We are seeing a real trend among our clients and beyond for using hubspot and I can see why; as an organisation they talk a lot of sense.  I attended the recent "Grow with Hubspot" event in Manchester where the theme was how to focus on the customer rather than your platform or channels. It's a mantra we've been following for some time and Hubspot can certainly help you to do that. They list their current customer numbers as 44,500 in over 90 countries. That's some impressive growth.

I’m not focusing this post on the benefits of Hubspot as there are plenty of great Hubspot partners out there that will help you to take full advantage of the platform from an inbound marketing perspective. Where my interest lies is how this sits within your current digital channels.  Hubspot links nicely to social, and has a really nice CRM element with some cool automation tools built in all with the aim of making managing your customer relationships a breeze whatever the channel.

There is a "but", one that topped the question list to the panel from at the event and it's around content management. There is an in-built CMS in Hubspot that is designed to help marketing users build landing pages. I’m sure they are looking to improve it but when compared to Umbraco the Hubspot CMS is quite poor. I can’t see any Umbraco users running to get Hubspot for the CMS. Like most of our clients there is a very good chance that your website is one of your key digital channels, and a really good chance that you already have a decent CMS in place to handle that.

Having looked at Hubspot with one of our Umbraco clients we decided it would be a good idea to look at building some integration between Umbraco and Hubspot. We're planning to build a suite of features I like to call our toolbox. Thankfully Hubspot has a decent API and we’ve got some keen developers so we've already built Version 1 of some of these tools.

Concept one – Make the forms easy

Turns out very little was required for this to use Hubspot forms simply, we just needed to create a component that could hold the Javascript. As long as we ensured we had the Hubspot tracking code in place too this just worked with a little help from our front end developers and it all looks good too.  We are currently extending this tool to allow for translations to happen so multilingual Umbraco sites can use their Hubspot forms with ease

Concept two – Get content from hubspot and make it available through umbraco

We thought this would be one of the more useful tools in the  Hubspot/Umbraco toolbox being able to access links to your Hubspot content, such as blog posts, directly from Umbraco. With a little effort we have created something that allows Umbraco to fetch all available blog posts from Hubspot and create links through to the Hubspot pages using the titles, images and links delivered within Hubspot. Written down that sounds a little underwhelming, however, this means that relevant blog content can be placed throughout a site and alongside the tracking and forms, we've just started to unlock the power of Hubspot and Umbraco

Concept three – currently under wraps

We’ve not built this yet, and are currently prototyping something really exciting to link up some of the more advanced Hubspot features with Umbraco.  So for now I can’t really reveal too much about this, suffice it to say we are looking with our future additions to the Umbraco / Hubspot toolbox to bring some level of automation and personalisation.

The best thing about all of these little tools is that we can replicate them for a client really simply now. If you have Umbraco and Hubspot and would like to find out more about our toolbox, or  you are currently wishing there was some other link between Umbraco or another CMS and Hubspot then get in touch.

Simon Haven