HubSpot Content Hub: Everything You Need to Know

There’s some big news in the content management space: HubSpot recently launched its updated website CMS - Content Hub.

HubSpot Content Hub is an end-to-end solution for creating, managing, and optimising all your digital content. What’s more, it brings plenty of powerful AI capabilities to the table, which will surely impress whether you’re an old or new customer.

In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into every aspect of HubSpot’s new Content Hub. You’ll discover how it compares to HubSpot CMS and what makes it so different. 

What is HubSpot Content Hub?

Simply put, HubSpot Content Hub is an all-in-one, AI-powered content marketing platform. It leverages a combination of HubSpot’s existing capabilities in this space, combined with exciting new AI tools to help marketers create, manage, and optimise content across the entire customer journey and all public touchpoints.

It brings together the best of CMS Hub, Marketing Hub, and AI, providing marketers with a unified system to support all their needs.

Content Hub replaces CMS Hub to join the now six hub lineup, including Marketing, Sales, Service, Operations and Commerce Hubs. 

Why Did HubSpot Create Content Hub? How is it Different From CMS Hub?

CMS Hub was, and still is, a powerful tool that gained popularity for helping businesses build CRM-powered websites that connect with prospects and customers through personalised experiences.

CMS Hub allowed marketers to seamlessly integrate the online website environment with sales and service functions, and customer data in HubSpot to drive engagement.

While the old adage “content is king” still rings true, customer expectations have shifted dramatically over the last decade. With increased competition and changing consumption patterns, audiences are expecting more. As a result, hyper-personalised, relevant, engaging, and up-to-date content is now the norm.

Content Hub represents HubSpot doubling down on their CMS, content and generative AI. It aims to supply teams with tools to create, manage, publish, and reuse content more efficiently to meet today's consumer expectations.

It’s designed to make content creation and management more efficient and flexible. And, to allow marketers to easily manage everything in one place - from blogs and landing pages to podcasts, case studies, and video content.

To do this, HubSpot Content Hub not only comes with all the capabilities of CMS Hub but expands on them with AI-powered tools to manage content creation, governance, and distribution across multiple channels. Now, marketers can focus less on juggling tools and more on creating impactful content that resonates with their audience.

Still unclear about how Content Hub differs from CMS Hub? For existing CMS Hub users, it mainly boils down to these key changes:

• Content Remix
• Expanded content creation toolset
• Podcasts
• Embeds
• AI-powered tools
• Case Studies

Benefits of HubSpot Content Hub

By now, you’re probably wondering what tangible benefits you can expect from transitioning to Content Hub. By its very nature, Content Hub is an end-to-end solution for marketing teams, meaning that it aims to bring improvements across your entire pipeline.

So, without further ado, let’s look at the reasons why you should consider Content Hub:

• Personalised content: Using AI, Content Hub helps craft highly tailored content for various market segments with minimal extra effort at scale.
• Save time and increase team productivity: Content Hub’s tools help with non-care processes, like governance, allowing teams to focus on more strategic and value-driven tasks.
• AI-powered tools: From ideation to creation, AI has the potential to accelerate processes while delivering more value, allowing companies to stay competitive.
• Simplifies multi-lingual, multi-channel marketing campaigns: Content Hub empowers teams to extract more value from their content by reusing it for different regions, languages, and channels.
• Brand consistency: Content Hub facilitates unified messaging across platforms, regions, and formats by standardising content creation and distribution within the HubSpot ecosystem.

What Are the Key (New) Content Hub Features?

HubSpot Content Hub still offers plenty of familiar features that CMS Hub and Marketing Hub users have come to know and love. However, its offering is supercharged, particularly around content creation and management, with a number of AI-powered solutions.

We can classify Content Hub’s main feature verticals into 3 broad categories:

• Website creation and optimisation
• Hubspot AI
• Content operations

Aside from these core capabilities, Content Hub also offers others to help ease content marketing:

• Accessibility tools
• Access to HubSpot’s vast app marketplace
• Central multisite partitioning and management

Now, let's look at the individual features that make Content Hub the digital marketing and content management powerhouse that it is:

1. Content Remix

Easily one of Content Hub’s best new tools, this AI-powered multichannel content creation feature effortlessly transforms a single piece of content into various formats. For example, you can repurpose a blog post into an email, social media post, ad, landing page section, or even an audio file.

