HubSpot Content Hub | All-In-One Content Marketing Software (Walkthrough)

Being a marketer in 2024 is no easy task. To win, we have to create rich, expertise backed content in many formats across many channels and keep it all updated over time. Today I want to walk you through Content Hub, an all in one AI powered content marketing software that helps marketers create and manage content that fuels the entire customer journey. Creating content takes a lot of time and with an ever increasing number of channels that marketers have access to, it's it can be difficult to keep up and produce quality content. Content Remix is a tool that makes it easy to take one piece of content and reformat it and reuse it across various channels. Let's take a look. Let's create a new remix as an example, we'll start by adding a piece of content. For this example, let's choose a landing page that I've already created. The landing page loads into the remix tool. I want to create a campaign. So let's choose social posts, blog posts, ad copy, and an email and click Next. Remixes uses AI to produce the different assets based on the one you gave it and now you have all these assets created for you. Click View All Content to see the pages and go edit them as needed. You can also save remixes to reuse them again. We have some templates we've created for you, but remixes you've done previously can also be done again using different pieces of content. So let's say you want to send a blog to your social posts. You can view this remix. We can see what was created previously, but we can add a new blog post here and run the remix again. If you use a hub and spoke technique with your blog posts, you can use this remix that you created previously and change the blog post that feeds into it. Select the new blog post you want to use, save it and HubSpot will remix the content from that blog post into four others. With so many different marketing channels available to you, Remixes is a powerful tool that will help you create more content faster. HubSpot makes it easy to maintain a consistent brand voice. Using our Brand Voice tool, you can feed historic historical writing into the AI model and then it can generate and revise your text to keep your brand voice consistent and getting the tone right. Let's take a look to set up your brand voice, come to the Brand Voice settings and click the Generate Brand Voice button. Give it a writing sample and tell it a little bit about your target audience and then it'll analyze it and come up with some personality and tone traits for your brand. You can edit these, add and Remove options and. And then when you're done, you'll have a brand voice that's ready to go. You can also choose to add a brand mission to give it a little more context. And you can choose what channels this brand voice is going to apply to. For example, if I'm writing a blog post and I want to make sure it's consistent with my brand voice, I can highlight parts of it and use the AI content assistant to apply the brand voice to it. Here's a revised version of the same paragraph with a brand voice applied to it. I can insert this. And now my brand is more consistent with HubSpot's AI blog post generator. You can effortlessly create blog content that will drive traffic, convert readers into customers, and transform your blog writing process from research to done in no time. Let's take a look. Here we are in HubSpot's blog tool. If you want to manually create a post from scratch, you can do that. Or if you want to use the AI tool to generate a blog post, here's what that experience looks like. First, you're going to choose your target country and the blog you're publishing to. And then you can ask it to generate some ideas, strategies for implementing data driven decision making and business operations. Sounds great. You can optionally add some keywords if you want, but let's just continue on. Now it's going to give us some blog post titles to choose from. And here it's generated for me a whole bunch of possible blog titles. And what's really great about this is I can see different SEO metrics over here. So MSV is monthly search volume. That's going to tell me how much demand there is for this difficulty to rank is a measure of how hard it would be for me to get on the front page for these words and then keywords. Intent gives you some codes to understand different types of intent. If you find a title you like that you want more of, you can generate a new title in that same vein. When you have one you like, select it and continue on. And now we're going to get an outline. Here we have a title, a description, and the paragraph headers. All of these are editable. If you want to make any changes if want you, if you like them, you can go ahead and generate the blog post. Now it's generating the full blog post. If you set up your brand Voice Inside of HubSpot, the content that comes out of this will be in line with that brand voice, which is a huge win for consistency. And here is our Blog post, read through it, edit it as needed, and then you're ready to publish. Images are an important part of many kinds of content, but finding an image can sometimes be a lot of work. Let's take a look at how HubSpot's AI image generator can help with this. Let's imagine you're creating a blog post and you want to add an image right down here. You can come to the AI Assistant menu and choose image and give it a prompt. In this case, we want a hyper realistic image of marketers working together. We'll choose a style and an orientation and we'll tell it to generate an image. When you get an image you like, you can select it and add it into your blog post. And this also works in other tools such as social media. Creating audio versions of your written content is a powerful way to increase engagement and reach. With our Blog Narration tool, you can easily do this for your blog posts. Let's