Why Your Competitors Will Crush You on the HubSpot COS

Quick….what’s the competitive advantage your company holds over the “other guys” in the industry?

(I’ll wait.)

If you’re like most marketers and business owners posed with the same question, chances are you immediately thought of product features, specs, or the way in which your service differs. And that’s great, because these differentiations are why people will ultimately choose to do business with you.

These are key differentiators in your prospect’s exploration phase, in which they’re comparing your offering to that of the competition.

But here’s what you’re missing: a competitive advantage in the discovery phase. The quality of the content you publish. The level of engagement in your social circles. And most importantly, the overall experience delivered from your website.

So while you may feel confident about your company’s competitive advantage in the exploration phase, you may actually be getting crushed by competitors in the discovery phase.

Here’s why.

Their Websites are More Personalized

It should come as no surprise that where a customer begins and where they ultimately end up are two entirely different places. 

At the beginning of the process they have different needs and interests than when they're closer to making a purchasing decision. 

The HubSpot COS is designed to help businesses connect with visitors, leads, and customers at the right time with a message that carries the most relevance. 

Through personalization and smart content, businesses are able to provide prospects and customers with a unique experience based off variables such as lifecycle stage, persona, industry, or location.

For example, when a reader reaches the bottom of one of your blog posts, it's likely that they are going to come face to face with a call-to-action. Rather than present them with something static, consider the improvement you would see if the offer adapted to the reader's needs.

Visitors see this: 

Leads see this:

Customers see this:

Use forms on landing pages that don't request the same information twice, pull a different homepage view for visitors from different industries, or personalize your messaging by inserting a leads name right into your content.

With the HubSpot COS, it's possible.

These inclusions ultimately result in more opportunities to serve up new offers and a more personalized experience that encourages reconversions - something that static content simply can't hold a candle to. 

Their Site is More Mobile-Friendly

Websites that are optimized for mobile instantly upgrade the user experience by making it easier for visitors to navigate around your website, consume content, and quickly share it with their networks.

With 57% of users stating that they won’t recommend a business with poorly designed mobile site, your business can't afford to carry on thinking that one version of your site is enough to sustain and maintain a visitor's interest. 

Websites built on the HubSpot COS are out-of-the-box mobile-friendly. Thanks to a bit of code built directly into the COS, websites are designed to be fully responsive on smart phones and devices of all different shapes and sizes. 

This means that visitors have the convenience of accessing your site from the device of their choosing without compromising their experience. 

If your business wants to remain relevant in real-time, they absolutely must put forth a responsive website experience in order to keep pace with the shift in consumer behavior.

Their Entire Campaign is More Integrated

Inbound marketing success doesn't have to take you here, there, and everywhere.

While you're busy pouring your time and effort into researching, implementing, and trying to integrate a disjoined set of marketing tools, HubSpot COS users are busy sipping fruity drinks equipped with tiny umbrellas under the shade of their all-in-one platform.

On a serious note, the ability to carry out all of your marketing efforts in one place has considerable advantages.

By having email, social media, blogging, contact information, and analytics all under one roof you're saving time, increasing productivity, and reducing the chances of delivering a misaligned marketing message. 

Simply put, an integrated platform makes planing, creating, monitoring, and maintaining a marketing campaign virtually seamless, making it easier for COS users to achieve greater resonance.

Their Websites are More Optimized for Search

The trouble with most CMSes is that they're out of date in terms of search engine updates. 

The COS is different. 

Features like the SEO Panel within the blogging platform serve as a valuable resource for content creators looking to ensure that their posts contain all of the ingredients necessary for improved search rankings.

The panel urges users to take into account title optimizations (keyword inclusion & length), body optimizations (keyword usage, internal links, & calls-to-action), image optimizations (image inclusions & alt text), as well as meta optimizations (meta description & url) by highlighting missed opportunities in red. 

With this type of real-time optimization insight alongside your content, users can be certain that they are effectively optimizing for the keywords they care about most. 

So while they're enjoying the view from the first page of search results, you're hanging out on page 6 struggling to craft a blog article that contains all the right pieces. 

Aside from blog optimization, COS users also have access to the Page Performance tool, which helps them identify areas for on-page SEO improvement, gain insight into which keywords they are ranking for, and uncover the inbound links that are directing visitors to their site. 

It's recommendations like these that transform the performance of websites built on the COS.

Their Strategy is More Measurable

You can't manage what you don't measure.

If you're looking to gain a competitive advantage, you have to be well-versed in the numbers behind your efforts. The numbers that reveal whether or not the landing page for your latest offer is inviting conversions, or the last email your sent out actually got opened. 

These are the insights that will fuel your future efforts, improve upon your existing ones, and provide you with the actualizations you need to perform at the level you're capable of. 

For HubSpot COS users, all of their actions can be easily traced back to a performance-based number. 

Social media posts are displayed alongside the number of clicks and interactions they receive, landing pages are coupled with views and submission rates, and a blog article performance can be broken down into views, sources, and CTA clicks.

The insights are beyond price.

So while COS users are using their Sources Report to help them pour their efforts into the channels in which they know they're generating traffic from, you're left scratching your head, trying to spread yourself thin across everything.