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Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hello, hello everybody and welcome to my session Memberships Payments and so, so much more all about CRM Powered web experiences. I'm em, win Grove. I'm your host and session leader today and I'm excited to jump in. We've got a good bit planned. We'll do some intros. This is definitely not about me. I wanna know about you guys too. So do a little bit of a group activity, um, to really understand web. I feel like we kind of gotta go back, look at where we've come from, look at where we are, and then try to figure out where we're going and then how do we build that future of where we're going in HubSpot. Best part about all of this though is the killer case studies that I have planned for you and of course, a behind the scenes look@inbound.com because of course my team and I built inbound.com with HubSpot and then we'll close it out with another group activity and it should be a very fun time today.

Speaker 1: (00:51)
So who we got? Who we got? Who is this lady here? It's me. I'm em Win Grove. I am the VP of professional services for a company called Aptitude eight, which I'll tell you about in just a minute. Um, I think it's important to call out that I am a career marketer here. I'm sure given that this is c m s, we may have some devs, we may have some Cs, we may have some sales ops or sales, uh, sales enablement here with us today. But I am a career marketer. I've got, it says 10 years, it's probably like 14 and that's embarrassing, but lots of experience with DemandGen, web ops, marketing, marketing ops. I built Aptitude eight alongside my fearless leader and C E o Connor Jeffers, who is very plugged into the HubSpot community. You may have heard of him. Uh, big Power user and HubSpot fan girl over here.

Speaker 1: (01:37)
I do go crazy for Corgis and I'm a Corgi mom and I love being by the ocean. So being in and around Boston this time of year, chefs kiss love being by all this water and of course inbound. So Aptitude eight is a rapid growth technical consulting firm. We specialize in marketing ops, rev ops, web ops, which we'll talk a lot about today. Solutions architecture or an elite partner with HubSpot. We were actually the fastest partner to ever become elite with HubSpot. I would say by far and large we are the most technical partner in the HubSpot ecosystem. We also build apps. We love HubSpot. We wanna grow alongside of HubSpot. Sometimes HubSpot has gaps in its product and we call 'em up and we're like, Hey, are you guys gonna build this product? And they're like, nah, our product roadmap is gonna do this.

Speaker 1: (02:24)
And we're like, can we build it? And they're like, yeah. So we build apps to make HubSpot better and we deliver services to help people use HubSpot. Better Icebreaker. Um, I would like to know a little bit about you guys. So in the, um, chat, tell me a little bit about my marketers. Marketers speak up for me. I know we can't like raise our hands, but in the chat, reveal yourselves. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm seeing a lot law marketers. What about devs? People who code, whether it's a front end developer, backend developer. Where are my developers at? Show me in the chat. Okay. All right. I see we got some people here. Nice, nice. Anybody from sales enablement? Oh, surprising. We do have some good, good to hear and see us. Anyone. Okay, maybe. Awesome. What about people who traveled to come to Boston who traveled?

Speaker 1: (03:29)
Show of hands in the chat. Of course. Okay, so most people it looks like traveled here. I don't know about you guys, but I, I forgot how to travel cuz of Covid. I don't know if you've seen the State Farm commercials or they're like, don't become like your parents. I have become the person at the airport that I loathe. I like don't know what to do with my shoes or my bags. We're gonna work through it though. It is a post covid world we live in, I guess. Um, alright, let's see. I'd actually like to know more though. Um, plot twist though because it's a little bit of a, of an alien world that I wanna create for us here today. Because when Aptitude eight started building on C m S hub, we had been previously building on Webflow WordPress. Um, I think we even did a couple of sites on wics, but HubSpot was new to us, right?

Speaker 1: (04:19)
It felt pretty alien. We're like, this is cool, but foreign. Then they started to get cute and they got memberships and payments and we really started to to understand and wrap our minds around, wait a minute, this is a true c m s that's powered by A C R M. What planet are we even on? So I figured we could all level the playing field here into a little bit of an alien world, outer space world, um, and have a little c m s get to know ya. So group activity, I hope you're ready for takeoff. On the next slide, you will see a QR code or a tiny, well, both a QR code and a tiny U R l, whichever is easiest for you. If you wanna scan it with your phone or if you just wanna type it in on one of your monitors, feel free.

Speaker 1: (05:07)
And you will follow instructions and you'll be building your own alien entity, your own alien personality so that we can all be in the same playing field here. So here is the U R l feel free cassette, scan it your phone or type it right in. And what you should see is a form that is asking you about your alien self, whether it's your alien aura, what are your alien vibes, whether it's the planet that you're from, there's a dropdown for those. You should be able to pick a nice cool planet that really suits you. Um, what else is on there? Your alien title, what do you do as an alien? Tell me about your alien self. And then once you submit your form, and by the way, I'm not asking anybody for any emails, any phone numbers. This is totally for fun, totally leveling the playing field.

Speaker 1: (05:59)
I just wanna get to know you guys. I'm not gonna try to sell you anything I promise. So once you fill out the form, you should land on a page that looks like this, which is, but a mirror listing page. No, we are not on planet Earth anymore, but fret knot, no need to phone home. We have each other. So this is a, an index page with all of your responses, all of your, your alien identities in a, um, in a listing here. And if you click in, we each have our own individual alien player cards. This is mine. M o e Home Planet Her's, 9 81. Hello, um, space Communications Director. What about you guys? Well, I can tell you about you guys cause I could just go to the page, um, and see the full listing of all of you and you can see all of each other.

Speaker 1: (06:50)
So what just happened is you filled out a form, right? And your data entered my c r m. This was just a dev portal, but it is still a crm. Um, your data entered the c R m and it created and generated this entourage listing page. You've been added to a team of aliens. All of your data has been aggregated. You also have your individual alien page, which I like I mentioned. And then there's associations, calculations, and a lot more stuff going on behind the scenes that I will tell you about in a minute. Stay tuned. But really it's all just c r m data, right? Like it's just a data model. So what we did was we had, you know, you've got contacts companies, um, deals all your objects in your C R M, right? Well, we made an alien object and we made a planet object.

Speaker 1: (07:32)
Um, and we wanna associate aliens to planets. And we want to have, we wanna know certain things about these aliens like your name and your favorite color, whatever, and have that property value added to your alien contact record. So everything, and you'll see this is gonna come up a bunch in today's presentation. Everything starts with a data model. And this is just a simple, like marketers can do this too. You don't have to be a developer to do lucid charting or, or, or diagramming. Um, but this paves the way and informs your, um, sort of design and, and whole function flow. One other call out that I'll make here is sort of behind the scenes look, I feel like I'm spilling the t Um, when we got the R F P for inbound.com from HubSpot, we were gonna respond to that R F P I set the strategy for that and the, the approach for that whole thing.

Speaker 1: (08:21)
And I was, I remember being so nervous because my whole approach to my response to their RFP was data first design and content and the fun stuff later, right? It all is informed by data. Data has to be the first step. And I knew like other firms, or I was assuming that other firms probably would lead with some really cool sick designs and really cool functionality. But my whole point was it all starts with the data. If we've got a data model, we can build whatever we want, really, like, especially using C M S up. So anyways, more to come on data models, but it is just cr r m data and like I said, there's more to this exercise. So start thinking about the other data points that you entered on that form and how we might leverage those in part two of the exercise a little bit later.