This maximises the value of every single piece of content and maintains an active presence and engage with your audience across various platforms without using more resources.

2. Brand Voice

Learning from your existing content, this AI tool is able to mimic your brand’s unique tone, style, and personality. It provides on-the-fly suggestions to rewrite new content to be true to your brand voice.

Not only does this help uphold consistency across your team, but reduces the need for training and supervision when working with new content creators. Built into the standard content editor, it’s also extremely easy to use.

3. AI Blog Writer

This generative AI tool can (almost) instantly draft blog posts optimised for search engines. It helps with every stage of the writing process, from coming up with ideas to generating a rough outline to producing quality content.

More than just a writing assistant, it provides key SEO metrics to help evaluate the impact of your content. It’s built on OpenAI's GPT-4 and uses Semrush data to stick to best-performing SEO principles.

4. Memberships

Similar to other HubSpot products, Content Hub users have out-of-the-box access to manage access to their content. This makes it easy to tailor content to specific audience segments or set up a business with a recurring revenue model.

You can either restrict access by inviting individuals from existing contact lists or set up methods for self-registration. It’s possible to create highly tailored experiences by setting up custom membership pages and fine-grained access levels.

5. Smart Content

Once again, setting up pages to use dynamic content is simple. It takes place in the default page editor, and you can create these “rules” using a simple editor - no code needed. Each and every module on the page can have its own smart content triggers and outcomes.

This is a highly powerful feature that allows you to hyperpersonalise pages for known and unknown visitors on the fly. For example, known contacts can see tailored content on their stage in the customer journey or upsell/cross-sell opportunities.

For unknown visitors, you can craft a targeted experience based on the site, ad, or link that sent them to you, their device, or location.

6. Content Embed

This nifty feature lets teams embed Hubspot-made content into external platforms, like WordPress, without any coding. You can design entire website sections using the Hubspot interface and seamlessly integrate it into your WordPress pages.

At the same time, this allows you to leverage HubSpot’s AI tools and dynamic content features to speed up production and create personalised experiences across different platforms.

7. Video & Podcasts

It’s also easy to create, host, and distribute longer-format content, such as videos and podcasts, for your campaigns. This can be tutorials, customer success stories, podcast episodes, or any other content you may want to leverage on your site, emails, or customer interactions.

You can either upload your own audio, or use HubSpot's AI to generate audio files from your content. 

After you've created your podcasts, you can check out your published episodes on the podcasts page. You can also distribute your podcast internally or on other channels. 

HubSpot’s CRM tracks video performance, so it’s easy to measure ROI or spot key moments of engagement.

It’s also simple to distribute podcasts across platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

8. SEO Recommendations

HubSpot’s SEO tools provides everything you need to build search authority, fully integrated with all its other content features. It suggests improved keyword focus and priorities to boost your rankings and ensure you get the most bang for your buck.

The recommendations feature also helps you identify which pages need updates, receive topic suggestions based on relevance and competition, and refine your SEO strategy over time. Not to mention built-in data monitoring and analytics to track organic traffic, keyword performance, and return on investment.

9. Content Library

While not completely new, this feature saw some upgrades with the introduction of Content Hub. This module allows creators to easily create and manage gated content, such as eBooks, infographics, PDFs, and other exclusive resources, and make it available to specific audience segments.

On top of providing a central repository to store, manage, and share these resources, it also leverages CRM data to improve personalisation and tracking.

10. A/B Testing, Analytics, & Reporting

As any seasoned marketer knows, your company site or blog is a living entity that must be continually nurtured.

Content Hub facilitates continuous improvement with A/B testing on any HubSpot Content Hub page. You can test different images, text, layouts, forms and more.

These A/B test all come with in-depth reporting as well as SEO performance, engagement, and conversion tracking. All of this takes place in user-friendly dashboards with colourful and easy-to-digest charts, graphs, and counters, which you can customise according to your goals and KPIs.

It’s also easy to test multiple variations of the page, allowing you to quickly see what works and what doesn’t.

