Blog - Vaulted

Why partner with a HubSpot web design agency?

Written by Emily Davidson | May 7, 2023 10:22:43 PM

As a HubSpot Partner, we tend to parachute into a lot of different situations with clients. Sometimes we work with other web design agencies or designers to collaborate on wireframes, while, at other times, we’re in complete creative control in terms of client direction.

You can certainly successfully use HubSpot to create a web design and launch a website on your own, but you’ll also likely notice the cavalcade of qualified HubSpot web design agencies offering their services. 

In this article, I’ll outline the benefits of utilizing a HubSpot website design agency like Vaulted, empowering you with the knowledge to select the right agency for your project.

Key Definitions: HubSpot Hubs

It’s easy to get confused about HubSpot and the various products (organized as “hubs”) that they offer, but once you understand what each hub does, you can leverage each to most efficiently help you meet your business goals.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

  • HubSpot CMS Hub 
    • A CMS, meaning content management system, offers a user-friendly way to build and manage websites. The HubSpot CMS Hub lets you build a website and launch a website from the HubSpot platform. It features powerful tools for website design, responsive editing, and SEO (search engine optimization), making it an ideal choice for businesses looking to create and maintain high-quality websites.

  • HubSpot Marketing Hub
    • The HubSpot Marketing Hub streamlines marketing efforts by offering tools for content creation, social media, SEO, and email marketing. It also provides powerful marketing automation and lead management features, making it an all-in-one solution for businesses looking to enhance inbound marketing strategies and generate leads.

  • HubSpot Sales Hub
    • The HubSpot Sales Hub helps sales teams close deals efficiently with tools for contact and deal management, email tracking, and meeting scheduling. It includes sales automation, performance reporting, and forecasting features, enabling sales teams to gain insights, identify areas for improvement, and drive better results.
  • HubSpot Service Hub
    • The HubSpot Service Hub improves customer support with a built-in ticketing system, a knowledge base feature for creating helpful resources, and customer feedback tools. It also offers reporting features to help businesses monitor support performance and make data-driven improvements to customer service processes.

 

HubSpot Websites: More Than Just a Website


Whether you’re new to HubSpot or a seasoned veteran of the platform, if you’re reading this, you likely already know that HubSpot can be a powerful engine for growth. This is especially true for owned media like blog posts and websites, where a company directly controls the marketing message.

But HubSpot is more than just a starting point for a website. It’s a nexus for all your digital properties. With native support for popular ad platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook plus powerful tools like email marketing, HubSpot’s intended purpose is to be more than just a website.

We often overlook the most important aspect of our go-to marketing strategy: the digital properties we already own. You can make the most of your online presence with a HubSpot website.

6 Reasons Why Businesses Choose a HubSpot Website

Did you know you can run an entire website, end-to-end, using just HubSpot? Thanks to HubSpot's CMS Hub, a powerful and user-friendly content management system, you can build and manage a website on the platform with ease. This comes with distinct advantages over other web technologies and content management systems. 

Let’s explore the advantages of creating a  HubSpot website.

1. Unified View of Your Business

With a  HubSpot website for your business, you’ll have a clear, unified view of the health of your business. In a single portal, you can view everything from the daily activities of your sales team to the number of visitors to your website. You can generate customized reports based on your real business goals, seamlessly delivering key performance indicators to your stakeholders.

In other words, a HubSpot website allows you to connect all the pieces of your business together. HubSpot provides a holistic view of how all the parts of your business are working, which parts of succeeding, and which parts may need more attention..

 

2. Measuring Content-Driven Growth

For many organizations, their website represents the opening act of a marketing and sales strategy. That is to say that websites are a significant way to source new business, firm up potential sales deals, and generate new relationships.

From a growth perspective, the issue is clear: your website will require quality content, and content marketing isn’t cheap.

We get it. Whether you’re investing in a paid social campaign on LinkedIn for an upcoming webinar or writing a blog post for SEO, every dollar matters when you’re producing content.

With a HubSpot website, you can track the effectiveness of that content and, maybe more importantly, tie those activities together and relate those to your actual sales and revenue.