Speaker 1: (09:10)
Buffers, I guess we have to do some slides. Um, why are we here? Who, who's earth? I don't know her right level playing field. What's our goal for today? Um, I would love for every one of us to learn about really cool c m s hub features and get the most out of HubSpot. Really push it to its limits. I I love to break things. Um, icebreaker is cute, but like actually breaking stuff is fun. And pushing HubSpot to its limits is literally what me and my firm do best. Uh, at Aptitude eight. I'd also like to have a goal of taking learnings back to your job. That you can actually use conversations or ideas you can take back to your teams. Bring up and look really smart and really cool and really creative. I want you to kick any fears you might have, whether it's about the dev side, which I'll be the first to admit.

Speaker 1: (09:55)
That's the area that I feel the, the the least strong in. Um, maybe it's marketing, maybe it's design. But I want you guys to kick your fears cuz this platform really is built for every one of us. Uh, c m s hub practice, of course, I want us to get comfy and practice new things and then of course get to know each other and have fun. As you can tell, my presentation style is a little casual. It's just because I, well selfishly, it's because it's the only way I know how to present . But also I wanna make sure that you guys feel comfortable too and can come authentically as yourselves, as your alien selves and have fun with one another. So let's go back way back. Let's do the backstory. How did we get here in the chat? Anybody know who this guy is? He's a dashing gentleman.

Speaker 1: (10:38)
If I do say so myself. Anybody know who this guy is? Oh, somebody knows. Yes it is. It's Tim Burners Lee. Tim Berners Lee founded the internet. He created the internet sexually, sir Tim burners Lee, which means he was knighted by the late queen. Um, couple of things about this guy that are kind of funny. So he was born in 1955. I call this out because that's when my parents, both my parents were born in that year and they barely know how to use a phone. So tip of that, Tim, um, he was into trains as a kid. I call this out because probably half of my company of aptitude eight was also into trains. As a kid in the chat, show me all my train fans, train fans. You have something in common with the inventor of the internet. Congrats. You did it. He went to Oxford, which is very cool and classy.

Speaker 1: (11:30)
And he became a software engineer at a company called CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. And my whole sort of impetus for all of this internet business was sharing information. He said that back in those times to there was different information on different computers and you had to log into each of those different computers to get at the information. And then on each of those different computers, sometimes they had different programs. So you had to learn a different program on each of those computers just to access information. So yeah, naturally it often, it was easier to just go and ask people when they were having coffee. So this whole informa information sharing dilemma that we have, and I say that in present tense for a reason because if you think about it, sure the internet has solved so much information sharing issues, uh, like the, the, uh, examples here.

Speaker 1: (12:18)
But if you think about today, so say your c m S is hosted on is WordPress, say the host is, uh, WP Engine or like CloudFlare or something. And then you've got GoDaddy and then you've got your market automation platform. Let's call that HubSpot. Then you've got your crm. Let's pretend like it's Salesforce. Then you've got your customer platforms. Pretend like that's Gainsight or something. All of those are pretty different. They're pretty different programs and they have different information and they're all separate systems. And sure there may be one person in your company that can excel in all of them. That's not, I mean, that's not enough. One, one person knowing how to access a bunch of information is actually a very big weak point for a company. You wanna have your information dispersed and distributed as much as possible and not have one person figuring out how to do all of these things.

Speaker 1: (13:06)
So the problem is still exists, it's just at a different scale. Um, and it, and throughout the presentation today, we're gonna keep coming back to this information sharing debacle and uh, uh, burying the lead here. But obviously having your C r m natively and one and the same as your c m s. Really, really great way to share information . Cause you can publish it onto a public website. Anyways, um, just to give you some context on how all of this started. So in late 89, he documented his whole vision. Tim did, and he was using a next computer points in the chat for anybody who knows, anybody know what a next computer is?

Speaker 1: (13:50)
I'm not seeing anything yet, but a next computer was Steve Jobs's first version of, you know, pre Apple, but think different, right? Our boys were on the same page clearly. So he was using modern, innovative technology to solve modern, innovative problems. Anyways, he no big deal, Tim, in 1990 created H T M L U R I and H T T P. Wow, okay. Uh, . And then later that year, the first webpage ever was served. And then here's where things get really cool. So CER and the company that he worked for releases that to the public. And then a year later, a couple years later, they made the underlying code for that first webpage that like browser experience, royalty free forever. Which it's like the beginnings of open source, right? Like they're the very first steps toward this should be for everybody and also goes right along.

Speaker 1: (14:44)
It is aligned perfectly with this whole information sharing debacle. Um, and then 1994, Tim actually comes to Woody and l Boston, m i t and he founded W three C schools, which is basically, uh, an institution of web folks who will want to maintain the integrity, integrity of the internet and want to have certain protocols and things around it. Uh, in fact, my entire web team at Aptitude eight has their certification and H T M L C S S and JavaScript through W three. So pretty cool. Um, and then put it into perspective, not that much later, a year later, amazon amazon.com launches. So when it comes to information sharing and success and stuff, it takes a village. Like without the internet, without Tim Burner's Lee invention. Would Amazon have happened? Maybe? Sure. Would it have happened that fast? I don't know. Probably not. Are there other geniuses that are in the world that just because they didn't come up with the idea for the internet can't harness and and leverage the power of it to do really, really cool things?

Speaker 1: (15:55)
Absolutely. This is really just case in point. The power of of information sharing is that you unlock everyone else to do really cool things too. Again, HubSpot, I feel like is doing that for us with c m s hub. Um, by the way, this is what the first browser looked like and that is the next computer. Um, just interesting call outs here. So like, if you look at the nav here, it's still top left. It's still a dropdown. It's not that different than today. There's still windows. You can have multiple windows overlaying on top of each other. There's still navigations in the corners, so it's not terribly different. Um, great framework. It also makes me feel like if he had founded the internet in 1989 and then Amazon happened in 1995 and here we are today, like time technology hits in a different sphere. Things move very fast. .

Speaker 1: (16:49)
So toddler years, if I had the controls to let you guys hop onto the mic, I would, because I wanted to have somebody read this language At first I was thinking, oh, this is like alien language. Beep ba boo beep beep, yeah, babo pow scripting that is 56 k dial up. Not necessarily alien language, but you never know. Um, depends on what planet you come from. But yeah, those were , those were our toddler years. Um, and anyone who was alive and well and using the internet during this time knows so well. The pain of listening to that stupid dial up and then your mom picking up the phone, trying to call your aunt or something and you're like, mom, no, please, I'm trying to be on the internet. Most folks these days don't even know that you couldn't do both of those things at the same time.

Speaker 1: (17:36)
Information sharing. Um, so what else? In our total of years, OG CMSs provided a very poor dev experience at the time. This was revolutionary. Sure. But, um, very poor dev experience. I don't even know that there was a content editing experience. I think the dev and content editing experience were one the same. Um, also made for kind of a crappy end user experience. If you can see on the right, that is the earliest, one of the earliest versions of Amazon, and it's as we know today from UX and UI research, is this is not the best way to lay out a page and get people to take actions. Um, also all the content is just static. Just, just just there. Um, so this are the toddler years. Everybody loves a starter pack MySpace. That's where I learned. I said that I was very uncomfortable with coding and stuff.

Speaker 1: (18:22)
I actually did learn some H two L MySpace when I was in my younger days. And I think I had Rihanna PO to replay as my song that started when you got to my profile. Um, . Anyways, what else? We have real player. We have Napster, which I know my parents hated me for that. Um, flash, Adobe flash. It's funny, Google, of course, they have all instant messenger, which you have a little away messages. All good stuff. This AOL online disc, I think is funny because being completely honest with you, I can't, I don't even know. My brain can't determine if, if this is software or hardware because it's an actual physical thing. It's a disc, but it has software on it. But gosh, weren't those the days, huh? All right, let's go to high school and college. Let's hit puberty and grow up a little bit.