HubSpot Content Hub Pricing

Content Hub is available as a standalone product or as part of the Marketing+ bundle. It has three tiers, with more advanced features at higher price points. Like many other HubSpot products, it follows a seat-based pricing model that scales with the size of your team.

The good news is that all options come with a 14-day refund policy, so you can test them out risk-free.

HubSpot has a Starter plan aimed at small teams or individuals. This plan excludes the majority of the most valuable Content Hub features, but it does come with the basic website and content creation tools:

• AI blog
• Create landing and web pages
• Forms
• AI assistants

Price: $15/month/seat

1. Content Hub Professional

HubSpot’s Professional and Enterprise tiers are where Content Hub really comes alive, though. Everything in Starter, plus:

• Memberships
• A/B testing
• Smart content for pages
• Podcasts [Beta]
• Brand voice [Beta]
• Content remix [Beta]
• Dynamic pages
• Custom reporting
• AI translation
• Content embed

Price: Pro starts at $400/month with 3 seats included. Each additional core seat is $45/month.

2. Content Hub Enterprise

Everything in Professional, plus:

• Limit access to content and data
• Content Approvals & Partitioning
• Serverless functions
• Custom objects
• Multisites

Price: Enterprise starts at $1,500/month with 5 seats included. Each additional seat is $75/month.

3. Marketing+ (HubSpot Marketing Hub + Content Hub)

If, in HubSpot’s words, you need a “complete marketing solution,” you may want to look into Marketing+. This essentially combines its Marketing Hub and Content Hub into a single package. Starting at $900/month for 3 seats, it’s a good deal as Marketing Hub alone starts at $800/month.

Marketing+ Enterprise costs $3,800/month for 5 seats (Marketing Hub Enterprise is $3,600/month)

What’s the difference between CMS Hub vs Content Hub and Marketing Hub?

CMS Hub was primarily a platform for building and optimising websites to provide dynamic and engaging experiences.

Marketing Hub is HubSpot’s marketing automation platform, focused on lead generation and omnichannel marketing to grow your audience

Content Hub is HubSpot’s all-in-one, AI-powered content marketing platform, synthesising many of CMS Hub and Marketing Hub’s capabilities and augmenting them with AI.

The key thing they all have in common is leveraging HubSpot’s CRM for improved personalisation and performance tracking.

What will happen to HubSpot CMS Hub? Can I still use it?

Existing customers will still have access to CMS Hub and be able to renew their subscriptions. It doesn’t seem like HubSpot has any plans to completely remove it any time soon. However, it’s no longer available for new subscribers, and CMS Hub users will not be able to access the new HubSpot Content Hub features.

Marketing+ represents a shift to a more all-in-one type of solution is in line with HubSpot’s strategy to better address the current needs of marketers.

HubSpot CMS Hub users will just see some of the new features that are not available. Everything else continues to work just fine. 

Have some tools moved out of other Hubs and into Content Hub?

For the most part, Hubs will retain their existing capabilities, but there is one specific change taking place which are good to be aware of:

• Landing pages and no longer part of HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Enter Marketing+

What is Marketing+?

Marketing+ is a bundle plan that includes both HubSpot Content Hub and Marketing Hub capabilities under a single subscription. It also has a Professional and Enterprise plan, both of which are more expensive than the individual Content Hub and Marketing Hub plans but more affordable than subscribing to both separately.

Why should I use Content Hub instead of other Hubs?

There are multiple scenarios in which you might benefit from HubSpot Content Hub:

• You have to create personalised and high-quality content for multiple channels, languages, formats, and audience segments at scale.

• You want a unified system for managing content and marketing channels, as well as measuring performance and optimising SEO.

• You want to eliminate inefficiencies and streamline collaboration between teams with tools for content approvals, consistency, and permissions.

Ready to change the way you do content marketing with HubSpot Content Hub?

HubSpot’s new Content Hub really speaks to the needs and challenges of the modern marketer.

Content Hub not only acts as a creativity engine, but also a way to maximise your resources and leverage your existing content to maximise impact across all your channels.

Ready to see how Content Hub can revolutionise your content marketing efforts today? Give us a call! As an Elite HubSpot partner, our expert team is on standby to take your digital presence to the next level.