How to do Inbound Marketing with WordPress

If you’re a content marketer, then there’s a good chance that WordPress is the CMS that you use to manage your content. After all, WordPress powers nearly 27 percent of all websites on the internet, which is an absolutely crazy figure.

Why is WordPress so popular? There are a couple of reasons (read Pros and Cons of the Big 3 CMS Systems for Content Marketers to get the full picture!) but I’d wager that it boils down to ease-of-use and timing. WordPress came around right when blogging was starting to get big,  and the fact that it was so easy to use and understand helped it to capture a lot of that early market share.

Unfortunately, that ease of use comes with a big trade-off: Namely, a lack of functionality. Though WordPress is easy to pick up, out of the box it has a lot of limitations that can only be resolved by installing plugins. It just wasn’t built to do certain things.

That fact makes using WordPress a tricky prospect for content marketers. Sure, it’s easy to use which is great for technologically-challenged marketers, but that means that to do your job you’ll need to find and install a whole bunch of ancillary plugins just to do your job. What’s worse, every time you need to update your theme or version of WordPress, you risk “breaking” various plugins, which can render your website unusable until fixed. Talk about a bummer.

Luckily, there’s an alternative to WordPress that has been specifically designed for content marketers: The HubSpot CMS. Because it was created with the needs of marketers in mind, there’s no need to add plugins just to get it to work. And, since it operates on a drag-and-drop basis, it’s just as easy to pick up as WordPress is.

To help illustrate this point and show content marketers why they should consider managing their content with HubSpot instead of WordPress, here’s a list of some of the plugins that you’d need to install just so that WordPress could match the out-of-the-box functionality of the HubSpot CMS.

Plugins for Attracting Visitors to Your Blog

For your content creation efforts to really work, you’ll need some functionality that just doesn’t come baked into WordPress. These include:

• An SEO plugin like Yoast or All In One SEO Pack for managing title tags, meta descriptions, and open graph tags (for social sharing)
• A plugin for Google AMP like AMP for WP which will enable you to optimize your website for mobile views. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is incredibly important for marketers today, when customers are viewing more content than ever on mobile devices.
• A plugin to enable social sharing, like Social Warfare or Sumo Share. Creating content is only a small part of content marketing; the rest of it boils down to promotion. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t come with any built-in social sharing functionality. To schedule posts on social, you’ll either need to download a plugin or sign up for a service like Buffer, which just adds one more step to your content pipeline that you don’t need.

Plugins for Converting Visitors Into Leads

Okay, you’ve succeeded in attracting visitors to your WordPress website with your content. Now you’ll want to convert those visitors into leads. And unfortunately that means more plugins. If you  want to actually convert website visitors, you’ll need to download:

• Some kind of plugin that enables forms, like Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, Jetpack, or Contact Form 7. Without one of these plugins, you won’t be able to collect the information about your visitors that you need to actually make a sale.
• A plugin for building popups, like SumoMe List Builder or Hello Bar. Attracting visitors to your website is only half of the battle. Actually retaining them is the second half. A popup builder will be extremely helpful in getting your visitors to subscribe to your blog, submit a form, or otherwise stick around so that you can continue converting them.

Plugins for Better Communication with Your Visitors

Once you’ve converted your visitors, you’ll need to have a number of plugins in place so that you can communicate with them more effectively. WordPress doesn’t have built-in lead nurturing capabilities, so you’ll need to install things like:

• A plugin for RSS feeds, like WP RSS Aggregator. This will help you automate the various feeds on your website so that you’re always appealing to the right visitors.
• A plugin that connects your email tool to your WordPress site. For example, if you use MailChimp to send out your newsletters, etc., you’ll need to install MailChimp for WordPress.
• A plugin for creating CTAs, like WordPress Calls to Action.
• A plugin for dynamic content so that your website shows different content to different kind of visitors (smart content). There are plugins out there built for this, like If>So Dynamic Content, but none of them are that great to be honest.

The Alternative: HubSpot CMS

That’s a lot of plugins that you need to install just to get your WordPress website functional for your content marketing efforts. (And that is by no means an exhaustive list—you could easily find yourself needing to install even more depending on your own needs.)

Had you decided to build your website/blog using the HubSpot CMS instead, all of these functions would come already baked in: There’s no need to download anything else.

This does, of course, come with a tradeoff. If you do decide that you want a functionality not pre-built into HubSpot, you won’t have an extensive plugin library to turn to. And because the HubSpot CMS is coded with HubL (and not HTML), finding a quality developer can prove a bit trickier and more expensive. But if your primary goal is to build a website optimized for content marketing, even with these caveats the HubSpot CMS is the hands-down winner.