Speaker 1: (19:11)
So we got high speed ish. It was maybe, honestly, I don't even know, one G, two G, 3g. Um, anyways, the end user focus started to happen, but it was for more so for traffic and clicks. Cause if you think about it in this sort of phase of the internet, this is when the ranking games really began. When people started to figure out, oh, okay, the biggest ranking engine on the internet is like Google. How do they rank their stuff and how do I get people to see my stuff and then click my stuff? So it was really more about stuffing keywords into your pages and into your old tags and things like that so that you could get found. Um, it wasn't really a super big focus on making sure that the end user experience personalization and relevancy was there. It was really like, let me get eyes on these links.

Speaker 1: (20:02)
Um, also still a poor content editing and front end experience, although I, at the time, I think people, no, I take that back. I was there. I , I was a content editor during these years. It was never a good experience. Honestly, if I got on WordPress right now, I'd tell you it was a terrible experience. Um, but every WordPress instance is so different. But anyways, we're here to talk about HubSpot anyways and it has a great front end experience. And as we go into our next starter pack, I'll see some familiar logos here. Obviously HubSpot stands out. We love HubSpot. jQuery came out during this time. WordPress, we were just talking about HTML five, bootstrap, MailChimp. What you're starting to see, or what I start to notice in this starter pack versus the toddler starter pack is that the, there's more interactivity happening, right? There's more, I'm trying to have an interaction with someone.

Speaker 1: (20:54)
It isn't just static, inter uh, static information sitting there on the internet. MailChimp, I wanna send communications out to people. This is all happening on a web app. Um, HubSpot, I wanna manage my marketing emails and my social, it's already web app, right? So you see more and more and more coming out of web than just static content on the page where, and image is on a page. Okay? I guess we have to grow up early adulthood now. We start to see the end user focus for experience and relevance. It's a much better dev workflow. Um, still , I still will argue, not a great content editing experience. Um, and then b2c, you start, you start to see them really breaking away from things solely just being a marketing site. Um, it's so much more than that. And if you look at the starter pack here, I mean, again, open source information sharing.

Speaker 1: (21:44)
Wikipedia is the first thing that stands out to me. , um, Pinterest, Tinder, talk about interactions. Um, Snapchat, Tumblr, Asana, collaboration. Oh my gosh, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia talk about information sharing and open source takes, um, YouTube, Yahoo. So again, way more interactivity and experiential sort of web problems that we're solving now in the 2000 and tens. But where are we now, now, now, now, well it's a whole new world to be honest, honestly. Like marketing site or websites can't, they just can't be a flat static marketing site anymore. We've gotta figure out as our little alien selves how to walk on this new dry land. Or maybe it's not dry land. Maybe it's wet. I don't know, maybe it's rocky. But like little Ariel, I don't want you guys to be left using a fork as a brush, cuz that just looks bad. Um, I want you guys to use cool tools that are of this age or of the future and build really cool stuff with it.

Speaker 1: (22:49)
And so where are we now? Let's see. Well, your site is not a billboard. We've kind of established that it's your digital relationship with the world and what we're seeing at after date, because we're consulting firm with tons and tons of clients who manage hundreds of HubSpot instances and sites. And what we're seeing demands for more data. People want more data. And I always tell clients that are, that are current. If they're currently on WordPress, which by the way, we don't even service WordPress or Webflow anymore, we are solely a HubSpot c m s hub shop. Um, but if they are, I'm like, yeah, well WordPress is cool, but , but all of that cool data that's in your c r M and E R P, it's not gonna make its way over there very easily. We'll talk a little bit more about data in a second.

Speaker 1: (23:32)
Um, we're seeing demands for more personalization, right? More of that relevancy, more automation, more interactivity, and then just increased functionality, right? E-com integrations with other tools and third party apps, payments, memberships, lots of stuff. And where, why are we seeing these demands? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with b2c, right? There's just so much higher expectations from buyers. And one thing I'll say about B2B and b2c, cuz I, I'm on the B2B side of things. I, I dabble in b2c. But here's the thing, we're all consumers no matter what, no matter if you're in B2B or you, you're in b2c, I still go online and see ads and click them and buy things. So I have expectations too, and I get it. Like I want my experiences to be really fast and really personalized. Show me, you know me. So we gotta fall in, you know, we've gotta fall in suit, we gotta do it.

Speaker 1: (24:24)
Um, and there's just not enough time to work how we're used to working. Um, you know, I could go throw together some pages and WordPress for you. Am I capable of doing that? Absolutely. I cannot do that very fast. , it would take me a week probably. Um, and in HubSpot, you know, with your c r m fully connected to your cms, I could just change a contact record and then that boom changes what's on a webpage because c M s CR empowered CMS anyways, there's not enough time to work out. We're used to, we have to work smarter and not harder. And then there's just the inability of traditional CMS is to meet these demands. It just weren't built for it. Like it's to be real. WordPress is a blogging platform, thankfully. It is open source and it has been able to grow and expand and be optimized over the years.

Speaker 1: (25:11)
But it is a blogging platform that is open source. You can't call their support. Um, it's just forums. But CMSs really weren't meant for all of this, right? Something else you wanna talk about is business constituencies. Because if your website's supposed to be your digital relationship with the world, then it should meet your people where they are at your business constituencies and every business has multiple, at a very minimum, you've got your customers, your employees, and your prospects, but you probably also have vendors. You probably also have partners, resellers, affiliates. There's all kinds of people that you work with as your company every day that would love to not have to make a phone call or get in their car and drive somewhere and show up for a meeting or go log into some separate platform to get it some separate information. Wouldn't it be great if they could just interact with your website to get everything that they need?

Speaker 1: (26:00)
I'm sure I'm not saying that there's not a place for human interactivity. Of course there is, but it's business. It's 2022 baby. We got, we got stuff to do. Um, and our websites need to meet our business constituencies where they're at. Um, and that does sound tricky. And that's because it is, cuz CMSs, traditional CMSs, were not designed to meet these new age demands. So we've gotta figure out how to get in our rocket ships, go to our other planet and navigate things. Um, websites are dumb. And I don't say that as like websites are dumb. Websites are actually kind of dumb. Like it's been that way for a while. Old site who is, they don't know who you are, what your user category. There is no user categorization. So is it this a prospect that's on your site? Is it a customer? Is it a partner?

Speaker 1: (26:47)
Uh, old, you know, traditional CNSs can't tell you that. Are there plug-ins that can help with it? Like, like a, um, lead forensics or something? Sure. But then that's just like another platform. So websites are dumb because there's, there's no user categorization. Also when it comes to data, it is obviously possible to use servers and on-prem servers, cloud servers, uh, your own database. It's possible to use data and get it into your website onto your pages without something like c m s hub. It is possible, but it is so hard and it is so expensive. Um, most companies aren't owning and managing data centers, um, or, you know, big servers. It's, it's hard to access, it's hard to pass. Databases are really difficult to maintain. Usually there's roles hired just to maintain them. And then integrations carry risks. So when you think about HubSpot, all of us kind of there, right?

Speaker 1: (27:44)
Because your c r m can do all of those things. So it's very close, but we're so far, um, your C R M can help you pass data. Your c r m has u user categorization. Your C R M has data on everything, but it's all internal pacing, right? If you think about it in a non HubSpot, you know, a non C r m powered c m S world, your C M s is your front end, it's external facing. And, and it's separate from your C R M, which is your backend and which is external or internal facing, excuse me. And with HubSpot, c m s, I mean inter, inter c m s of it truly is as c r m powered c m s world. Those two things truly are merged. So let's orient ourselves. We are here in this foreign planet, um, and I'm telling you, believe me, trust me, you can build really, really cool stuff.

