HubSpot’s software offering keeps improving and expanding as the needs of businesses do. Their latest addition to their series of software Hubs – Content Hub – is designed to sit at the centre of your content marketing strategy. Because let's face it: we're juggling more types of media across more channels than ever before, and "just post " isn't cutting it anymore (did it ever?).
Think of it as mission control for your content marketing strategy, designed to bring order and sanity where there once was chaos.
So, what is it, how does it work, and why should marketers consider investing in it?
HubSpot’s core message of Content Hub is short and snappy:
‘Content Hub is an all-in-one, AI-powered Content Marketing software that helps marketers create and manage content that fuels the entire customer journey.’
Admittedly, everything seems to be ‘AI-powered’ nowadays – even when they’re not – and the term feels like more of a buzzword to make products seem ‘up-to-date’. It’s not a bad thing to feel sceptical when a company like HubSpot seems to jump on that bandwagon!
Beyond their positioning statement, then, what is it?
In the simplest terms, Content Hub is an evolution of HubSpot’s long-standing CMS Hub – with the latter being phased out.
It comes loaded with features (new and familiar!) that are as smart as they are helpful. AI-driven insights for optimizing your content? Check. Tools for seamless cross-channel publication? Double-check. A drag-and-drop interface that actually makes content creation fun? Absolutely!
The core idea is that marketers can create the content they need, manage it in one place, and deploy it across multiple channels when they need to.
Between changes to SEO, the rise of video and podcast content, and changes to the buyer’s journey marketing is in a period of transition. In a way, it always is.
In 2024, marketers are needing to produce more content, distribute it across more channels at more points in the customer journey, and make it highly personal to each prospect. That’s a Herculean task whether you’re a team of 1 or 20.
Other challenges include a rising demand for quality content, but no growth in the teams producing it; the endless search for attention-grabbing (but non-clickbait!) content ideas; trying to juggle file explorers and Canva accounts full of content; and keeping our content fresh and performing well.
Content Hub has two main uses, which directly address these challenges:
HubSpot’s focus on alignment, automation, and efficiency sits at the heart of all the company’s offerings, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Content Hub is closely aligned with its predecessor Hubs in this area.
Now that we’ve covered what it sets out to do, let’s crack on to its key features!
Let’s break the features into two categories: existing and all-new.
It can simultaneously feel like search engines are always moving the goalposts, and we’re living in an age of low-quality content.
Modern SEO, for all its complexities, prioritises content linked together in ‘topic clusters’ – similar content, about similar keywords, joined by internal links to a pillar page. There is also the technique of Pillar-Based Marketing (though that’s a blog post for another day). The ability to build Topic Clusters in HubSpot will simply move to Content Hub, along with the SEO recommendations tool.
HubSpot’s SEO dashboard integrates with tools like Google Search Console to provide a detailed view of keyword effectiveness, traffic projections, and overall search authority. This integration helps in making informed decisions about which topics to target and how to structure your content for the best organic reach. All at your fingertips!
At the heart of effective lead capture is the ability to gather essential information without deterring potential leads. HubSpot’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor allows you to craft custom forms quickly that are structured to capture the necessary data your sales team needs to follow up effectively.
This information then sits in the CRM, ready to be redeployed for both sales and marketing activities!
One of the most pressing questions about Content Hub will likely be: what about my website?
Content Hub is, in a sense, a large-scale CMS in its own right, hosting everythng you need for social posts down to website updates. Which means it's the new home for HubSpot's award-winning CMS.
BTW: existing users of CMS Hub will still have access to the features in their subscription, but new features will be rolled out to Content Hub only!
Keeping your brand voice consistent can take some effort on the part of copywriters. The need to keep it consistent across multiple platforms only complicates matters.
To combat unruly copy, Content Hub introduces an AI Brand Voice tool. Simply insert historic copy, double-check the relevant personality and tone tags, and voila! Content Hub will generate a brand voice for you.
To use it, you can simply use the built-in AI content generator to regenerate in-line text in blog posts, social posts, or website copy in line with your brand voice. An easy way to keep things consistent!
Full disclosure: this is the tool within Content Hub I am most excited about. Because creating quality content for all your channels requires one critical element: time.
As a member of a small team, missing out on crucial opportunities to reach your Ideal Customer (if you don’t have an ICP, you can learn more here!) because it takes too long to refashion content is the sort of thing that breaks me into a cold sweat. You can probably relate.
The whole point of Content Remix is to allow you to take a piece of content and repurpose and reformat it for redistribution across multiple channels quickly and easily, with the help of AI. From here, you should tweak the content to humanise it – but still, think how much time you’ve saved!
For instance, you can start with a long-form blog post and generate social media posts, images, emails, or landing pages – all built upon the content in the original blog post! The content will be consistent, brand-aligned, and easily publishable through HubSpot’s preexisting social, blog, and ad functions.
This is the epitome of work smarter, not harder.
Not everyone is in the market for a website rebuild. We get it.
As we all know, dealing with WordPress can be a pain in the proverbial if you don’t have dev expertise or the budget to outsource. However, HubSpot’s content embeds can revitalize your current WordPress site by providing enhanced capabilities that your existing CMS may lack. This method involves integrating rich, dynamic content blocks that can interact seamlessly with your site, enriching the user experience without the need to migrate to a new platform or start from scratch.
(Though Content Hub does provide access to HubSpot’s CMS. . . just saying.)
These embeds can integrate with HubSpot’s CRM, offering site- and contact-specific adjustments like personalized product recommendations, targeted messaging, and tailored offers.
As Hannah Montana once said: it’s the best of both worlds.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what the Content Hub can do for your content strategy. Keep an eye on this space as we dive deeper into how HubSpot’s newest Hub can become an integral presence in your martech stack!
Overall, it’s able to massively reduce the time it takes marketers to develop content for all their channels – a massive win for those of us in the B2B space, where time is of the essence. Naturally, we couldn’t cover everything here, but feel free to book a meeting with our Director of HubSpot Services to learn more!
If you want to know more about how HubSpot can work for manufacturers and B2B tech companies, just browse here.