take a look. Here's a blog post I've been working on and here at the top you can see no audio has been generated for this blog post. All I have to do is click on it. The narration transcript comes in. This is the blog post if you want to edit it so the audio is slightly different, you can do that. There are six different voices you can choose from. We'll stick with Alloy and then we'll generate our audio. When it's done, check to see how it sounds. Learn how to effectively implement data driven strategies in your business operations to drive success and growth and when you're done, click Add to blog post and now you have an audio version of your blog embedded in your post. There's been a lot of pressure on marketers lately, especially with third party cookies going away and AI search engines and bots decreasing traffic to websites. Members blog allows you to offer exclusive content to your users, show previews of your blog posts, capture leads in a cookie less world and protect yourself against AI Search eng search by keeping content exclusive to your website. Here is a blog post I'm editing. If I want to make this exclusive to members, I can do that in the access control settings and require self registration. When that's done, the blog will be visible down to this read more line which I can drag to anywhere I want and if we preview this, a signed in contact will be able to see the full post, but an anonymous visitor will only be able to see down to that line before they are prompted to sign up. And you can set this up on a post by post basis or for an entire blog. As you continue to grow, HubSpot makes it easy to create, manage and optimize multi language pages and blogs. Translations Translates all your pages and blog posts into all the languages you need and associates in language variants together for easy management. Let's take a look. For this example, let's create a translation of a blog post. Let's imagine this blog post right here needs to be translated into another language. I can create a multi language variation right here. I can see a long list of available languages and I can see that this blog post has already been translated into into Japanese. Let's say I'm creating a Spanish variation. For this one, I can choose to have AI translated automatically, which I'll go ahead and do and then I can click Create. I now have a Spanish version of this blog post and if I want to switch between language variants, I can do that up here in the top left corner. Podcasts are a great way to reach a wide audience. HubSpot makes it easy to create and manage your podcasts. You can provide a written copy of the show transcript and podcast hosting will create an audio podcast for you. Or you can upload your own audio file and have HubSpot host it and and syndicate it for use with all popular podcast providers. Let's take a look. This is what a podcast looks like. Inside of HubSpot we'll create a new episode. If you already have an audio file for your podcast episode, you can upload it here. You can then edit your episode details and save. Alternatively, you can generate audio from text. Put your text in here, select the voice you want, you can sample them if you like, and when you're ready, click Generate Audio. When it's done, you can preview the audio if you want. Today we delve into the world of data analytics best practices with a focus on insights and when you're satisfied you can save it and move on to the episode details. Every episode is required to have a title and artwork, and you can also add show notes if you want. For the artwork, you can choose to upload an image or generate one using AI. And when you've added all the details you need, you can publish the episode. This high bar gives a couple of important pieces of information. First is your RSS feed URL which you can use to distribute your podcast to platforms like Split, Spotify and Apple. And also a note that you can embed particular podcast episodes into your content using the podcast module. Inside of HubSpot. Whether you record audio yourself or generate it from text using AI podcasting is a great way to reach new audiences with HubSpot Video. Hosting your videos live right on your website instead of being hosted on a third party site. That means a lot more SEO power for your pages and you can use your videos across multiple pieces of content. You can also add conversion points to your videos to convert leads and measure video performance with in depth reporting that shows how video influences lead conversion. Let's take a look. Let's imagine you're editing this website page and you want to add a video to it. First, come over to the module section and search for video. Grab the video module and drag it over to the place you want it. You can embed a video from an external site if you want, but the real power comes from using HubSpot Video, where you can upload videos directly to HubSpot and use them across all of your content. Once you do that, you get a lot of powerful options. For one thing, you you can add title, text, description and meta tags for SEO purposes to make your video more powerful in search engines. Additionally, you can embed CTAs or forms right into the video so that you can use your video as a conversion tool. You can edit the options to choose when the form or CTA gets displayed and whether or not your visitors are allowed to skip it when they come to it. And then on individual contact records you can see if a contact has submitted the form or viewed the video. And at the aggregate level, we can see how many views a video is getting and how many seconds of that video people are watching. Video is a powerful tool for marketers, and HubSpot Video makes it easy to reuse videos across a variety of channels and measure the impact they're having. With Content Hub, you can create and test beautiful personalized landing pages that generate leads and