We love HubSpot.
We love helping HubSpot customers create better marketing, design better assets, and drive better results. To do that, our clients often need our agency to supplement skillsets not available to many marketing departments in the inbound marketing community, and we’re happy to be able to contribute to those needs. We feel as though, out of all the marketing automation platforms to choose from, HubSpot is the easiest to build on, which is why we’ve prioritized HubSpot with our clients, but when the needs began to outgrow the skills our clients have on hand, we saw an opportunity to help.
One of the biggest needs across nearly every single client we’ve worked with is the ability to build custom layouts and designs for a variety of landing pages, COS pages and email templates for HubSpot. Whether it’s an inability to commit time to learning how to build thoroughly with the COS, a lack of CSS and HTML coding skills within corporate marketing departments, or even knowing how to plot the best layouts for telling a brand’s story and converting visitors into leads, the work required to create effective digital marketing assets can often put a strain on marketing budgets.
And marketers have been talking about these struggles for years:
- 37% of marketers state that budget constraints hinder them from conducting an efficient marketing automation strategy. (Pepper Global, 2014) (Source: httpss://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
- Lack of resources, such as staff, funding, and time, remains the biggest obstacle to successful lead generation for 61% of B2B marketers. (BrightTALK, 2015) (Source: httpss://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
Adding a content block in Belch
Building a Builder for Everyone
We’ve got a lot of experience around building solutions for non-technical marketers who want to do more without necessarily having to hire an on-staff developer, so it was only logical for Big Presence to create a HubSpot-specific builder that removed the requirement of knowing CSS or HTML. We wanted to give users the ability to point-and-click every aspect of their build with user-friendly controls like color pickers, dropdown menus, and other simple UI elements to create emails and landing pages.
Base themes in Belch give HubSpotters a running start, from which they can then customize all of the following settings required to customize a template for HubSpot:
- Landing Page Building
- Email Building
- Grid-based Content Blocks
- Custom Logo Embed
- Implement Existing HubSpot Menus from Dropdown List
- Embed Existing HubSpot Forms from Dropdown List
- Custom Responsive Google Font Settings
- Padding, Borders and Margin Controls (no coding)
- Images Upload Direct to HubSpot CDN
- Row Height Control
- Integrated Font Awesome Icon Library
- Template Version Control
Publishing to HubSpot
In short, we’ve created a landing page, COS page and email builder that marketers, creatives and developers can use to build anything they need for HubSpot, and publish it directly to their portals.
Results of Belch.io
Belch is now being used by around 50 HubSpot users in its first month of release, so our data on the impact of Belch is limited to a select group of HubSpotters. Initial research has shown that Belch can eliminate up to 80% of development time spent by users building for HubSpot, and over time, that number will increase as users begin to reuse existing templates and configurations across their marketing needs.
As a demonstration of Belch’s power in our initial release (many features have been added since), we at Big Presence were able to create a replica of HubSpot’s homepage in less than 30 mins, and publish that page in our portal with ease.
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Design for a new landing page template used to take an average of 6 hours. With Belch, it takes 30 minutes.
Design and development for a new email template used to take up to 15 hours in order to make all platforms like Outlook, Gmail and iOS happy. Now, we can do it in 3 hours or less.
Now, strategy, copywriting, design and development can be done by one person, rather than tying up the whole team. That’s priceless.
BELCH Impact Highlights for Big Presence
In our own use of Belch as an agency, Big Presence has cut down on expenditure across three main categories of work:
Marketing
Our marketing experts can now build their own custom emails and pages, from start to finish, without having to touch code. This ladders up to immense savings for our agency, because our strategists don’t have to risk their vision being lost in translation, or wait for a developer to be ready to help them tweak an email to accommodate a new content need. Now, marketers can use the Belch integration for HubSpot to make the entire vision come to life as an editable HubSpot landing page, or email.
Design
Our designers can now build brand new custom pages, and emails from scratch in the world’s first truly visual template builder for HubSpot. With the ability to add, clone and modify content sections and elements in one control panel, designing custom HubSpot assets has never been faster.
Development
Developers can leave behind the hours of hard coding demanded by the process of building custom HubSpot pages and emails using HubSpot’s native tools. As a downloadable desktop application, Belch provides a time-saving solution for developers and we don’t try to hide the code from you. You get full access to the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and HUBL code that we generate. It’s all sitting in your portal, waiting for your modifications.
