5 Ways the HubSpot CMS Hub Lets You Personalize Your Website

When exploring a CMS for your website, personalization is a must-have.  It’s been said that context is equally as important as content and that you should make sure your website is setup well with both.  Personalization leads to higher visitor-to-lead conversion rates, an increase in CTA click-through rates and as well as more overall time spent on your site.  HubSpot’s CMS Hub has the great ability to personalize many aspects of your site and is the perfect platform to build and maintain your website on.

HubSpot uses what they call “smart content” to personalize aspects of the website.  Any text module or call to action on the site can utilize a “smart rule” and change depending on who the visitor is.  The CMS provides many personalization options, both for anonymous visitors as well as known contacts.  To understand this further, let’s discuss the five ways we can personalize your website using the CMS.

Anonymous Personalization

• Country – One way to personalize content on your site is to setup a smart rule based on a visitor’s country.  This personalization option is available for anonymous visitors and can be extremely helpful when specifically targeting traffic from a particular region or speakers of a certain language.

• Device Type – Using smart content, you can also show specific text or CTAs based on the visitor’s device.  Knowing that someone is visiting your site from a phone or a desktop can determine which call-to-action you’d like to present, or which blog articles to promote.  For companies that offer a mobile app or a web-based solution, this type of personalization can be very valuable to highlight that capability.

• Referral Source – There are certain situations in which knowing a visitor’s referral source can dictate what content you would like them to see.  Whether visiting from a social network or even a tradeshow website, your audience is looking for specific information.  This type of personalization allows you to answer common questions from these visitors and offer them additional resources unique to them.  Some companies have different sites setup for individual products.  Leveraging this type of personalization, you can target visitors that visit your site from your other domains and prioritize what is seen first.

Personalization for Known Contacts

• Smartlists – Most marketers have their database segmented in a variety of ways.  Smartlists are often created to group contacts based on many different factors including previous form submissions, job titles, or personas.  To personalize content, we can use these lists as the determining factor for what should be displayed.  An example of this is found when setting up smart CTAs.  It’s common to create offers with specific personas in mind.  By personalizing CTAs based on a smartlist of a particular persona, you can offer downloadable content uniquely to that audience, while promoting other offers for different personas.

• Lifecycle Stages – Integrating HubSpot with your company’s CRM has a multitude of benefits.  One in particular is the automatic updating of lifecycle stages.  By doing so, HubSpot can then keep track of contacts based on where they are in the buying process.  With this feature, we can also use these lifecycle stages as the smart rule for personalization.  As you could expect, this gives you the ability to customize the content on a page based on the contact’s lifecycle stage.  It’s possible that you have offers specifically geared towards new leads, whereas existing customers are offered upsell or renewal opportunities. This type of personalization allows you to market to each one separately.

Personalizing the content on your site helps to get the most out of limited website space and cater content towards more than one audience at the same time.  HubSpot’s CMS Hub has made it extremely easy to create smart content based on the above criteria and adjust as needed.  If your current CMS does not offer personalization, it’s a great idea to look into moving your site over to the HubSpot CMS to take full advantage of these capabilities.