How We Built a 5-Page Microsite in 1 Day With HubSpot’s Free CMS Tools + Free Theme

[BenClementz]

Would you believe we built an awesome-looking, fully-functional website in one day, for free, with HubSpot?

Probably not. But I’m going to tell you anyway. And then I’m going to prove it. A bold claim, I know. But at Lean Labs, we don’t say we can do something if we can’t back it up.

You may have concerns about building a new site on HubSpot CMS. Is it going to be too expensive? Will you have to waste months of dev time or hire an expensive agency? Will the site come out looking generic and boring?

After building hundreds of sites on HubSpot, I can assure you that the answer to all of these is a resounding no. However, you don’t have to take my word for it. Test the waters yourself by building a microsite. 

This article will walk you through the exact process we use to build microsites quickly and easily using CMS Hub, so you can get your product or service to market and start converting leads into customers.

What is a Microsite?

Think of a microsite as a web page or even a small website that is built for a specific, targeted purpose. Microsites are a standalone experience that may or may not link back to the brand’s primary website. 

Related: 11 of the Best Microsite Examples We've Ever Seen  

A microsite allows you to create targeted campaigns for one persona, promote events, pre-launch new products. or test ideas.

Take Ikea’s “Life at Home Report.”

Instead of publishing a PDF that no one would read, Ikea created an immersive experience that takes the user on a journey. They include visualization, animations, videos, and engaging questions. Naturally, it all connects to Ikea’s brand and helps readers recognize the importance of a comfortable living space.

We built this microsite for Synergy. 

This streamlined, single-page site educates users and leads them to a form that helps identify the perfect vanilla for their needs. 

Why Build a Microsite?

Microsites can be used to serve many different goals. Some common use cases include a book or course launch, smoke-testing new offers or messaging, co-branded events, building a user community, and launching a new business or product line.

Every element of a microsite exists to service the singular focused goal of that site. You generally won’t find an About Us, blog posts, or any page that doesn’t serve the specific campaign objectives.

There are many benefits to building a microsite.

• Time to result: Get a functional site up in a day, not months.
• Experimentation: Test new ideas independently from your main site.
• Customer Experience: Customers can understand your product or service faster and easier.
• Simplicity: The streamlined experience prevents distraction and keeps users focused on the core message.

There are some drawbacks, too.

• Expensive: Microsites can be costly if you take on extra costs to cover design, development, and maintenance.
• Quality: It doesn’t serve you to produce a poor-quality microsite with below-par content. You’re looking for speedy, not rushed.
• Short life cycle: Once your campaign or event is over, what will you do with your microsite?

Why Build with HubSpot’s Free CMS Tools

HubSpot’s CMS Hub is a powerful drag-and-drop website builder that uses a combination of themes, templates, and modules to help you build website pages, landing pages, and blog articles quickly and easily.

Is HubSpot’s Free CMS Tools entry-level? Sure. But does it accomplish the job of empowering business builders to easily create fast, secure, and reliable websites that drive business growth? Absolutely.

Instead of just listing the benefits of HubSpot’s free CMS tools, let’s look at how they can benefit your business.

• The drag-and-drop interface empowers non-technical marketers to build beautiful, effective pages
• There’s no need to wait for a developer to change the colors, margins, and padding or add images; you can do it yourself in seconds.
• It integrates seamlessly with your CRM platform so you can personalize the user experience.
• There are many integrations on HubSpot Marketplace to take advantage of. Connect your tools, teams, processes, and data in one place.
  
  

There’s so much more I could tell you about the power of Hubspot CMS Hub, like advanced SEO tools, actionable reporting dashboards, and content staging, but instead let’s jump into the meat of this article: how we built an entire microsite in one day! 

Build a Microsite in 6 Simple Steps: Get Growth Case Study

What is Get Growth?

The microsite that we made in one day was created to promote our newly launched brand: Get Growth. We’ll reference this site build as an example for each step in this article. But first, what is Get Growth? Briefly, it’s a new training program that helps innovative businesses nail their go-to-market strategy and achieve profitable customer acquisition. 

Lean Labs partners with SaaS & tech startups and scaleups as an outsourced growth team. We’re a 5-Star HubSpot Solutions Partner, and we’ve worked in the HubSpot ecosystem for over nine years. We really work alongside our clients as a hybrid growth team. We fill their strategic, creative, and technical gaps, and provide playbooks for the activities that are best completed by the in-house subject matter experts.