 

3. Bringing What Matters Into Focus

When we hear clients discuss the benefits of HubSpot for running a website, they most often quickly mention the relief of skipping the common pitfalls of Wordpress and similar CMS platforms, like security and speed.

This explains some of the popularity of HubSpot websites; it avoids many of the drawbacks of a platform like Wordpress that need constant website maintenance and supervision. Those issues don’t even begin to touch on problems related to Wordpress performance, and it can be costly to hire a developer to begin to diagnose those performance issues.

By taking care of the basics of website management, the HubSpot website platform lets you focus on the most critical aspects of your business.

Frankly, that’s the heart of HubSpot: focusing on what matters the most at the expense of what doesn’t.

 

Security

Wordpress has a constant need for security updates and general website security maintenance. If you’ve worked with Wordpress before, you’ve likely encountered the headache that is an out-of-date plugin or incorrect permissions settings. Self-managed solutions like this can distract from larger growth strategies and plans.

Many important security basics are covered right out of the box with HubSpot:

  • Security Updates 
    • Security updates have to be regularly updated, monitored, and maintained in many legacy CMS platforms. HubSpot allows you to avoid this with regular, automated security updates that keep your website secure.
  • SSL Certificates
    • SSL (secure sockets layer) Certificates ensure private and encrypted communication between your website and web visitors. Translation? They make your website more secure. Having an SSL certificate is also a trust indicator with potential customers.
  • Content Delivery Network
    • HubSpot websites also come with their own content delivery network (CDN) baked right in. Your website loads faster, ensures more website uptime (over 99.9%), and ensures that your site is secure.
  • Security and Threat Detection
    • Choosing HubSpot as your web platform of choice means you have an active team monitoring potential security threats and keeping your data safe.

 

5. Website Maintenance
When you choose a managed solution like HubSpot and work with a dedicated HubSpot web developer, you don’t have to worry about maintaining plugins or diagnosing technical issues, meaning you can focus on what matters the most: success..

 

6. Hosting Costs
While free solutions like Wordpress can seem like a popular option to save money, the cost associated with maintaining and updating these sites can easily exceed the cost of simply going with a HubSpot website in the first place.

 

HubSpot Website for Owned Media Growth


Most website design projects intrinsically involve owned media, which is any medium where an entity has direct control over their marketing message. A critical part of that owned media is (you guessed it!) a company’s website.

A Harvard Business Review article underscores the foundational nature of websites:

At the risk of oversimplifying, paid media is advertising and sponsorships, while earned media is public relations and word-of-mouth. Companies either pay to deliver content to an audience or try to earn coverage and exposure from reporters and influencers. In contrast, owned media is anything under companies’ direct control such as websites, newsletters, catalogs, and blogs.”

In today’s digital landscape, your website is effectively the starting point for your owned media strategy. Effective web design will both establish your brand message and serve as a foundation for growth. 

When it comes to website design, no product better embodies these key features than HubSpot. At Vaulted, we view websites as essential building blocks for more advanced and effective marketing—your website serves as the reliable foundation for all other marketing efforts.

 

HubSpot Websites: Built for Performance

The impact of website performance on digital campaigns can’t be understated. Slow websites frustrate visitors, causing them to abandon checkout processes and bounce off websites. Plus, there’s  overwhelming evidence that slower sites perform worse in search engine results.

As we’ve established, HubSpot, on a fundamental level, is built around producing incredible, powerful user experiences, especially as it relates to performance.

HubSpot’s website management platform has a few specific features that a HubSpot web design agency like Vaulted can help you take advantage of: A/B testing and SEO.

A/B Testing Tools

Testing is a critical part of any marketing strategy. At its most basic, A/B testing is the creation and analysis of variations of website pages, landing pages, or emails. By testing different variations, marketers and salespeople can discover which marketing messages or techniques are most effective.

A/B testing typically needs to be baked into whatever type of software you’re using to conduct and run a test.

Luckily, a HubSpot website comes with this functionality incorporated. With just a few clicks, you can test the copy related to a new promotion or see how a new page layout performs. 

As a HubSpot Partner, we have the expertise to not only guide you through how to set up A/B testing, but how to strategically leverage the technology to produce better marketing outcomes. A/B testing can be used to lead your data-driven marketing in a smart way, making the most of your marketing dollars.