Speaker 1: (28:35)
Like what, like resource centers, learning management centers, real estate listings, membership sites, partner portals, e-commerce sites, customer portals, sales enablement studios, company intranets. You can access all of your own company in, uh, information internally. Oops. Applicant tracking systems, lots of real life things that you can build inside of HubSpot. But if we're feeling like we're on a foreign planet and we're out of our element, then we need a little bit more information here. So we're still here, we can still build those cool things, but we gotta figure out what tools we have available to build something like a cool resource center or a customer portal. Luckily, um, we have sets of tools, great tools. We have c m s tools, right? Modules, templates, themes, um, even assets from the marketplace. We have marketing automation tools, so forms, lists, workflows, all of that. CRM tools. And here's where things get interesting.

Speaker 1: (29:31)
Custom objects help DB dynamic data, a bunch of tools in our toolkit. So I guess custom objects. Let's next step is, let's dig into these tools. Let's start building cool stuff with them. Custom objects. I love doing web work with custom objects. Now I'm gonna go through a few different of these tools, right? And you can use all of them to build different things. You can use some of them, you can, you could use Hub DB instead of Custom Objects or custom objects instead of Hub db. It all depends on the end user experience, content editing experience, developer experience. So you gotta solve for the how, which I'll get to in a minute. But let's talk about Custom objects for a second. Because in the example, or in the activity we did earlier, each alien was a custom object. Every time I go into my dev portal and I want to go update my alien name, I don't have to do anything on c M s, it just updates it.

Speaker 1: (30:29)
The second I hit save on that contact record, that custom object alien record, the data changes and it's there. So if you want to have a ton of aliens and you want to get them onto a page, not by way of a form submission custom object is still a really great way to do it. You can import a spreadsheet of all these custom objects, just like you'd import a spreadsheet of contacts and have all the information about them. You can have all their associations listed in there. Um, so there's a ton that you can do with custom objects and it really allows for a lot of scale. Something else to call out with Custom Objects is there are rich text fields. So, and the same goes for Hub db, but you can have images and formatting and all different kinds of texts and bullets and all kinds of fun stuff in your field.

Speaker 1: (31:17)
So as I'll show you in some of our, uh, case studies later, we've done some really, really cool stuff that scales very well for custom objects on CMS hub. Do not sleep on the blog object. It's called the Blog Object. Scramble your Brains for a second here and pretend like it's not a blog object. Um, you don't have to use that just for blogs cuz you think about the Blog object and HubSpot. All it is, is you have a listing template that has all the blogs that are listed out, and then you have the post template for once you click into one of them. That's what the post looks like. Why does it have to be blogs? It doesn't, I mean certainly use it for blogs, but what if you use, if you can see here in this screenshot, you're using it for other things like key studies or guides or webinars or other content types.

Speaker 1: (32:02)
Mm-hmm wheels are turning. We have really good case study on that later. Um, then there's Hub db. So instead of having some server somewhere with a bunch of tables, it's right there in your cm. Everything's here. And like I said, you have rich text fields, you have your tables here, and then you can port all that information straight into c m s pages. Um, and don't have to go edit a bunch of cm s stuff. Just edit the hub DB table and then you can write really cool code to query these tables in the way that you think is best fit.

Speaker 1: (32:33)
Ooh, the marketplace. You don't have to do this alone. You can buy stuff from the marketplace. There's free stuff in the marketplace, themes, templates, all kind of modules, all kind of cool stuff. You don't have to do this by yourself. Um, which is, I I say that out loud, . I say I want it to make you feel better, but I say it to make myself feel better because it's true. Sometimes I'm like, oh, if I go to the asset marketplace or if I go get a partner for help, then I can't possibly be as smart as I think I am. No, wait man, we can absolutely, we can. We can't. We had to do this as a team. It takes a village. Nobody can do this all by themselves. And you're absolutely still an intelligent, amazing, resourceful human being if you use the asset marketplace, which is loaded with great stuff.

Speaker 1: (33:13)
Um, but then there's the App Marketplace. Um, same thing. There's so many apps in there that make HubSpot better. Of course A eight Labs is, um, aptitude eights product arm. And we have a, a ton of apps in there that we've built, some of which are for c m s, but make use apps to make your web experience better. If you can't achieve it, you know, with some code, get an app to help you. Oh, private content. Big part of the session here today is on memberships. You do it through private content, you do it through lists. Um, super cool, right? Like you can gate content, you can create an exclusive experience. You can create that exclusive experience to be paid, right? That exclusive that you have to pay for it. And then there's all kinds of cool reporting. Something else you don't wanna call out about.

Speaker 1: (33:58)
The differences in these objects and tools that I've been talking about. Um, when you think about the publishing experience, for example, for a blog, when you go to publish a blog, you can come back to it later, you can, not every single post is exactly the same or when you're using a custom object, it's only, there's only the properties that are associated with, or I use associated to loosely. There's only the properties that are on that custom object record, right? So if you want a page to look a little, if you want your alien page to look different than my Alien page, the only way I can do that is by changing the data that's on the custom object record. Whereas with the blog object, I have a little bit more freedom. Um, so again, it goes back to how you want to use the tools and what are we really solving for.

Speaker 1: (34:42)
So private content. So the how, the how is really, really, really, really important. And I kind of touched on this a minute ago, but it matters to your business. It matters to your clients, your end users, all of your constituencies, your, your business constituencies, your employees. It matters because you have to enable an experience for the content editor that's quick. They can go in and edit stuff quickly. Maybe they don't even have front end or any c m s experience and they're just gonna go into the custom object record and change something and hit save and boom, they've made a change on a page that has to happen. Remember, we can't work the way that we're used to. We gotta be smarter, not harder. So quick editing is, is important. Here's another one that I always forget because again, I'm not a developer, but comfortable coding environments.

Speaker 1: (35:24)
When we first started using HubSpot, c m s, excuse me, I remember our developers, uh, were a little hesitant because they wanted to be able to edit to, to write code in an ex, in a, in an environment that is comfortable for them. Um, if the window is really tiny, then it's not that great. Uh, so I know, uh, HubSpot I think is at this year at Inbound has started talking about potential integrations with GitHub. So even more to come scale, scale is also super important. It might be easy to throw together a page one way, but if you need to throw together 300 pages next week of the same thing, man, you can't be doing onesie twosies. That's when Custom Objects or Hub DB comes into play where you can really scale out and dynamic content, really scale out how you're using your c m s hub security practice, best security practices.

Speaker 1: (36:15)
Your site's gotta be secure. like that really matters to your end users, to you. You don't wanna get hacked. Um, site speed and usability, your end users matters to them. If your site takes longer than whatever the status is, like 0.01 seconds, they're out, they bounce. So there's a lot of importance in the how. So let's take a little slide break and do some group activity vibes. This one we're gonna do sort of at home alone cuz I don't have, uh, I can't see all of your beautiful faces and I would like to do, put a finger down if and see where we're at and tell me where you're at in the chat. So put a finger down if you have used C m s up before, show me in the chat. Okay, so Mo , most everybody has used it. That's lovely to see in the chat. Um, put a finger down if you've used HubSpot CRM data on a C M S Hub page.

Speaker 1: (37:15)
Okay, what about you've used payments, custom objects, hub DB memberships, any of those tools I just mentioned on C M S app. Okay, payments, I see some payments. What about put a finger down if you've got a handful of whether it be marketplace apps, assets, partners that help you achieve your c m s goals. Okay, everybody seems to have that. Um, and then put it figured out. This stuff makes you a little nervous. It certainly makes me nervous sometimes. Um, and as I sit here with my clenched fist, what I'd really like to do is give every single one of you guys a pound and tell you how much, uh, I am inspired by all of you because we're all nervous, we're all aliens out here, we're all trying to figure out how to walk on this dry land and we're doing it together. And again, I promise you we can build really cool stuff and I'm gonna show you.