look great on any device. No designer or IT help required. Check it out. This is the Landing Pages tool. To create a new landing page, click the Create button and select Landing Page. Then give your page a name. Here you can select a template to give you a good head start on the design of your page. There are lots of options here ready to go and you can always find more in our marketplace. I'll just take this first one right here and I immediately dropped into the editor where I can see the page as it will look to my visitors. But I can also make edits directly in line. So if I want to change some words here I can do that and see immediately how it will look. What's a Landing page without a form? We have a full Forms tool inside of Content Hub and here in the sidebar. Without leaving your page, you can add and remove fields to your form or you can go to the full Forms editor to have more options. Here you can add fields from any of your CRM objects. So if we want to add company name, we can pull it from Contacts or from Companies. I'll grab the Contacts version and drag it over. And for each of your form fields you can add logic. So let's say we want to make this a progressive field, meaning that if this form has been submitted before, perhaps you embedded on various pages. We can replace this field with some of the cued progressive fields we have down here so people don't have to keep filling out company name every time they come to this form. Next time they see it they'll be asked to fill in industry or job title. You can also add dependent fields if you would like to change what fields are shown based on the information that the person provides. Additionally, if you would like to collect payment on this form, you can come down to the payment section and turn on that option here and select a payment link to have people pay after they submit the form. When we're done, we can update this form and we're taken right back to our landing page where we can continue making edits One of the most powerful things you can do to improve the performance of a page is to personalize it for each individual visitor. Known visitors who are connected to records in your CRM can have actual tokens placed in here, but even unknown visitors deserve a personalized experience. Additionally, you can personalize the text and look and feel of this page for the visitors who come using something called smart content. I've already set this up in the background, so if we want to just preview how it will look. We can preview the page as various contacts if you want to see how it'll look to a specific person. Or you can just look at the smart rules I've created. What we're looking at here is query parameters in the referral URL. If CEO is indicated from the ad source, we can check this box and CEOs get a special different page that talks about ROI. This way the page is personalized to the needs and desires and goals and of the person you've sent it to. Once you've got the content and the layout of the page looking and feeling the way you want it, we have a lot of SEO suggestions that you can look through to take your page to the next level to make sure it performs optimally for each of the recommendations you see here, HubSpot explains the value of that particular recommendation. In this case, adding a meta description can help with search results, and you can click this button to be taken directly to the Meta description page. If you don't know what to make the meta description, you can use AI to generate one. When that's done, you can move on to other recommendations to continue improving the performance of your page. If you work on a team, there are likely times when you'll want to collaborate with your teammates on the content you're creating, and there may be some situations in which you don't want content to be published without getting approved first. Approvals work on web pages, landing pages, blog posts, and marketing emails. Let's take a look at the approval process inside HubSpot CMS. So here I am building a page inside of HubSpot. If I want to collaborate with my teammates, I can come to this comment section, mention people, ask questions, and work with them to get this page perfect. If I am a team member who requires approval for my work, when I'm ready for it to be reviewed, I can click the Approval button and request approval. I can choose what approver I'm going to send this to, and I can choose whether all the selected approvers or just one approver needs to approve this project. I can also add any details I want before I send the request. Now I'm logged in as an approver. I can see a notification that an approval has been requested from me. I can click on the notification to be taken directly to the piece of content that I need to review. If there are any comments in here, I can review and interact with those. And when I'm ready to approve, I can click this Approve button up at the top. I can add any notes I want to approve the request. And now the page can be published. You've created your content. Now it's time to drive traffic to it. HubSpot's SEO tools analyze and optimize your content to help your business get found online. And this all begins with before your page is even published. Let's take a look. Let's say this is a page you've been working on and you want to optimize it for search. Click on the Optimize button and you'll get all these SEO recommendations. And for anything that's actionable right here in the editor, you'll be able to click a button. For example, you can't be searched if you don't have a good meta description. If you need one, you can Click this button and you'll be led directly to this page where the meta description needs to be added. If you want help creating it, you can use our AI assistant to generate one for you. Feel free to edit this as needed and then you can save it and move on to the next recommendation. All