Focus on Search Engine Optimization 

When asked which of HubSpot’s website features is most valuable, I immediately think of its search engine optimization tools, which allow you to monitor and improve your SEO strategy. 

Rather than spending hours on the Internet or pinging ChatGPT, you can use HubSpot to evaluate your existing content and make recommendations that will improve your organic search results, thanks to HubSpot’s native SEO tools. 

HubSpot website SEO tools include:

  • Technical and Content Suggestions
      • HubSpot’s SEO tools can help identify issues with blog posts and suggest how to optimize them further, informed by the current best practices for search engine optimization. 
  • Reporting and Analytics
      • While Google Analytics and Google Search Console are excellent tools for monitoring SEO efforts, you can also connect these tools to HubSpot for even better insights. HubSpot provides reporting data to monitor the effectiveness of SEO content.
  • Content Performance and Production
      • One of the biggest challenges of producing content that will rank on Google is simple: time. It’s time-consuming to produce new content, requiring ideation on content, topic selection, keyword research, writing, editing, and design. A dedicated HubSpot Partner can help guide you through all the required production to turn your website into a lightning rod for new customers.
  • Topic Clusters
    • Topic clusters are one of HubSpot’s most powerful features. Topic clusters are intentionally organized and linked website content that generates effective user journeys and quality site structures. With HubSpot’s topic clusters, you can plan ahead to make the most of SEO-focused content.

 

HubSpot CMS Pro: 3 Steps Marketing Teams Can Expect

Throughout my career, I’ve had the misfortune of working in many different content management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management systems (CRM). HubSpot combines the best of both a CMS and a CRM in one sleek platform that allows you to focus on the work behind marketing instead of the repetitive tasks of operations.

At Vaulted, our goal is simple: to help you stand up and operate HubSpot as simply as possible. That perspective guides how we approach your website design as well. 

Here’s what to expect with our optimized process:

 1. Discovery with HubSpot in Mind

Discovery is typically part of any professional services project and is the primary phase where essential information about the project is gathered. Critical data is identified and organized in order to proceed with future phases of a project.

When you choose to work with a HubSpot Partner like Vaulted, you’ll discover that we’re asking questions not typically discussed in the realm of strictly web design. Why? Because we know the power and extendibility of HubSpot, and we are designing for your next three years rather than just the next few months.

From leveraging smart content to A/B testing, our objective is to transform your relationship to your CRM and begin the building blocks of a much larger marketing program today.

2. Rapid Onboarding and Operations

From a technical perspective, working with an experienced HubSpot web designer ensures that your website is capable of the basic functions you need it to do. Rather than working with someone inexperienced on the platform, set yourself up for success by working with experts.

You can also benefit from the knowledge of best practices on how to use the platform. Rather than spending hours on tutorial videos, we can quickly onboard you to how to leverage a HubSpot website for maximum effect.

 

3. Building HubSpot for the Long Game

Make no mistake, choosing a HubSpot web designer for your HubSpot website is a forward-thinking move. Your HubSpot website will seamlessly integrate with the other powerful marketing, operations, and service tools that HubSpot offers, making it easier than ever to launch your next initiative.

Elevate Your Website with a HubSpot Partner Agency

Partnering with a HubSpot web design agency offers significant benefits that go beyond simple aesthetics. By working with a team that has extensive experience with the HubSpot platform, you can leverage their expertise in owned media growth, website performance optimization, and the long-term success of your marketing efforts. 

The right agency can help you make the most of HubSpot's powerful tools for content-driven growth, tracking the effectiveness of your marketing investments, and connecting various aspects of your business together.

Collaborating with a HubSpot-focused web design agency can streamline your website design project and set your business up for success in future marketing endeavors. Our experts at Vaulted understand the platform's capabilities and can guide you through every step of the process, from discovery and onboarding to designing your website with the future in mind. 

Ultimately, choosing a HubSpot web design agency is a forward-thinking move that can help you tap into the full potential of the platform and maximize the impact of your marketing and sales operations.

To get started on your HubSpot website, contact us today.