Let’s take a moment of silence to mourn the end of Adobe Business Catalyst.
If you haven’t already heard the news, Adobe Business Catalyst has shared its end of life announcement, meaning the system has stopped new development and the platform will be shutting down. Thankfully, the migration deadline has been updated to 2021. This may seem like a long ways away, but without a migration plan in place, scrambling last minute could cause your marketing and sales to suffer.
Before you get frantic, here we explore what you need to consider before migrating your site to a new platform and a few options to help you determine the best solution before the deadline.
Unfortunately, to transfer your website to a new platform, you have to do more than just download all of your files and re-upload them to another CMS. Business Catalyst does more than just host your website; it makes it functional, running your ecommerce, integrating with email marketing solutions, housing files and helping you manage customer relationships. Because of this, transferring your site may mean you would need to re-create it on a new platform with new templates, forms, blog and other tools to allow it to run as it did before.
Not all sites are created equal, thus different platforms offer different capabilities for different needs.
If you’re looking for a simple website with mostly graphics and text, and a similar editor to Business Catalyst, WordPress may feel the most familiar. You will also have the ability to integrate with other tools so you can build the functionality you need as you go.
If an online store is the main driver of your site, a platform that provides ecommerce capabilities like Shopify, BigCommerce or SquareSpace would be a better option. You could also elect to use an integration like WooCommerce to work with your WordPress site if you prefer working within the open-source environment.
Another option would be to use an all-inclusive platform that combines the marketing, sales and customer service aspects of your business like HubSpot. While HubSpot is not an ecommerce platform, it does integrate with Shopify and has a set of APIs to connect other ecommerce platform data.
Schedule a demo of the HubSpot software to learn more about how it can benefit your business.
HubSpot is powered by its CRM and focuses on unifying your marketing efforts with sales and customer service. The platform features three hubs designed to help each department focus on what matters most to them while remaining aligned.
The marketing hub not only provides the ability to brainstorm and create content, design templates, and manage your promotion plan, but also lets you work with sales to pass over qualified leads. You’ll also be able to use tools for content management, SEO recommendations and campaigns, keeping everything organized and easy to review.
The sales hub helps your team work more efficiently by providing the ability to schedule meetings, send follow-up emails and track deals automatically. With features like Live Chat, you can communicate in real-time, ensuring your hot leads are followed up with promptly and getting their questions answered when they’re ready to purchase.
HubSpot recently launched the service hub, which provides a way to keep in contact with customers after a sale, ensuring questions and issues are resolved for the best experience with your brand. It helps you boost your brand loyalty and grow your customers into evangelists.
In addition to the alignment HubSpot offers teams, HubSpot may even help you migrate your site over to their platform. One of the most stressful and frustrating things about starting over is having to manually move your site onto a different platform. HubSpot recognizes this and does everything they can to make the move easy for you by assisting in the migration process.
Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, HubSpot’s capabilities will scale as you do. With the ability to create personas, build your content strategy and build campaigns, you’ll be sure to have a strong marketing foundation in place for your business. And with HubSpot’s sales tools, your team can work more efficiently by automating tasks so they can focus on the most qualified leads.
Being able to see how your marketing and sales efforts affect the bigger picture can help you drive decisions about your business. HubSpot’s reporting dashboards help you see not only where you traffic is coming from, but what campaigns, pages and emails are performing best. Having these easy-to-understand reports will help you discover where your efforts could use a little boost (and where you can boast).
It’s unfortunate to lose a platform like Business Catalyst, but it could be the push you need to update your marketing and your website. Explore the possibilities HubSpot has to offer and see how you can not only successfully migrate your site and marketing efforts, but improve upon them as you do.
