterprise customers. And essentially the existing CMS, if you've already got the website add-on, that's basically the Pro product now. And they've put this new tier in, which is Enterprise which adds a few new features and also enables a few features that previously you had to have Marketing Enterprise for. So look, I think this is a really good move. What are your thoughts Ian?

- [Ian] I can only look at it from face value currently but I think it is a great move and the more and more we use HubSpot CMS the more and more people often come back to me and say, "Wow, this is so good to use." I've got the customers that use it and they love it. They don't know what they could do with not having it.

- [Craig] Yeah, that's right. And if our listeners remember back in episode 188 when we were chatting about this, we've actually had a client, they're on HubSpot CMS but they were very hesitant before because it was almost too cheap, to use their own words. And the good thing about HubSpot CMS Hub Enterprise is it's reassuringly expensive, so I think it's in the $1000 a month tier and above, depending on which region you're in. I think this is a good move, it just makes it clear. But interesting there's no HubSpot CMS Hub Starter. I guess we got that prediction wrong.

- [Ian] Well, you never know. We might have a Hub Starter come time around inbound, which will fill out the entire suite.

- [Craig] I thought they might've had a Starter edition that just had the blog landing pages but you know. Anyway, exciting times.

- [Ian] There you go. So have a look if you're interested because I think there's some great things to be had. Now we also include a link in there because often people will say, "Why should I use HubSpot CMS "when I can just use WordPress?" So there HubSpot have built a great pillar page about the differences and why you would consider one over the other. And so I'd encourage you to actually read that and get an understanding of why that's different or why you would use it in what scenarios. So the link is in the show notes for that. All right Craig, onto our HubSpot sales feature of the week. And we're talking about HubSpot quotes again. And we talked about this last week because they rolled out quotes for in the startup package you to trial for 90 days, so you can actually try it out. But what we're seeing is it's getting improved on a one would say monthly basis and we're actually getting a far better product ongoing aren't we?

- [Craig] Oh that's right. And the reason I wanted to talk about it in the show this week because we've talked about it before when they made some enhancements. So there's nothing new to report this week, or nothing new in feature-wise, but it is new I think, behavior-wise. We've actually using it now happily in our agency to compare quotes and spin them out pretty quickly.

- [Ian] Yes.

- [Craig] Over previously we were using Xero quotes within our accounting package. And I really like it because we still use Aquila for proposals, big proposals, but for quotes, yeah, we're actually now moving to HubSpot. And it's because it's solved all those frustrations I had before that you couldn't record or quote or edit it once you'd sent it, all those kinds of things. I think it's pretty fully featured now. So just a reminder to people who might've already been still been stuck with disappointment in the quoting tool. I think it's really good now. So maybe time to reconsider. And the only thing I'm still waiting for is automatic tax lines. But that's fine, I can do it as a manual entry for now.

- [Ian] And I think there is a feature request for that to come in.

- [Craig] Oh, there's been plenty of feature requests for that. But yeah, look I think it's really good so just a reminder, get to use it if you've got Sales Pro. Or you've got the trial, yeah, no use it. I think you'll really like it.

- [Ian] All right. Our HubSpot extra of the week Craig?

- [Craig] You know what? It's so good just to see the product team pushing out their monthly product updates. You know the HubSpot product updates blog. And they're all at home, you can see their backgrounds and they're still pushing them out. I really like it And I think it just kind of gives an insight. I think after this whole period it will normalize this idea that you can just be at home with kids running around in the background and you don't have to look super professional. And like people just realize, "Oh, you're actually real."

- [Ian] That's right.

- [Craig] You don't have to put on this facade. Well we do with our backgrounds. But yeah, look, I'm really enjoying their updates and just seeing people being real.

- [Ian] You can really tell that people have embraced this and you know that people are real. So I would say just run with it like I'm running with it right now. And then you can work it out. How's our Gotcha of the Week Craig?

- [Craig] This is a nice little find and thanks for helping me out with this. I had a question from a client, "Can we have multiple email addresses on a HubSpot account?" So they've set up their HubSpot account with say their work email. And then they've been invited to another portal with another email address. And so effectively they're going to be setting up two different HubSpot accounts. And I was like, "Oh, I wonder if we can consolidate them?" And I was like, "Oh well, "maybe they should invite you into the other portal "with that main work account, et cetera." But actually you highlighted on your profile, your HubSpot profile, you can actually go in and set an email alias and add other email addresses into that account as well. So that's a really good, I actually haven't tried it yet but that was a great find and overcomes a bit of a frustration that one of our clients was having. And this is the thing. You kind of dig into all the settings in HubSpot and you just find someone's probably thought of this problem before and they've got a solution for it.