Our next phase as a company is to expand our impact beyond our hybrid growth partners with a coaching and training model that will empower us to help many more businesses achieve their growth goals by leveraging the same tools, strategies, and processes we use with our most successful clients. 

We’re calling this program Get Growth.

To launch this elite coaching program, we returned to HubSpot. We created a brand new free HubSpot account and, using the free design tool Sprocket Rocket; we built a fully-functional five-page microsite, all within one business day.

Of course, if we were using CMS Hub Pro and Sprocket Rocket Pro, we could make the Get Growth site look like a top-shelf site like thesalesblog.com, which we built for international speaker, sales leader, and author Anthony Iannarino.

Or the site we built for B2B Marketing Expert Dave Gerhardt at Exitfive.com.

But that’s the beauty of HubSpot; it grows with you. Start 100% free with Free CMS tools & Sprocket Rocket free. Get your site up, test your messaging, and get some initial traction. When your site traffic and revenue have grown to the point that it makes sense, upgrade your accounts to improve your site's design, functionality, and analytics capabilities.

Step #1: Define your Goals.

What is the purpose of your microsite? Tie a goal to that purpose. Goals should be SMART.

Specific	Nail your next steps
Measurable	Track progress; you have the tools to do it!
Attainable	Achievable, short-term goals
Relevant	Move in the right direction
Timely	Set a due date and time frame

For example, if the goal of your microsite is to promote a new service, you’ll want to define what success looks like. Simply saying, “I want new customers to try our new service,” isn’t a SMART goal. “I want to attract and convert 100 new customers with my microsite in the next two weeks” is a much clearer, well-defined goal.

Think about the intended outcomes you want from your microsite. Which growth metrics should you track to ensure you’re hitting goals? Is it engagement? Traffic? Conversion rates? You only know when you define an outcome.

Next, decide who it’s for. Have you created a buyer persona for this specific project? What are their pain points? Look closely at behavior, how customers interact with your existing services, and where they are on the buyer journey.

Hone in on a single pain point that your product helps to address, and build your microsite around that. This will keep your efforts focused and effective.  

Example: Get Growth Goals

• Drive awareness for this new elite coaching program. 
• Measured by: total site traffic increased from 175 visits per month to over 450 visits per month by the end of next year.
• Capture qualified leads of business leaders who are interested in the programs. 
• Measured by: 75 new MQLs by the end of next year.
• Increase monthly signups for programs. 
• Measured by: 20 new customers across all programs by the end of next year. 

Step #2: Choose and Set up a Theme

A HubSpot theme is a set of modules, style settings, global content, and templates you can customize to create your microsite. You can compare different themes in the Theme Marketplace. Many themes offer similar capabilities and benefits:

• Creating global content that remains the same throughout your website.
• Reusable and stackable elements that make drag and drop easier.
• Customizable templates and branding.
• You can copy a theme folder from one account to another.

Not all themes are the same, however. Look deeper. Is there friendly support when you need it? Can you build pages fast? How many modules are available and how extendable are they? 

Sure, paid themes offer more features, layouts, and settings. But free themes allow you to experiment with different designs without breaking the bank. Perfect for a microsite! And, of course, you can always upgrade when you’re ready.

For the Get Growth site, we went with the Sprocket Rocket theme. It best suits our needs of creating sites quickly and modularly. It’s the tool we use to build all of our sites.

Watch this video to see exactly how to add the theme to your HubSpot portal and adjust the theme settings to customize branding. 

Step #3: Customize Theme Settings

With Sprocket Rocket free, you get thirteen proven modules for building effective, user-friendly modules. But you also get all the options you need to customize your modules and theme settings for instant sitewide changes.

Remember, the name of the game here is speed and quality. With customizable themes, you get the best of both worlds. You can make sweeping changes on your site, but also use themes and modules that are proven to work. 

There’s no need to open up each element individually and change colors, typography, buttons, and spacing over and over again. Just update everything in one place.

Step #4: Build your Site Architecture

Now that you know how to design your pages, you need to decide how many pages you need. Is it just one page like our Synergy example? Or do you need several?

Think back to your goals again. What are you trying to accomplish? What pages do you need to accomplish your goals? Visualize the ideal experience from the user's point of view. 