of these recommendations are specific to this page we've been building. If you'd like to see recommendations for your site as a whole, we have a dedicated SEO tool for that. This is the SEO tool. Here you can see how many pages of your website HubSpot has scanned and the total number of recommendations we have for you. You can filter these by their level of impact, technical difficulty, and what role you need to have to address these recommendations. You can also filter the categories on the left hand side. As you scroll through these, you can select to see the pages that are impacted by this recommendation. Up at the top you can analyze your SEO to see how your pages are performing at a high level and over time. And in the Topics tab you can choose what topics you want to target with your SEO efforts. If you have Google Search Console integrated, you can see additional data pulled from here, and you can add topics that you want to start addressing. Select the topic from the list, select Create Topic, and then you can start adding subtopic keywords and organizing your efforts in a pillar strategy. Once you build that out, it will look something like this, with a core topic in the middle and subtopics branching out. And you can attach individual pieces of content to each of these subtopics to organize your content strategy and to tap into this monthly search volume. HubSpot Content Embed makes it easy to embed personalized dynamic content from HubSpot to into your WordPress site. Let's take a look. This is a WordPress page I'm editing, and I'm going to grab the HubSpot content embed block and drag it over here. I can select an embed I've already created, or I can create a new one in HubSpot. Let's look at the process of creating a new embed. Give it a name and then you can build this the same way you would any other content inside of HubSpot. Grab your modules and drag them over. So here is a content embed I've been working on. It uses smart content to dynamically show different information depending on who views it. So what we're seeing here is the default text, but I've also created a variant for CEOs who view this from an ad. In that case, we show a slightly different set of information. Let's go back to WordPress and see how this looks. So here in WordPress we select the content embed we want to use. And now it appears in this page. If we go and look at the live page, we can see the difference between the two variants. Here we have the default version which talks about enhancing your decision making skills with data analytics. And here we have the CEO version which talks about elevating your decision making abilities through data analytics. Using content embeds, you can bring the power of your CRM Data to your WordPress pages. They're great for marketers who want a super easy editing experience and want to leverage HubSpot features like Hub DB, CRM data, smart content and Dynamic content. They're also good for developers or admins who want to limit what someone can edit on a WordPress page or to leverage content embeds and across multiple pages and websites. But to update them in a single place made for marketers means easy to use. And HubSpot's drag and drop editor is very easy to use. Take a look at this. So here I am editing a landing page in this lovely what you see is what you get Editor. What you see is what you get means I can just click in and if I want to edit this text, I can just do that right here and it's edited right in line. If I want to add a new module, I can come over to this module library and specific to the theme I'm using for this page. There are a lot of modules that are just built in that I can drag and drop over. If I want to do some animations or buttons or menu sections, I can do that without any coding at all. And regardless of what theme you're using, Housewife has a lot of built in modules for most anything you would need. If you want to give people the option to schedule a meeting, you can do that. If you want to collect payment, you can do that. Want to call the action button? We've got it. Want to add a form or maybe a video or maybe an audio file or an image. All of these things are just here, ready to go. Let's use a video as an example. Perhaps down here by the form. I would like to have a video. I can just drag it into the spot I want it as I'm editing this. If I decide this isn't the exact right spot for it, I want it up above these words, I can just drag it there. I can move it anywhere on the page I want it. And it's really easy. But now let's say I'm editing this and I decide. I feel like everything I've done is just a mistake. I want to go back to where it was before. We have very easy and simple version history where you can go back to the previous version, see what it looks like, and restore it to get back to where you started. No harm done. HubDB and dynamic pages make it easy to build libraries, listings and catalogs that may have thousands of individual pages and manage them with a single table and a single page template. You can also build dynamic modules so that you can make a change in one place and have it reflected across all those individual pages. Let's take a look at how it works. Here's an example of dynamic content. In this case, it's a list of upcoming events. We've also provided a calendar for people to search by date. You can create other filters to give people a variety of ways to sort and sift through your dynamic content. And on this page we have a search bar, so if someone wants to search by their location, they can click on a specific event, see this page that was dynamically created with all the information for this one event, and register if they're interested in attending behind the scenes. Each of these pages are managed in a Hub DB table, which looks and behaves just like a spreadsheet, with each row representing a different event and columns for each piece of information you want included on the event page. To create a new page, all you have to do is add a row, fill in the information, and the dynamic page gets created automatically. The page template itself looks like this. It's pretty empty because the content all gets fed in from the Hub DB table. You will need a developer to do the initial setup on a page like this, but once that's done, you can use this same template for all of your pages, no matter how many there are. And then on your listing page, you can add dynamic modules that reflect the data in those individual pages. For example, on this page I have a calendar module where people can search for events by date and time, and if we go forward to a month that has an event, we can see this Sydney event is highlighted on this calendar. Hub DB and Dynamic Pages make it easy to generate and manage large numbers of pages for whatever it is you need to list out for your visitors. You can use memberships to create exclusive and personalized pages and blogs for select audiences. This feature can be used on website pages, landing pages and blog posts, and it can be used both on regular pages and on dynamic pages that show specific data for each individual user that logs in. You can use this to create a learning management system, a partner relationship management system, a dealer management portal, an intranet, or anything else where you might want to display dynamic CRM data behind an individual login. Here I'm creating a members only content library for select customers. If I want to restrict access to this, I can go to Settings and select Audience Access. By default, anyone on the Internet can access a site page. You can make them password protected to make them accessible only to people who know the password. But to restrict access to a specific group, you're going to want to use Access Group Membership. You can select the groups that you want to have access and they'll be invited to create an account and sign in. You can create and manage your access groups in the membership section of HubSpot. You can create static groups where members are manually added by you or your team. Or you can create dynamic groups where members automatically get added based on properties or activities. When you create an access group, you need to give the group a name, and you can optionally give it a description and decide whether this is a static group or a dynamic group. If it's dynamic, you can add the filters that will automatically determine who is and is not a member of this group. Once a group is created, you can restrict access of certain pages to just the members of that group. When the page is live, members will be able to access all of the information in it, but non members will be asked to log in. Memberships are a great way to provide personalized attention to your best customers. If your company has multiple brands or multiple websites, or multiple teams working in different divisions, you need a way to organize your content across all those different groups. HubSpot CMS has you covered here. Let's take a look at how it works. This is the page where you manage domains and URLs inside of HubSpot. If you have multiple business units, you can arrange these domains and URLs by business units and see just the URLs associated with a particular business unit. And for each of your primary domains, you can assign them to specific teams to restrict publishing access to just the teams working on that brand. On this screen, you manage your website pages and you can filter them by domain. When you create a new page, whether it's a website page or a landing page, you can choose which website this new page is going to be a part of. And individual pages can be assigned to particular teams the same way that entire domains can be and when it comes time to look at your traffic analytics, you can choose just to look at the data for a particular domain. By creating a view that is just for that particular brand domain, top level domain subdomain or URL, you're done creating your content. Now you need to make it more targeted. There is a sea of content out there and marketers have to work harder and harder just to stand out. Additionally, search is shifting to AI, reducing the amount of traffic to individual web pages and making targeting even more essential. Personalization used to be a nice to have. Now it's a must have. You don't want to just create informational content. You want to craft a content experience that makes your visitors feel like you're speaking directly to them and that you understand them. Smart content lets you do exactly that, and it's all drag and drop. No developer needed. Here we are looking at a landing page. Let's imagine you've worked hard at designing this and now you want to personalize it. In HubSpot, you can personalize just about everything on a web page. Text, images, videos, design elements, forms. The sky's the limit. And you can personalize it to both known and unknown visitors. When a lot of people think of personalization, they think about known visitors, people who are already in your database. Known visitors are typically part of a list or a lifecycle stage, and you can provide information to them based on the stage they're in, whether whether that's an upsell opportunity for a customer, or high value information for your prospects. But typically that's less than 5% of your traffic. Why leave the other 95% untouched? Now you might be wondering, if they're unknown to me, how can I personalize content for them? But there are lots of ways you can gather information about an unknown visitor. Whether that's the site that referred them, the ad they clicked on, utm, or other query parameters, their device, their location. All of this can be used to craft an experience, especially for them. For each of the modules in this page, you can add smart rules. These can be