HubSpot vs. CMS – what can HubSpot do that a CMS can’t?

We have the privilege of meeting many talented marketers who just want to get on with the job of doing Content Marketing. To help you communicate the pros and cons of HubSpot compared to other website CMS tools to your internal stakeholders we've prepared this article. Hope it helps!

What is a CMS?

A Content Management System (or engine) is a database that holds content (usually images and copy) and allows marketers to administrate changes and updates to this content on their company websites. There are thousands of CMS's around, and they all do the basic job of allowing you to add, edit and delete content from your website. Most CMS’s these days have plugins or modules that can be added so you can increase the functionality of your site without incurring major rebuilds, but they still require techie input to update. Wordpress is a great example of this. CMS’s do not allow you to do email marketing or post to social media, and they don’t provide you with any guidance on page performance and SEO – you need to know what to do here, or trust your developer has got it right.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is an inbound marketing software platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads and close customers all in one place. HubSpot software includes all the tools you need to do inbound marketing – a CMS, blogging, email, social media, landing pages, forms, marketing automation, SEO and analytics. All this functionality can be replicated using other tools and existing platforms, but you won’t reach the level of cohesiveness that you will with HubSpot.

So the difference is, HubSpot allows you to add, edit and delete your usual website content, plus produce premium content campaigns including customised landing pages, forms & CTAs and all the blogging and social media posting that goes along with it – from one place (and without developer input). As well as all this, the data about your prospects is recorded in HubSpot as they interact with this content – so you can understand what content & channels resonate most with your personas. Then you can start using this information to develop content that will help nurture them along the path to ‘purchase’.

Tools such as workflows and lead scoring allow you to be really smart with what and when you present content to people. And email, social media publishing and advanced SEO tools are built into HubSpot, so you can plan, schedule and control messaging easily, quickly and to SEO best practice with no outside help.

What are the key differences?

HubSpot:

Email and Social Media publishing tools: easier to plan, schedule and control messaging
Advanced SEO and analytics tools
Landing pages, forms, and marketing automation tools
Workflows and lead scoring tools
Provide the data about prospects and content they interact with
Allows you to produce premium content campaigns including customised landing pages, forms & CTAs and all the blogging and social media posting.

CMS / Stand-alone solutions

Ability to add plugins or modules to increase functionality, nature and ease of which depends on the CMS you're using
Third party integration required to CRM
Basic reporting via GA code
CMS's typically do not run email programmes or databases
Social sharing is via third party API's
No one place for monitoring and analysis of website, social and email performance - need to use disparate tools.

Can I continue to use my existing CMS if I go with HubSpot?

Yes, however most marketers want to consolidate their marketing efforts into as few tools as possible, so that they can spend more time producing content and doing their jobs, and less time managing software or moving data around. The HubSpot all-in-one, integrated marketing system includes a full content management system for this reason.

However, if you would like to continue hosting your website on your existing CMS, we will provide you with a snippet of JavaScript code to place on your website. This code is similar to that of other analytics packages, and will report information on your visitors and their behaviour back to HubSpot. This code is what powers HubSpot's analytics and lead intelligence systems.

HubSpot has a great page on their website that runs you through a comparison between HubSpot and Wordpress.

For more information http://www.hubspot.com/products/faq/hubspot-vs-wordpress-cms