- [Ian] And Craig, that's the thing. This came out of a problem that we had with somebody that was shifting emails of different domains. So they had a .com and they want to move into a .com.au and to standardize all their email addresses. And that's when I found out about this with HubSpot support and that's why I included the link in the show notes. Now Craig, what's the marketing tip of the Week?

- [Craig] You know, I like to pay attention to what's happening very at the moment and I've been seeing on Twitter and in other areas people talking about the move back to desktop. So people's behaviors changing and they're less on their mobiles for work stuff and website pieces and more on desktops. I thought, "Oh wow. "This is really interesting behavior change for, "well, for a few reasons." One, it might change how you lay out landing pages, things like that, But also your ad campaigns. You might find, well previously you've optimized for mobile or in-app campaigns. Maybe now is the time to test desktop again. And we actually are. We're actually going and testing this again because I thought it was interesting finding. However, and here's the reminder, don't just take on face value what you see people sharing on social because I went through a whole bunch of our accounts to check if this was happening. Are we seeing a drop in mobile and a rise in desktop? And pretty much across all the accounts we're not seeing that behavior change. So we'll keep testing and we will always be mindful of these but the takeaway I think for people to listen to is well, wow, that could be an option, check in your account, your mileage may vary but don't just take blindly advice that you see people spouting on social.

- [Ian] Now Craig, another thing you wanted to highlight with this, there is the Adobe online Summit. And that's usually a paid for event that's now free.

- [Craig] It is. Free and online, so go and check it out. You can hear people talking about how Marketo is so good and then you can compare your HubSpot Enterprise experience to that.

- [Ian] All right. Onto our insights of the week Craig. Scanning patterns and how people read web pages. And this is a little piece of content from the NN group, right?

- [Craig] Yeah, Nielsen Group. And always good to see their research. And what they've done in this one is they've looked historically back over the last 10, or it might be more, 15 years at all the eye tracking studies that they've done, how people "read", I use "read" in quotes, website content and not much has changed. And what they're finding is people scan still and they don't read, they just scan. So always be mindful of that when you're laying out your pages. But the only thing that's really changed perhaps is in the design techniques people use. And so what they're noticing is a bit of a, it's a kind of a ladder scan that people have. They'll kind of look down a page, then across, then down, then back left, then down, then right. And they kind of ladder their way down a page. So interesting insight to read there. And they gave an example on the Apple site and that's why they have alternating product versus text content on pages. So just a little design theme to take into account there. Always interesting reading from the Nielsen Group. So a good little insight to consume when you get a chance.

- [Ian] And I think you're right. Like I was doing an audit today with somebody and looking at what was on their page and I went through all of this text. Came down and then discovered they had all of these links in what would generally put a call to action. And I just totally missed it because they had this chunk of text, then they had a picture and I just scanned my way down. I'm like, "What do I do after this?" And then I went, "Oh hang on, "there's like three different links here." I'm like, "Okay, we need to put a clear call to action "of what needs to take place." And then once we did that he was like, "Oh yeah, I see that." So just make it really easy, like exactly what this research report is saying that people are just scanning their way through. They're doing their first pass and they go up and look at something else then they come back down again. Just think about, always take a look at what you do when you're online. Just take a mental note and I think you'll discover very quickly you'll behave like a lot of other people.

- [Craig] Exactly.

- [Ian] Now, and something else Craig. In this given times we can see people with advertising revenue are pulling back on spending just want to give us some indication as to what's going on and how we can take advantage. Isn't that right?

- [Craig] Yeah, look. There's some interesting articles, we've linked to them in the shot seven. I think it's... I'd just like to add these for marketers to be reading. I think these are good insights. But the second of them is around how advertisers are pulling back and Google and Facebook look to be missing out on, I think it's 40 or 50 billion dollars worth of ad revenue this year because advertisers are pulling back. But then on the flip side there's another article, I've added this at the same time. Because there's this pushback against all the targeting that's going on and in fact the Wired article that we've linked to is someone raising I think, "Why don't we just ban targeted advertising?" Now it sounds extreme. I think it's a good article to read because I think it's a good conversation people need to be having and I think as marketers people need to be aware of that. You know how a couple of week ago we talked about Benedict Evans' prediction the next big thing is going to be legislation. And that's especially going to be the case in terms of marketing and privacy and advertising what we do there. And so you've got these two things. You've got pushback on targeted advertising. And then with the whole pandemic going on at the moment, people pulling out of advertising. So the landscape's going to change. It's going to be really interesting in three to six months to see how Google and Facebook have adapted. Anyway, interesting reading, I think thoughts for marketers to be considering now.