Speaker 1: (38:13)
So let's get some b t s action going behind the scenes. Let's look at some real, real life builds. So I'll start with membership portals. Um, really quick, these are just, honestly, this content is just from HubSpot site, but cause I want you to understand that HubSpot has memberships via private content. Um, so it's powered by lists. You can make updates only, you know, certain people can see create personalized experiences and all that good stuff. You can even create revenue streams of paid content. But HubSpot also has customer portal functionality via the service hub. And what's funny is, um, we have a client named Panzura, and this would've been, oh gosh, eight months ago maybe they, they had a requirement for a customer portal. Well it was before this feature in HubSpot existed at all. So what we did was we actually used memberships, a k a private content to create a customer portal for panora.

Speaker 1: (39:12)
And then, oh gosh, I don't know, a month or so later, this feature dropped in HubSpot, but Fre Knot because there's always gonna be features in HubSpot that completely solve your need. But then maybe your requirements or your needs go just a little bit beyond what HubSpot can offer. So it ended up working out in the end. Um, if we got that request today, we would still follow that same approach and use memberships because what they were looking for was a little bit more than what HubSpot's customer portal functionality had to offer. But just calling out that, that, that, um, functionality is there. So first case study here is from a company called Ignite. So they do online coaching membership. So it's this like a professional coaching, you buy the membership online, you go to these sessions and you can, you know, empower yourself and get better at your work and all that good stuff.

Speaker 1: (40:01)
So, but it was a mess cuz it was a patchwork of systems. They had, um, Eventbrite was doing all event registrations. They had, their site was hosted on Squarespace. Squarespace had like a Stripe connector and do it. And then they were using Zoom webinars and probably a couple of other things. Um, that at, I mean it was, it was kind of working for them. But what started to happen is they couldn't figure out like, like people could basically log into sessions without paying for them if they were able to find URLs and stuff. So that was the big pain point. Um, so we also redesigned the whole site and you know, had to map remap out all of the conversion paths, do the whole registration user journey, overhaul the branding. There was a free trial involved with this. So it was a free 30 days.

Speaker 1: (40:51)
You sign up to be in the membership, you get into the membership and then once that 30 days hits free trial is over and now I get charged. So it was c m a combo of c m s, uh, memberships, HubSpot payments, custom objects and lots of automation. And if I am correct here, this was the first ever site, um, or customer of HubSpot to use c m s memberships and payments at the same time. This all happened like right when payments dropped. So how did it work? Well, here are the main objects that are sort of in question here. So we've got companies, contacts, courses, instructors, and then deals. So we made courses and instructors, custom objects, contacts and companies can be associated with one another. We also needed contacts and the courses that they attended to be associated with one another. So when I go into the contact record, I can see, oh, this person went to all of these courses.

Speaker 1: (41:45)
I also need to associate courses to instructors. And instructors are their own object. And I need to be able to say, okay, let me go look at this instructor and we'll see all the courses that they do. Or let me go look at this course and see the instructor that's associated. And then of course deals need to be associated with contacts and companies. So that was sort of the baseline data model. Oh, and we did use our own app called Associate, which you can find in the app marketplace, um, powered by a eight labs. But um, you can find associated, we use that to again, just get a little bit more out of HubSpot than it could offer, than it can offer, um, which was deeper association. So we wanted to, to be able to link more things together. So what you're seeing here in this screen share is a training event.

Speaker 1: (42:34)
It's the course and that is the record inside of HubSpot. And so if you click into the properties, you can see all of the event details are there, the event goals are there, all of that is content that's going to go onto a webpage. Um, so if you see, I believe here now she's going, we are going to create new. So you can create a new course by just clicking in there and adding that information. But you can also import a list that has all of the same data because if you think about it, every course, so this is a listing page. Um, when you click into any one of these individual events, all of them have the same set of information. They all have a title, they have the headline, they have the module for the instructor, even though it may not be the same instructor.

Speaker 1: (43:27)
They all have those three takeaways, even though they might not be the same three takeaways for every single event. So you can see it's all just data from custom objects powering c m s pages. And if for whatever reason something happens in this training and event has to get moved up an hour or whatever, I don't have to go into the c m S and touch anything. I can just go to the custom object record and change it. Hit save and it changes on the c m s live. You can see though, that could be risky, right? So it's all about the how, it's all about the end user and maintaining control and reducing risk. Um, so what you're seeing here is the actual memberships flow. So once you're added to the list, or once you try to access one of those, um, sessions and you're not a member, you can either go to the login or you can go click into one of them, go to register.

Speaker 1: (44:13)
Now you can either log log in, which at this point you wouldn't have that. So we had to custom make the registration template. Um, and then you sign up to start your 30 day free trial. One thing I'll call out with memberships, uh, and private content is you've got, um, templates that come built in. They're systems emails and systems pages. So what I mean by that is you've got that registration page, it comes with a template inside of HubSpot, obviously we customized it, um, the forgot password page, right? Like that has to be a part of this whole memberships flow. That template comes as a part of memberships or private content. Um, same with the like email that you see once, um, she gets a free trail. She goes to her email and you can see that it, um, does send through. That also is a template that's built in.

Speaker 1: (45:02)
And of course we, we, we customize them all, but um, but the baseline and the foundation is all there. It helps us. So really, really cool stuff. Payments. All right, so we've got HubSpot payments, which is wonderful. Um, no code required. You can do recurring. Um, you can embed the payment links in your quotes, forms, meeting emails. You can now do payment forms. Um, of course there's workflows and something to call out too about HubSpot payments is that it's basically the Stripe infrastructure is built natively into HubSpot. So if you already have Stripe, HubSpot payments may not be the right choice for you because you can't migrate all of your current stuff into HubSpot. Like people's credit card information isn't gonna migrate from one Stripe account to another. You're gonna have to collect that information again. Um, so if you're starting something for the first time or you're already using hubs up payments, that's great.

Speaker 1: (45:57)
But if you already have uh, Stripe, then I will give you a solution to that in just a second. But I wanna talk to you guys just a little bit about using Hubs Up payments, how we use it on Aptitude eight. So we're a consulting firm. Most of the, most of our deals are large size deals that are sold build with invoicing and you know, we're not, you know, not not a candidate for payment links, but we do have, because there's MSAs and stuff required too, there's a bunch of, you know, that makes a sales cycle not perfect for a quick payment link. But once someone's already a client of ours and they say they're on a retainer and they run out of hours and they're like, gosh, can I just buy 10 hours from you guys? Heck yeah, we use the payment links. They've already have an M s A associated with them so we don't have to do anything weird.

Speaker 1: (46:44)
And then we, we've got, um, a notification that comes in that's like, hey, so and so just, you know, purchase something and then we know what to do next. So, pretty cool way for us as a company who this really wouldn't be, you know, eligible for us. It wouldn't really be that good of a candidate of a feature for us. It actually opens us up to be able to do more and sell more just by having a quick little payment link. So if you don't, if you do already have a Stripe account, like I said, it might not make the most sense to go over to HubSpot Payments cuz there's, you'd have to ma you need to migrate all that stuff over if you do have a Stripe account. Um, you don't have to use Hub Swap payments, you can use an app called Zebra.

Speaker 1: (47:24)
So this is our latest and greatest app from um, A eight Labs. But it does basically, it allows you to have your own Stripe login and you can sync custom objects, contacts, companies, products, everything to and from your HubSpot and Stripe. You can manage all of your payment data, you can do downgrades, you can pause, cancel, refund, you can collect credit cards over the phone. You can send branded quotes. You can automate everything. So you can create tasks and send emails and update records and honestly do any other actions inside of HubSpot. So Zebra basic and reporting, which is huge, right? Like all of your Stripe data, whether it's L T b, cac, M R r, churn and attribution, all of that can be captured. So this is just another example of HubSpot made a really, really great product. We found a small gap that for at least for maybe a little bit more enterprise clients that we could fill easily by creating this native integration.

Speaker 1: (48:19)
And it is the only native integration with Stripe into HubSpot. So definitely check it out if you've already got a Stripe account, of course, built by eight, eight Labs. Um, and here's how, here's an example of how we used it. So we have this client called Call my doc and they are a call answering service app for doctors so that they don't have to employ tons and tons of receptionists and so that they can get all the call data transcribed and all that good stuff in order to sell to their buyers. Um, it's healthcare, right? So there's, there's, there's different documents that have to get signed and it slows their sales cycle big in, in a, in a big way. So we incorporated docs into c m s pages with forms and we automated payment processes. So it was c m s, it was Zebra, it was a Hello Sign integration and it was Stripe, so it looked like this, right?

Speaker 1: (49:10)
You have a HubSpot form and once they fill out the form, there's a Hello Sign integration that creates a popup so that they can actually sign off on the documents and then they can actually go into that payment flow, their email, the quote, and from the quote, um, that is connected to HubSpot by Zebra and Strike whatever. Uh, it all comes through into HubSpot. So the payment link is in the quote that gets emailed to the customer. And then of course there's a ton of automations, and don't take my word for it, you can watch it here. So, um, this is the quote, they're gonna go ahead and pay straight through the quote. This is the form. Those check boxes start us moving a little fast. Um, the check boxes underneath the form are what powered the Hello Sign integration and the docs to pop up so that you sign, you see there, I agree to, I agree to.

Speaker 1: (50:02)
Cool. Let me sign off on this. I'm initialing it. I agree to this. I have fill out the form now. I've signed, now I get an email that has my quote and I can pay my quote right there. It's freaking cool, man. Very, very cool. Um, and something that has never been, we, we've never done it before and it's never been done on HubSpot before. So very, very cool stuff and is a data model. This is just one of, I think there's a bunch of different tabs in the lucid for this client, but, um, this was the main sort of hello sign integration data flow. And I put this up here to one of course demonstrate that it's always data first. It's always figuring out your data model so that that can inform your design and your sort of web experience. But I put it up here because I also want you guys to know that the, the team who built this is marketers.

Speaker 1: (50:53)
They're not crazy. I mean, we, obviously, there were some developers doing the development of the integration with HelloSign, but this diagram was built by marketers. Um, again, just calling that out because sometimes these diagrams make me feel a little nervous. They make me feel a little scared and, and like I'm in over my head. But we're not, man. Like, it's just data. It's just, it's just, it's just building blocks. . It's just a matter of learning what the shapes mean. Um, but very, very cool stuff here. Let's go into e-comm, which is a big, big thing going on, I guess right now for HubSpot this year at Inbound. So case study here is for Palo Alto University, and this was the continuing and continuing education and professional studies arm of P A U. And so they sell online courses and obviously this was happening during covid during the height of it.

Speaker 1: (51:44)
So it was so important that they got this right and they're able to actually sell their courses online and keep kids enrolled, keep people enrolled in school. So it was online course sales. There's a shopping cart, um, a checkout purchasing on behalf of others. So you could buy a course for you and the rest of your team. That creates a whole whole world of complexities. Um, I redesign their whole site way to consolidate their tech stack, optimize their user journeys, um, redesign everything. So basically their live courses were available in Shopify. They'd go to Shopify, look at all their courses and buy them or whatever, get sent the link, um, and then join at the time of the, the live event there. On demand courses. Were all in the, in an LMS system called Thinkific. So what we actually did was we used Shopify Headlessly, so all of the Shopify checkout pages, all of the ca, the, the cart, all that stuff, it was still being powered by Shopify, but we actually used HubSpot, c m s for, for the pages, for the build.

Speaker 1: (52:48)
Um, similar to the Ignite case study, um, that I went over a few instances ago, but company, the objects were companies, contacts, courses, and instructors. So same thing. Those, those were both custom objects and deals. And we needed the companies and contacts to be associated with one another. The courses and contacts and courses and instructors obviously, and deals to be all associated. Um, excuse me. So what would happen is basically they'd go onto the Palo Alto website. They have all these cool different cards for all their different sessions, whether it's online, whether it's demand, excuse me, whether it's live or on demand, it doesn't matter. You go in, you click what you want. So let's pretend that, uh, it is a live course. You go into Shopify, you, as you can see, you've got that shopping cart that looks like a cool shopping page in Shopify.

Speaker 1: (53:36)
It's not, it is built on HubSpot and it is using Shopify Headlessly in the background. Now, if they were to go onto Thinkific, which is also linked in there, um, that data was just sinking right into HubSpot. So really it created this harmonious flow of data for the operators of HubSpot, right, for the client. Like they're, this is amazing, but it also created a harmonious flow of data for the end user. The functionalities here were like pretty endless. Like I said, buying something on behalf of someone else is quite a complex process and even in a lot of B2C instances is, is difficult. And I've had friction in my own, um, experiences buying things for other people. So as you can see here, this is just the custom object record of a training course. You've got the instructors associated over here on the side, um, and all of the information about the session, this is very similar to the other from A C M S perspective, is very similar to the Ignite case study because as you can see here, you've got the same using custom objects to power this dynamic data on the pages, the same, you know, sections.

Speaker 1: (54:41)
There's always gonna be learning objectives. There's always gonna be a module for the, um, instructor. There's always gonna be the curriculum module. There's always gonna be this, you know, these three things here. So very, very cool and very, very easy to scale for them by using custom objects. And so it started small. This was, there's a lot of integrations here and a lot of different requirements and user stories that we had to solve for. So it started small. And this is also just sort of a nod to you guys. Like you can start small. It doesn't have to start as like the biggest, most complex diagram ever. What are your main objects? What databases are you trying? And I say databases, objects. Are you trying to access, where is all the information and how do we, where do we want it to go and how do we want it to look?

Speaker 1: (55:21)
So it starts small turn turned into more of this, um, which was really, cuz once you've got like the big picture down, you're like, okay, now I can start filling in the gaps of like where all this data goes. And then I can visualize the process and what, and these are on the right side are a little bit more wire framing than they are process diagrams. But, um, very, very cool case study that we were able to do so much with data on a website and with payments. All right, let's talk resource center. Everybody loves a good resource center. So for all of the marketers who raised their, their hands in the chat earlier, this is for you. Um, we did a very, very cool case study, uh, or sorry, uh, resource module. So it's like a resource center, but it's a module that you put on a bunch of different pages.

Speaker 1: (56:10)
Um, so we used custom objects for resources and the module displays those resources based on a bunch of different various properties, like of the visitor, like persona, region, lifecycle stage, right? Because it's, think back, if your, your C R M is your backend and your C M s is your front end and you know who these users are and you know what lifecycle stage they are, then you should be able to control their C M s and their front end experience. So we also used smart content. So that allows the module to change offerings based on the user as well. So custom objects, smart content in a module for their resource, uh, for their resources that can go on every page. So if you look here, what you're seeing is the, this is a screenshot from the custom object record for the resource. So this is the name of the resource, this is the type, it's a blog post, it's not a webinar, it's a blog post.

Speaker 1: (57:09)
Uh, is it featured? No, I don't want it to be featured. Here's the image that I'd like to be shown in that card. Uh, oh, excuse me. Uh, let's see what else. You have an object id. Cool. And then on the right hand side here, you see the screenshot of the content editor. This is what's really cool. So you can, you just, it just opens up so much flexibility for the content editor, for that, for that user, which then by way of that creates a really cool personalized experience for the visitor. So what you can see is you can change whether or not you wanna show something that's featured. It's set as featured, yes or no here. So show featured. You can do whatever you want. You can change however many rows you wanna hear. Have here. You can change how many cards per row, gosh, excuse me, how many cards per row you want. And then you can, here, here's where you can select the persona, the region, the place in the funnel. So you can really, really create a personalized content consumption experience or content perusing experience for your users. And do it in a way that also is a good experience for your content editor and also is a good experience for your HubSpot admin and also is a good experience for your developer.

Speaker 1: (58:20)
Okay, I told you not to sleep on the blog object, um, aptitude eights resource center, which you can please go to it, peruse it, have fun. Um, but we are very creative with our blog objects. So our whole resource center is powered entirely by blog objects. So if you go to the resource center, um, which looks like this, it's nothing but a bunch of mo modules. So you've got a blog module, you've got a webinar module, you've got podcast module, and each of those modules is just pulling listings from the blog listing, right? It's just pulling that data in. Each blog has a listing template and a post template. The listing is the specific blog directory and the resources page is just made up of a bunch of modules of those things. So I do have a page that you can go and see all of my blogs.

Speaker 1: (59:13)
So the full blog listing of all the articles I've got, you can click into one of those blog articles and see the post. But it doesn't have to be just for a block. It could be for my webinars, it could be for my case studies. And it provides a content editing experience that is great because you can come back to it. Um, you don't have to have the exact same sets of information on every single post. Um, so lots of flexibility for the editor and lots of relevancy for the for the end user. Ah, yes. And so what you can see here is the fully custom modules allow you to sort things, the card layout, even the columns. So you can change the top content, you can change the button, the article settings, module styles, the number of columns. You can change the font. So now I say, so I always call it building the builder with HubSpot CMS hub, you can build the content editor as a developer, you can build the content editing experience to be however you need it to be. I could lock this whole thing down so that nobody can change anything, right? So that it's like fully like, uh, all you can change is the title of featured podcasts, for example. Um, but what we've done, because we're a services organ, we're all a bunch of really, um, talented marketers and developers, is we've opened it up so that we do have that flexibility.

Speaker 1: (01:00:36)
More custom objects on c m s pages. Um, just some examples. So our careers page is also made. So the front end is just a job listing, but on the back end, it's a custom object record that's housed in a module. Um, there's a separate deal pipeline. There's a separate contact type for our candidates so that our full recruiting pipeline can all be seen both, well I guess all in HubSpot, right? Like in the c m s side in the reporting side and the sales hub side. Um, and on the marketing automation side as well. So we used custom objects, c m s reporting, analytics deals, automation, and let me show you a little bit what that looks like. So on the left hand side, these are the custom objects that populate the module. And so you might be thinking, well, um, you told me that if I go in and change a custom object record and hit save, it's gonna change whatever is there on the website.

Speaker 1: (01:01:32)
What if I'm not done with my job posting and I like, don't wanna save it because I don't want it to be published on the website? Well, we created module logic that basically says only include jobs here that have the status published. And so if you look on the left-hand side, one of those properties is published and if it says not published, it's not gonna publish it. So we even worked around the limitation of using custom objects so that we could create a better editing experience, um, for our hiring, our head of people ops, very cool stuff. And then we can report on everything. We can see everything. We can look at our full like hiring pipeline by stage and see, oh, who, where are my next steps? Who do I need to call? Um, here's another case study. This is just for fun, so don't judge on designer look and feel, but we wanted to figure out if we could do sort of like a booking flow on c m s hub.

Speaker 1: (01:02:28)
So we create invoices, quotes, and direct sales, which would be deals using a flexible UI that's modular andex, expandable, the dates, price ranges and appointments are all custom objects. It's a little tricky though because if you think about it, it's really blending that CRM data with a little bit more css, right? Because if the appointment that I want that I'm hovering over or whatever is sold out, it needs to be read and that copy needs to change as they sold out, right? So it's, again, don't judge. This is totally just an experiment where we were trying to play around with booking, so it's totally possible, can confirm. And like I said, these were the custom objects, dates, prices, and appointments, all just things in the c r m. All right, let's talk about event sites. Means we're getting close to the inbound, behind the scenes.

Speaker 1: (01:03:21)
Look, um, this one's pretty quick. So Flow Cast is a com uh, one of our clients, they're a month end type of like an accounting software. We actually won, uh, the HubSpot 2021 impact towards integrations innovation for this case study. But it was their first ever virtual user conference. And they have big user conferences and this was in, in during Covid. This was the first time they're ever gonna use, um, use, use everything online and be virtual. So their whole goal was like, we've gotta make sure that cuz they didn't think that any people would come and they're not gonna get the same numbers and engagement. So their whole thing was we've gotta get big registration numbers, get good engagement, but the on-demand experience has got to be clutch cuz we need long-term conversions for this. Well unfortunately they were, there's a pretty big limitation using on 24.

Speaker 1: (01:04:15)
So we had to make a custom script. So basically this is what it looks like when you're in a webinar that's on the on 24 platform. You can see the speaker, you can see all these like cool different assets that are associated with the session and all that stuff. But before you get here, it would actually make you go to this weird sort of like stop gap waiting room. So you'd go onto the HubSpot page, oh, fun fact by the way, their entire website was built on WordPress and we built their entire event arena in HubSpot, landing pages, , we didn't actually even use CS hub. Um, so it was all on a SubD demand anyways. So you'd go to access an on-demand session, you'd go to the landing page, you'd fill out the form to access it, and then it would take you to this waiting room where you'd have to fill out a one field form with your email that gets you then to the on 24 experience.

Speaker 1: (01:05:09)
Um, we didn't want users to have to do that extra step. We figured there'd be a ton of fall off. Um, all data suggests that that's what would happen. So in order to get into that on 24 page, the link had to contain the event id, the event key and the user's email address, which is why that middle section, that little waiting room was asking for the email address cuz on 24 was saying, Hey, I don't know who you are and like, I need to make sure that you're registered or, or enrolled in this session. So what we did was we created a custom module that, that on the form there's a hidden field that has the event Id already prepopulated and it has the event key from on 24 prepopulated. And then we took with a line of code, those two pieces of information plus the, it was a on form submit line of JavaScript.

Speaker 1: (01:05:59)
We took that email address from the form submit and then we merged those things together to create that direct URL that would take them right into the experience. Um, now for the, the juicy stuff, so a eight built inbound.com and we did not build the app by the way, we just built the website. Um, but this was the first time it was ever gonna be both digital hybrid, you know, so virtual and in person. And they were really going for like that experience, right? They were, they gave us examples of like, we want music festival vibes, like sort of B2C feels and we want all the data, you know, all the places , uh, so we used C M S Hub, of course we used Airtable and we used a custom blog. So I'm gonna show you a little bit about this. Um, oh, lot of animations.

Speaker 1: (01:06:51)
Quick little side here. If you're familiar with lot of animations, it's just a form of motion graphics. It doesn't have to be quite so manual, but it works within HubSpot. It works with our favorite theme, which is inbound elements. Check it out in the, um, asset marketplace. It works with Figma, which is our favorite design tool. And it is, we use lot animations for the header of inbound.com. So you see all the little components spinning around and moving the video pieces, filling in some of those gaps. That was all using Lottie. So it looks really complex, but it actually wasn't, wasn't terribly, terribly complex, uh, or difficult. So that was one thing. All right, dynamic content . So we had to build a HubSpot air to air table integration because that housed all of the speaker data, all of the session data, the agenda data, all of that.

Speaker 1: (01:07:38)
And all of it was being dynamically pulled onto those c m s pages. Um, one thing that I'll call out for this case study is when I was talking about the how, like why the how is so important. Um, you don't want things to be too, too flexible given you have to think about consider your end users or consider your visitors and your constituencies and all that stuff. We didn't want it to be too flexible cuz HubSpot told us themselves. They're like, we're probably gonna be naughty and we're probably gonna go in and edit stuff after you tell us not to because we have deadlines to hit and like we gotta, we just gotta move and we have a capable marketing team and, and we gotta do it. So we are like, all right, right, we hear you and we're gonna have to lock down some of this stuff.

Speaker 1: (01:08:18)
So the way that we built this site was that most pages actually weren't flexible and modular how we build for most of our clients. Cuz we just didn't want the HubSpot team to be doing anything during launch windows that could potentially risk any, um, information or any sort of c m s experiences for the end user. Um, but there were a couple of of pages where we had it, uh, very flexible. So the first thing here is the, um, is the custom blog page. So if you think about the blog as it exists in HubSpot default, you've got, like I said, the listing template and the post template. One of the downsides of using those by the way, is that they're only available in a design manager. I get it. You don't want people willy-nilly going in and changing cuz if you change your blog post template, you make one change to it.

Speaker 1: (01:09:09)
Every blog that you have, every post that you have is now going to change and it might not fit right? So I get why HubSpot puts those in the design manager, but we needed the HubSpot team. We needed them to have flexibility here so that the blog listing page, that template could be easy to edit. Um, and they weren't gonna, they weren't coders not going into the design manager to do that. So what we did was we created a custom, um, intuitive blog editing sort of experience right in the front end so you can edit the text and then switch out articles that occupy each of those slots. And then the rest of the blog content works with the out of the box functionality. So it's honestly like endless possibilities for curating content on other sites. Um, you know, when I think about it this way, you can make one bigger or smaller very cool stuff here.

Speaker 1: (01:09:59)
And then, um, one more cool twist on the blog is that you can adjust which components to include in those listings. So for example, if you don't want the author listed for those posts, you can just uncheck, just uncheck that. So lots and lots of flexibility here. And then this page was one where we also needed them to have a lot of, uh, flexibility, a lot of ability to make changes and update content cuz things were just happening and changing so fast content was coming in so fast. So this is the carousel for the, or the experience carousel on the experience page. We made it so that it was wide open, they could edit sort of whatever they want, but if you change the image, let's say of this girl with the sunglasses or this very happy lady, it's not going to go outside of that ovular shape.

Speaker 1: (01:10:47)
It's still gonna be constrained within the things that are on the, the objects that are on the page. So we're giving them a ton of flexibility without giving them too much. Alright, I figured to sort of close out the case studies, I wanna share all of our favorite things. So obviously HubSpot's a big one, but these are the apps that we use my team uses constantly, um, to stay successful. Click up is our project management tool. Front is a email tool that says on top of Gmail, um, we use Salesforce for some of our billing. Most of our infrastructure is built on HubSpot. Our site's on HubSpot, obviously. Um, we use Shopify for clients all the time. We use our own apps, associate Zebra Seru, a lot of Google stuff, screaming Frog. But yeah, wanted to share some of our favorite tools so that you can, uh, you can give 'em a try too. Now, group Activity vibes. Let's close this outright. Let's go to our little inbound universe. So take out your phones again, feel free to scan the QR code or just type it into another window.

Speaker 1: (01:11:50)
And what you'll see is that you are now a part of a connected universe, right against all odds and science. Uh, , a collection of aliens from all of these far away galaxies and unknown planets have all converged here today at Inbound. Um, and our universe really does look stunning, doesn't it? So what you see is all of these cool planets, and if you scroll down, there should be a button that takes you to another page that looks something like this, which is an aggregation of a bunch of data. So I wanna explain a little bit about what just happened here. So we used, uh, associations to associate the custom objects of planets with the alien contact objects so that they are married sort of to one another. Then we use some really cool c s s to determine the size of the planet based on years of experience that you, um, selected in the form your light years of experience as it were.

Speaker 1: (01:12:51)
So the more each planet has in experience, the bigger it is and the more aliens that are assigned to that planet, the bigger it is. So if you go back some, not all of these planets are the same size. So you can do really cool stuff with data. Um, and then reporting and data visualization on C M S. So the Spaceport customs officials over here are direct directly monitoring new aliens in years of experience through this C m S generated dashboard. This isn't a HubSpot dashboard, it's just some, um, I think code pen and some other react, but pretty easy. And don't judge us on design here. This is just for fun. But now I can see everything about all my aliens and we all have our little alien community together. Um, so we can all figure out together how to walk on this weird planet that we're on right of, of futuristic c m s world. Um, and we have the power of of HubSpot in our hands. So we're, we are doing just fine, I promise. All right, let's do some q and a.

Speaker 1: (01:13:54)
So I see a question from somebody asking about using the, using custom objects versus the blog object. So again, this really comes down to what you want the experience to be like for the visitor, the developer, the content editor, and potentially even like the HubSpot operator, like whoever is the admin instead of HubSpot. Maybe it's the ops person or, or what have you. Um, when it comes to the blog object, again, think about the publishing experience, think about also the out of the box reporting with, with the blog, but then start thinking about custom objects and how Custom Objects is just like a contact or a company, right? Like it's just an object. Well, you can do way more reporting on Custom Objects. Blog has some cool reporting built into it, but it's not, you're not gonna be able to say like, let me pull every single blog and see.

Speaker 1: (01:14:51)
You just can't do deep analytics on it, but the blog has a better publishing experience than a custom object. So it really just comes down to what the use case is, what the scale, potential scale will be. Who are all the people involved in using this function or feature, right? So I, I hate to give you the, it just depends answer, but it really does just depend on on, on your users and your business constituencies. Thank you. All right. It looks like we have another question about associations. Yeah. Associa, how do you use associations and workflows for c m cms? So really, workflows and associations are kind of, I mean, I don't wanna put too much importance on it, but they're kind of the glue that holds it all together. Um, associations are what associate objects to one another, and then once things are associated to one another, that gives you deeper reporting.

Speaker 1: (01:15:50)
And like I said, there are gonna be some limitations with HubSpot. There will be with any, any big platform that you're using. Um, and that's why companies like Aptitude exist to, to build apps to make it better and to provide services to make it better. But, but yeah, workflows power can use those associations to power more things to happen. So I mean, if we're talking about internal automation, so like a notification because somebody did something, so let's notify that person, let's send them an email because someone took a certain action on the web. Let's also create a task for that person. Let's also, um, associate that person's company to their custom object of course, or some of, you know, training course or something like that. So associations are what binding the objects together in your C R M and your C R M data is what's going to power this awesome c m s experience.

Speaker 1: (01:16:44)
And then workflows are what are there to move data around, move things around, create, I mean, it's automation, right? It's, it's creating things faster than you could do if you were just doing it manually. So they're kind of the glue that holds it all together. Thank you. All right. I'm not seeing any other questions coming through, but if you have any questions later, feel free to shoot them over to me, Emily at Aptitude eight. Contact at aptitude eight, get in touch with me. I'd love to get to know you. Um, love to answer more questions and really appreciate you guys coming out to the session today. And I hope that you have a great rest of inbound.