HubSpot CMS for Marketers - Certification Course Notes & Takeaways

This article will go over some of the concepts in the HubSpot course "HubSpot CMS for Marketers"

What Can You Do With HubSpot CMS?

  • Create Content
  • Get found online
  • Develop experiences
  • Capture leads
  • Gain insights

Fundamentals of the HubSpot CMS

Best Practices for Creating a Website with CMS Hub:

  • Use as few themes as possible
    • This is to ensure consistency across your site
  • Set global theme styles first
    • This is to save time in the long run and also help with consistency
  • Use appropriate image sizes
    • This assists not only with page loading times but overall visuals on any given page
  • Limit the number of fonts
    • Again in the name of consistency
  • Set system page and blog templates
    • Navigate to these settings through Settings > Website > Pages > System Pages  and Settings > Website > Blog > Templates respectively.
  • Go to Settings > Marketing > Email > Configuration to set your brand's colors through the color picker

Templates control the style and functionality of pages; the same template can be used to create many different pages.

Themes are collections of assets that enable a marketer-friendly content editing experience

Fundamentals of a Great Website User Experience

Job's Theory or the Jobs to be Done framework can be applied to this with the idea that people have jobs in their life that need to be done, and they “hire” the best product or service to do it.

User Experience can be classified as how a person feels with interacting with a system.

A very important piece of knowledge to remember when creating a great user experience is that it will be an ongoing process with constant iteration. Not only can your user's change in their interests from time to time but keeping things fresh and nice to look at will assist in giving user's an excellent experience.

Creating Pages in the HubSpot CMS

There are three main characteristics of a good website page: Descriptive, Clear, and Well Designed. Keeping these in mind will help generate great webpages that are helpful to the user and easy to navigate.

The purpose of landing pages is to convert visitors into leads by collecting their information with forms.

Don't forget that creating blog posts is a great way to improve your SEO.

Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines in HubSpot

Search engines rank content in the order of Discovery (when search engine bots crawl your content) > Relevance (indexing based on signals like keywords) > Authority (which will be determined by the crawl and then give your site a ranking in the given search engine)

Analyzing Your Website Performance in the HubSpot CMS

The first question you should ask before starting to gather and analyze data about your website is “What is my main goal for my website and what metrics can I track to help me achieve it?”

Regularly checking your website and traffic analytics reports and asking what you can do to improve those numbers is a crucial and constant step to be taking when analyzing your site's performance. 

Organizing and Managing Assets in the HubSpot CMS

The greatest advantages to maintaining a well organized CMS are that it makes it easier to find what you need and make changes quickly, keep your website up to date and relevant, to collaborate with your team and to report on your website performance.

Another important thing to remember is that while archiving content and publishing content go hand and hand they are not the same thing. Unpublishing it will remove it from your website entirely while archiving it will make it harder to find but still be accessible on the site.

Using the HubSpot CRM With the CMS

Information about your website visitors is entered into the CRM by a visitor filling out a form on your website and then tracking their activity.

Smart content can use the following characteristics: Country, Contact lifecycle stage, and Device Type.

Avoid using smart content in your blog posts. This can confuse RSS readers and have a negative impact on your SEO.