- [Ian] All right Craig, and onto our prediction of the week. We're going to call this the HubSpot Prediction.

- [Craig] Yeah, a no-brainer. Yeah.

- [Ian] Well what is it Craig?

- [Craig] My prediction is HubSpot's CMS hub is going to sell really well. I think the market is ready for it.

- [Ian] Yes.

- [Craig] And it's perfectly placed. Fits in there mid-tier to lower Enterprise in between WordPress at the bottom and Marketo and SitePro at the top. I think it's just going to do really well.

- [Ian] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's going to happen and again, we'll probably see a starter version of CMS coming in at some point in time to fill that suite of products that they have.

- [Craig] And actually, sorry I'll just say it, the reason I think it's going to sell really well is not because the product has changed but because the marketing positioning has changed, just the way they're packaging it, I think it's going to sell really well.

- [Ian] Absolutely. Now Craig, we spoke about in the show, how Google rewrites meta descriptions and that was an interesting stat.

- [Craig] Fascinating research from Ahrefs

- [Ian] Ahrefs.

- [Craig] Yeah, talking about how they analyzed just under 200,000 pages to see how Google either honored or rewrote the meta descriptions that those pages had. And staggeringly, I thought, staggeringly, more than 62%, almost 63% of the meta descriptions were rewritten by Google.

- [Ian] I know.

- [Craig] If you'd asked me I would've said, "Oh look, 20 to 30%." Two thirds are getting rewritten. So it raises of course the question, should you even bother with your meta descriptions? And I kind of feel like well, maybe your top ten pages be really clear but after that maybe it's not a good use of your time. But just interesting how Google is deciding what people want to know about, taking your website content and rewriting it for the best experience, in Google's eyes, for those people searching for it. So yeah.

- [Ian] Now Craig, you had something about Snap Camera.

- [Craig] Oh, have you seen this?

- [Ian] No I haven't.

- [Craig] Snap Camera. So you know Snapchat?

- [Ian] Yes.

- [Craig] How the app on mobile, you can have those filters.

- [Ian] Yes.

- [Craig] Overlays your face, baby face, all of that kind of thing. Well they've released a desktop product, Mac or Windows, called Snap Camera and you download it, it's an app.

- [Ian] Yeah right.

- [Craig] On your desktop. And then on Zoom or any web chat at all, you can basically set Snap Camera to be the source and basically it sits in between Zoom and your webcam and you can have all these filters play. So you can get on a Zoom call and apply all these Snapchat filters.

- [Craig] It's great. What better time now when everyone's at home and being real, you can actually put these silly little filters on. Anyway, just some fun.

- [Ian] All right Craig, our quote of the week. And this is from the late Steve Jobs and it says, "Being the richest man in the cemetery "does not matter to me. "Going to bed at night "saying we've done something wonderful, "that's what matters to me." Listen, we've got a lot of links in the show notes to interesting things that we're reading or have come across. So I would encourage you to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook and wherever it is and look at the show notes because there's a ton of gold in there. Do you want to share one Craig?

- [Craig] Oh look as always, we love Benjamin Mangold at Loves Data. He's got a little link on how to analyze Google Analytics trends. It's at the beginner level so if you're very familiar with Analytics this won't be for you but often marketers they don't know their way around Google Analytics that well. His does a great job of just talking you through how to set date ranges, how to check whether things are seasonal variations versus actually extreme variations. So yeah, well worth the read and yeah, a ton of links there. There's so many good things to read lately and we'll try and keep the show notes full of them.

- [Ian] And listeners again, thank you for listening to us. We hope that you have had a good Easter because you'll be listening to this after Easter, and you are all coping well and are all well and safe. And had a good time in isolation, like us all.

- [Craig] Hope you had some chocolate.

- [Ian] That's right. Hope the Easter Bunny was good to you. Again, connect with us on LinkedIn and like I've said, please feel free to reach out to us, we would love to help you in this time. Don't feel like you're not worthy to speak to us. I know a few people have said, "Oh, I'm not ready yet. "I don't feel right to talk to you guys." You know what? We're all starting at some place and we don't all have things together. Craig and me teach each other lots of things everyday so I'd encourage you to reach out. We will be more than happy to help you guys out wherever we can, or even introduce you to people who can help you out so don't be afraid. Please connect with us. Well Craig, until next time.

- [Craig] Catch you later Ian.

- [Announcer] Thank you for listening to this episode of HubShots. For show notes, resources, HubSpot news, including practical strategies you can implement, visit us at hubshots.com.