Pro tip: Consider where prospects are in the buyer’s journey when they reach your page and provide content that meets them where they are. 

Let’s see how this played out on the Get Growth microsite. We chose a streamlined site map with just five simple pages.

• The Mission page explains the high-level goals of Get Growth and sends visitors to the Method.
• The Method page explains our approach to growth, how to understand your current phase of growth, and what to do from there to achieve the next level. This directs visitors to Programs and Pricing.
• Programs and Pricing lays out the details of the three Get Growth programs, who they are for, and what they will help business leaders accomplish. This leads visitors to Get in Touch.
• The Get in Touch page helps users understand if Get Growth is for them and then provides a simple form to book a meeting with our Growth Experts.
• Finally, the Results page reassures users by sharing documented proof that we’ve helped brands like theirs achieve remarkable results.

Step #5: Build your Pages

Component-based themes are like a set of legos. You’ll have components like headings, paragraphs, images, forms, and buttons that you can slot together to create what you want.

A modular theme offers pre-made building blocks made up of individual components modeled after user-friendly website patterns. Can you imagine how much faster it is to drop and stack modules onto a page, swap out the text and visuals, and hit publish? Spoiler alert: It’s fast.

The drag-and-drop editor is user-friendly and easy for non-technical team members to use.

You don’t need to know how to code, and you can still edit global content, meaning you can make changes to typography, buttons, and colors across your entire website.

You can still use templates to speed up the process. Themes like Sprocket Rocket feature ready-to-use page templates for every need; Homepage, About, Contact, Case Study, and more!

Example: Ordinarily, you’d need to create the headline, subheading, CTA, image, and social proof elements separately. With Sprocket Rocket, the Hero section comes as a complete module; all you have to do is swap out the content.

You could split this module into various individual components, but there’s no need! Sure, you have unlimited possibilities with components, but they require more time and effort to build. Modules are fast and effective.

Check out this video to see how easy it is to build pages using the drag-and-drop editor.

Step #6: Launch Your Microsite and Monitor the Results

Fail to plan, plan to fail. Although we want you to get your microsite published quickly, there are a few steps to take before going live.

You’ll need to decide when to launch, get stakeholders to review and apply final touches, put your microsite through quality control, and finally, prepare for the launch with a plan to track analytics.

Connect your microsite to the analytics tool your main website is connected to, in this case, HubSpot. Look back at your goals, and track the metrics you need to understand if your microsite is bearing fruit. For example, you could track conversions, form completions, time on page, bounce rates, and submission rates.

You can now begin site optimization. Once your analytics are firing, where do the most significant opportunities lie? What types of changes do you need to make? Be open to experimentation. To maximize conversions, your website needs to perform well.

Bonus Step: Set up an A/B Test of your Key Pages

Part of the experimentation is using split or A/B testing key pages. You can experiment with different elements. For example, maybe your CTA isn’t clear and concise. 

Perhaps your messaging isn’t landing. Does it answer the questions your target audience is asking?

With a split test, you create two different versions of one piece of content and show them to two audiences to analyze which one performs better.

Let’s use a landing page as an example. Perhaps you discover your landing page isn’t converting as well as you’d like. You think it might be your messaging. To figure out how to appeal to your audience, reach out and talk to your customers.

Once you better understand your target customers' pain points, frustrations, and goals, rebuild your page with improved copy and run an A/B test to see if it performs better.

Getting Started with HubSpot’s Free CMS Tools and Themes

And there you have it! How we built a microsite in one day with free CMS tools and themes. Testing out HubSpot CMS with a free microsite is the best way to see first-hand the power of HubSpot’s CMS and the results you can achieve.

Seeing how robust HubSpot is will help you determine whether it makes sense to migrate your main site to HubSpot and leverage the power of a truly integrated CRM. You can also upgrade to Sprocket Rocket Pro to take advantage of more than a hundred pre-built modules and thirty-plus pre-built full-page templates.

If you’re ready to test out HubSpot CMS with your own microsite, get started 100% free with HubSpot’s new Free CMS Tools and Sprocket Rocket Free.  

If you want help deciding if HubSpot CMS is right for you, let’s chat. We’ll show you how to unlock the power of a scalable system that lets you quickly build pages, analyze the metrics you need to take massive action, and generate sustainable business growth.