Just when you thought it couldn't get better, the HubSpot team has done it again.The announcement of the launch of their new HubSpot COS in Inbound 2013 was a long awaited event. Finally, the wait is over.
The inbound marketing software giants bring us more tools than ever to increase qualified traffic, convert more customers, and best of all, create tailored marketing that people love. It is no longer a Content Management System, but a Content Optimization System, refurbished to help your website become truly customer-centric, the next step of customer and search engine optimization.
Today, we are going to blow your minds away with awesome features of HubSpot COS and give you an early review of what's coming.
Before we start on our deep dive of the tools, some of you might be wondering what is the core difference between the CMS and the COS. As a first impression, the CMS is awesome. It allows you to build great looking websites that work. But as a second, third, and fourth impression, the website remains more or less the same, even if the person viewing it is growing in knowledge and interest.
Econsultancy found that 52% of digital marketers agreed “the ability to personalize content is fundamental to their online strategy”.
The COS takes into consideration that your viewers are accessing your website from many different devices, with varying levels of interest that change as they interact with your company.
According to HubSpot, the COS “is the first integrated website, blog and landing page system to recognize the unique needs of visitors and optimize content for each person looking at it. It is mobile-optimized out-of-the-box, fully integrated with every marketing channel, and adaptive to the changing needs of leads and customers.”
Mobile Optimized
Go to any Starbucks today and you’ll see people with tablets and laptops browsing the web. Just walking on the street, you’ll see people with their phones out, checking one thing or the other online. It’s no secret that smartphones, tablets, and on-the-go-laptops have become increasingly popular.
Here are some numbers:
IDC projects that by 2015 more Americans will access the Internet through mobile devices than through desktop computers.
iab found that “61% of customers who visit a mobile unfriendly site are likely to go to a competitor’s site”.
Cisco predicts that the mobile internet data traffic will grow 13-fold by 2017.
That means it’s essential to make sure that your website is accessible from a mobile device.
HubSpot knows this and has built the COS, blogging software, landing pages, and emails using responsive design. What this means is that the website automatically changes to fit the aspect ratio of the device viewing it. This makes it easy to browse through no matter what device your viewers are accessing your website from.
Fully Integrated tools = better lead profiles
Nothing gives results like a great team effort. The HubSpot marketing tools all work together to help build your lead profiles. From content tools, to social media, to marketing automation and analytics, you’ll be able to work with tools that are deeply cooperative, building a complete history of your lead’s interests and interactions with your website. Using this insight, you’ll be able to build more personalized campaigns and relate to people better than ever before.
Smart Content = Fully Personalized Experience For Your Buyers
This is perhaps one of the most exciting features of the new COS. It puts to practice everything inbound calls for in terms of personalization and customer-centric websites. So far we’ve been exposed to Smart CTAs, but HubSpot has taken it one step further to introduce Smart Content.
Until now, with regards to customer-centricity and segmentations, what you’ve been able to do is gather information about your leads through their interactions with the website. Then you take this insight and use it to set up personalized email campaigns, landing pages, and calls to action.
Now here’s the best part. HubSpot COS allows you to actually personalize whole website pages, landing pages, and blogs that change based on rules that you’ve set. You now have the ability to create your content strategy and customer buying process analysis and actually tweak what is communicated in the website pages depending on who the buyer is or where he is in the buying process.
Talk about customer-centric, huh?
It’s difficult to see what the next frontier is once this is accomplished, but this will bring fun to marketing for a while. Personalization has never been this flexible.
Social media platforms have a huge marketing potential. They give you front row access to your leads’ interests and updates, allowing you to target them with specific content they might be interested in, converse with them, and further develop your relationship.
But somewhere along the lines, it has become absolutely cluttered with mindless updates, photos of someone’s breakfast, and other all-around nonsense. It seems as though everybody’s become the village crier, standing in a crowded square and screaming the day’s highlights. Today, monitoring your feed is problematic enough, responding to your leads is even harder.
So how does HubSpot fix this?
Introducing the Social Inbox. Social Inbox uses your contact database to zero in on the social activity of your leads, customers, and biggest evangelists. This sheds off the distractions that come with social media listening, alerts you to key individuals in need of responses, and provides context for interactions. The village crier will be replaced with targeting, meaningful interactions.
Your sales department will be able to leverage the Social Inbox’s push notifications to track mentions of specific leads.
Your customer service department will be able to respond directly to customer inquiries on Twitter with a personalized email.
Your marketing department will be able to give leads and prospects relevant marketing materials that they will love.
Let’s take a look at the biggest Social Inbox features.
Integration with HubSpot’s Contacts Database
When a viewer provides their email address in any of the forms, HubSpot will automatically match the email address with the viewer’s Twitter account. Then it will pull up a record of their interactions with your company to date. Social Inbox will also flag tweets from people with the same name as contacts from your database so you can create fuller contact profiles.
Segment Monitoring and Alerts
Until now social media monitoring was limited to specific terms. But now Social Inbox allows you to color code your social media feeds by customer lifecycle. So you can see for example lead-only feeds, or customer-only feeds. Further, you can setup alerts based on specific monitoring rules by lifecycle stage. So for instance, monitor mentions of your brand at the lead stage should trigger a certain action from your social media team; specifically when the lead is asking for feedback about your product for example.
Actionable Analytics
When once it was near impossible, the Social Inbox allows you to measure the return on social media investments with surgical precision. First of all, you can see how many visits, leads, and customer each social media channel generated. Second, not only can you see the total number of clicks or interactions with an individual share, but also the names of each contact that expressed interest in that tweet.
Inbound marketing turns your website into a sales person Which means that it answers most of your prospect’s questions long before any human interaction ever occurs. Contacting a sales person now takes place at the very end of the funnel, when the prospect probably knows more about the product than the sales rep. That’s no good.
Without a proper streamlined process for specifically designed for sales reps, they won’t be able to do their job well. They will end up annoying the prospects rather than having personalized and context-rich conversations.
So how does HubSpot fix this?
Signals is a notifications tool that provides all the context your sales reps need for meaningful conversations. It allows you to know exactly when and how to engage with your leads and customers to hit the right chords at the right time.
You will receive real-time notifications right to your desktop coming from:
Leads who have revisited your wesite. This will show you what content they're looking at and what they're interested in.
Leads who have revisited your website. This will show you what content they're looking at and what they're interested in.
Email open notifications. This will let you know when someone has opened an email you've sent.
Salesforce email open notifications. This will allow you to track emails you've sent from Salesforce and respond to new leads quickly.
LinkedIn. You can mark important leads as VIPs on LinkedIn to receive real-time notifications whenever they update their profile or post something.
The next time you have a conversation with your prospect, you can talk to them about things you know they’re interested and address some of their updates to show them how much you care.
We’ve covered the biggest features, but there are also a ton of updates going on. You can check out some websites that have been developed using the new COS right here. Our team has had the opportunity to work with all the new tools and we can design and develop websites for the new HubSpot COS.
Inspired by HubSpot, we've been doing more research and focusing on customer centric sites. We’ve gathered and implemented best practices on customizing the entire site to be tailored to where the buyer is in the buying process.
We're very excited to push our marketing services farther than ever before and help our clients reach their marketing goals.
Now the question is: are you ready?