based on external factors such as ad, source and query parameters, or internal factors such as list, membership and lifecycle stage. You can set these up for each of the modules on the page, and after they're here, you can manage and review them as needed. Once you have your rules all set up, you can preview the page to see how the different rules behave. When we go to the preview pane, you have two options. You can select specific contacts to see which version of the page they'll see. Or you can select your smart rules to see how they vary. For example, you might have an ad campaign that targets CEOs visitors coming to your site through those ad clicks may be unknown individually, but you know that that CEO positioning resonated with them, so you should match that on the pages they land on. So perhaps CEOs clicking on ads want to see a shorter, more to the point version of the copy. You can test that out and see how it looks. Once you publish the page, you have a host of analytics to show you how these variants are performing. If we click on the published page, we can see this Smart Content tab where we can see that the more personalized variant performs much better than the general variant. And thanks to our Content Embed feature, you can use smart content on other CMSs such as WordPress. As you develop your content, you'll want to test it to optimize for conversion and visitor experience. You have two options for this inside of HubSpot. One is an AB test which divides the Traffic to the page 50 50, showing one variant to half and the other variant to the other half. You then can choose, based on the analytics you see, which of those variants should become the default page. The other option is a multivariate test where you can have up to five variants of a page, and HubSpot will automatically detect the ones that work best and show those to more and more users until a clear winner is chosen and selected. Let's imagine this is a page you're working on inside of HubSpot. If you wanted to create variants to test, you could click the Testing button and choose a B test or Adaptive test for this page. I've already set up an AB test, so what we're seeing here is the A version. I can click on this to see the B version, where I've added a video to see if that improves conversion rate on the form. If you want to run a test with more than two variations, you'll want to do an adaptive test. An adaptive test allows you to create up to four variants for a total of four five variation pages. And this is a great place to test small adjustments to your page. So maybe on this one you change your banner color. Maybe on this one you change the language of a particular button. Perhaps on this one you swap in a different video or add different imaging. And by testing each of these little elements in a different test, you can see which one actually has an impact. And HubSpot will measure the performance of each of these and gradually choose a winner automatically. So you can know which change actually drove the impact you were trying to make. This page has already been published, so I can see how the two variants are performing compared to each other. If I click on the page name, I can come to the test results section and see how the A and B variants are performing compared to each other. In a case like this where one is clearly outperforming the other, I would select that one as the default. Moving forward HubSpot provides marketer friendly content, analytics and reporting right out of the box so you can easily pinpoint where leads are converting, which pages are converting the best, which channels are driving the most traffic, and most importantly, how much revenue can be attributed to your marketing efforts. Then take things to the next level by building tailored customer reports that show how your marketing team is impacting your bottom line across ads, emails, website and all other digital marketing channels. This is what reporting and analytics looks like inside of HubSpot for a particular piece of content, in this case a landing page, you can see how much revenue can be attributed to this piece, various metrics for the page itself, and how these metrics have changed over time. If you're using smart content, you can see how that's affecting a variety of metrics, and if you're running any tests, you can see how they perform against each other. If you'd like to zoom out to see your data at a more holistic level, HubSpot has a wide variety of reports ready to go for you. For traffic, we have data across sources, pages, UTM parameters, device types, countries, browsers and topic clusters. You can see how these are performing across all kinds of different metrics over time. When you see a report you like, you can save it and put it on a particular dashboard. And if you can't find the report you're looking for, you can create a new one yourself. HubSpot has a huge library of standard reports that you can search through and add to your dashboards, or you can create a fully custom report if you need to. Regardless of whether you use a standard or custom report, you'll want to add it to a dashboard. HubSpot dashboards are incredibly flexible. You can resize and rearrange the reports as needed, and you can even add external content from other systems to have a single pane of glass where you can see all of your data. If you aren't sure where to get started with a dashboard, you can create a dashboard from our library and choose which reports you want to include. Well, that wraps it up. Thank you for joining us on this journey through Content Hub your all in one AI content marketing tool. How do you think you'll use Content Hub? I really like content remixes because it makes it so easy to turn one piece of content into a whole series of content. Let us know in the comments how you'll use it, and be sure to click the link to give Content Hub a try yourself.