Sales and Marketing websites that is
If you’d asked people 10 years ago what was the mark of a modern website, most probably would have ended up talking about how websites needed to work on mobile devices. At that time the conversation was around whether to have responsive websites, versus mobile-specific websites (ie remember all those m.companydomain.com sites).
These days we all take that for granted – of course a website needs to work on mobile.
So, what is the new indicator of a modern website?
I’m going to suggest that modern websites need to be built on a CRM. Actually, to clarify, modern ‘sales and marketing’ websites need to be built on a CRM. (Other sites eg a developer site or doco site or KB site, don’t necessarily need this).
So what does this mean?
A modern sales and marketing website needs to be able to track the journey of a visitor right through from initial visit to potentially being a long-time customer.
This is one of the reasons we’re so bullish on HubSpot’s CMS (ahem ‘content hub’) functionality. Everything to do with tracking the customer journey is built in – forms, analytics, page views, key marketing events, reports, campaign management, deals, revenue, and attribution reporting.
There are very few other platforms you can coordinate all this so easily.
We used WordPress for years (decades?) and combined it with Google Analytics (and other tools) and parts of HubSpot (eg tracking script and forms) and could only really get part of the way. Having now moved all our sites over to HubSpot entirely, we have much more clarity (and it’s easier).
That’s not to say the picture is complete – there’s still a bunch of holes (eg if a visitor blocks cookies then you miss a lot of key touches).
Worth thinking about for your company websites – I’ve been chatting with a number of companies lately who didn’t realise HubSpot was an option for their entire website (ie not just landing pages and blog posts). They’ve been excited to consider the possibilities.
Interested in a deep dive into HubSpot’s complete website feature set – check out our monster guide to building a website on HubSpot, using Content Hub (download here – no signup required)
Ian and I chat through this further in the shot 6 of HubShots 308:
