Have you heard the news? HubSpot has just launched Content Hub - an AI-driven content marketing platform that supports marketers in crafting and overseeing content along the entire customer journey. It has the features and benefits of multiple disparate AI tools packed neatly into one platform. This means you can easily create and distribute content across multiple channels at scale. Go off HubSpot!
From April 3rd 2024, HubSpot CMS Hub will rebrand as HubSpot Content Hub, donning some functional and funky new capabilities. Jonathan Shipton and I have been among the lucky few who got our hands dirty and tested HubSpot Content Hub before its launch. Is it brilliant? Absolutely! Will it make our lives easier? Undoubtedly!
Why the change-up?
The hunger for attention-grabbing, scroll-stopping content is reaching stratospheric levels, while the marketing resources at our disposal have yet to match this pace. As a result, content marketers were darting between many platforms to create different content pieces for distribution across different channels. Amidst this whirlwind, trying to stay relevant to your audience along the various stages in the customer journey and making each interaction feel personal and impactful has proven difficult. But not anymore, with Content Hub now part of the HubSpot family.
Our takeaways from testing the flashy new features
Feature: Brand Voice
What it does
This is not a drill. You can actually infuse your brand’s personality and tone into your AI-generated content! By fine-tuning the AI tool using samples of your unique blog content, you'll create posts that resonate deeply with your audience, echoing your distinct voice. This can increase efficiency, consistency and genuine engagement.
Our take
Although the feature can be a powerful ally in helping you nail your brand voice, nothing beats having a clear understanding of your buyer personas, their challenges and goals, and how you help to solve them. If you factor these into your content, you can ensure your customer journeys are memorable experiences for all. And who knows? Maybe one day, the tool will be advanced enough to factor in these personas without human oversight.
Feature: AI image generator
What it does
This feature enables you to create content-specific images by typing in a short prompt and clicking a button. You can generate unique, royalty-free images for blog posts, landing pages, marketing emails, and social posts that don't require a subscription to Adobe or the like. You can also pick an image style, so if Andy Warhol-esque pop art is on-brand for you, generate away. This whole process saves the time and money you’d otherwise spend on a separate (and expensive) subscription for stock photos. You can also crop and edit images to fit different ratios to suit different channel requirements and opt for portrait, square or landscape, which definitely has us sold.
Our take
In our experience, your prompts need to be super clear to get good results from this feature. This is particularly the case if your industry is a bit more niche (and your content is also). Without clear and concise prompts, you might have a harder time generating images that are bang-on for you.
Feature: AI Blog Writer
What it does
Crafting top-notch blog content is crucial for fueling your organic traffic and leads, but let's be real: It's a time-consuming endeavour. With HubSpot's AI Blog Writer (nee AI Content Assistant from CMS Hub), you can pump out blog posts at speed and scale. Simply toss your ideas into the ring or get it to generate blog ideas for you, and watch as it whips up the content in seconds. *Poof* Writer’s block, be gone!
Our take
We took this feature for a spin and were thrilled with how fast you can get words on the page without having to go to a third-party AI blogging tool. However, our favourite parts of this feature are its ability to SEO-optimise blog content natively and in your unique brand voice. This is something that has definitely earned our applause.
Like most AI-powered tools, while the content it generates is quick and reasonably accurate, it does require the irreplaceable critical thought of a human to take the blog to the next level. This is especially true when you want a more in-depth blog rather than a high-level overview. Either way, it is an excellent bouncing board to kick-start a blog.
Feature: AI Blog Post Narration
What it does
Hold onto your hats, because there’s more! With just a smidge of code added to your HubSpot website's blog template, voila! You can now churn out an audio rendition of your blog article in a snap. This is really cool because the narration is so human-like, making your content more accessible to a diverse audience.
Our take
The only fault we could find with this feature is that the narration isn’t available in an Aussie accent just yet, but stay tuned.
Feature: Podcasts
What it does
We know that podcasts are the ‘it girl’ of the b2b marketing world as of late. Now, you don’t need a separate platform to embrace one of the hottest content trends of the decade. With HubSpot’s Content Hub, you can either share your dulcet tones by uploading personally recorded audio files or let AI work its magic to generate audio content from a written script.
Now, let's talk numbers. Depending on your subscription level, you could be cooking up to 5 podcast shows and 1000 episodes with Content Hub Pro, or bumping it up to 50 shows and 1000 episodes with Enterprise. Talk about options galore!
Our take
After giving this feature a whirl, we quickly saw the value of its utility, whether you're a seasoned pro or just dipping your toes into the podcasting waters. What’s typically a fiddly and time-consuming task to record and edit audio, the AI-generated podcast feature gives you so much time back.
Feature: Content Remix
What it does
We really do love the idea of repurposing content to squeeze more out of our efforts. But in practice, this task has been very time-consuming, albeit necessary to meet the growing expectation of being omnipresent for our audience.
So naturally, we did happy dances when we learned about Content Remix. With AI at the helm, we could breeze through the content transformation process. We’re excited about how much time this frees up to focus on fine-tuning our message and pursuing higher-value strategy stuff. Good riddance to the days of manually converting blog posts, ebooks and podcasts into social posts, ads and emails. Content Remix can even build whole pages using your pre-saved web page sections!
Our take
We saw firsthand how you can take one piece of content and spin it into three different mediums in a matter of seconds. Though, like with the output from most AI tools it required a bit of tweaking here and there (also because we’re perfectionists), but all in all, Content Remix, you deserve a standing ovation.
Feature: AI translation
What it does
You can now break down language barriers with AI translations powered by DeepL to effortlessly translate your page and post content into other languages. Creating multilingual web pages is simple. All you have to do is click “re-write” in the language of your choosing and sit back as your content transforms seamlessly into the language variant you need.
Our take
Of course, we still recommend having a human touch to ensure everything reads smoothly. But from our experience of converting one of our blogs into Spanish, this tool gets pretty darn close! And we’ve got the people to verify. With this, you can start making your expertise accessible to audiences across the globe.
What does this mean for your current subscription?
HubSpot’s new AI tools aren’t automatically included in your existing CMS subscription. If you want to take advantage of them, you have to upgrade to Content Hub, which will mean a small increase in your monthly subscription fee.
If you're a Marketing Hub customer, you will continue to be able to use your content tools like blogging and landing pages as usual, even though these features move under the Content Hub in the new model. If you’d like to add AI to your HubSpot toolbox, there’s a new Marketing+ offer available, which will also incur a small additional cost.
What does this mean for content marketing?
Marketers with a penchant for content creation would be excused for thinking this threatens their livelihood. But as purebred content marketers, we don’t see it that way. It’s a great opportunity to steer creativity and ideation, recreate content at scale that usually chews up so much of our time, and ultimately do more with less. It still doesn’t have the legs to replace human creativity, critical thought, or wit. That’s still up to us.
Are you curious for more details? We speak HubSpot and business, so contact us to uncover how Content Hub can help your marketing efforts hit the gas.
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