The Financial Services industry is evolving fast to meet changing consumer needs and keep up with new technologies and market disruptors. To attract new clients (and retain old ones), your business website must effectively showcase your products/service benefits and address your target audience’s needs and pain points. But what is the best content management system for Financial Services businesses?
We explore the leading solution providers, the traits of top platforms and how they can empower your marketers to create compelling, SEO-friendly content and drive quality business leads.
A content management system (CMS) is a platform that enables you to build and manage a website, create new content and pages and monitor performance.
Your CMS software should provide a user-friendly interface to create, edit, manage and publish content. Most platforms offer extensions and templates to help you customise your website’s design and functionality, without writing any code. While others require web developers to deliver the required look, feel and functionality.
Cloud-based solutions allow seamless collaboration and real-time updates for easy content management and agile website optimisation.
The best content management system for Financial Services companies should offer the following traits:
Find out our pick of the 5 top content management systems for Financial Services companies.
We outline some key ways your business can benefit from using a suitable content management system for Financial Services.
The best CMS software will enable you to generate more leads by reducing the time needed for creating, editing and publishing great content on your website.
You want to be able to simply select a template or theme that aligns with your brand. After that, you can immediately start creating content for your website without spending time on coding or development, unless desired.
Another benefit of using a top CMS provider is the ease of integration with other tools and platforms, including your customer relationship management (CRM) system. It’s crucial to achieve a single source of truth for data, for efficiency, visibility, analytical capabilities and attribution.
Financial Services companies need to effectively manage interactions with leads, prospects and customers. A seamless integration with your CMS offers engagement insights to feed into your CRM activity and a unified view of the customer experience that your company is providing.
CMS and CRM integrations can help turn your website into a lead generation machine and source of data to optimise and improve performance, retain loyal customers and make every customer/client interaction feel personalised and meaningful.
The Financial Services industry is always changing and evolving, so your company needs a dynamic and up-to-date website to remain relevant and attract potential clients.
The best content management system will make it infinitely easier to modify and update your website, whether you’re trying to simply change the layout of your homepage, update an image on a product page or redesign the entire site.
Since you’re no longer obligated to pay a software developer every time you want to change an aspect of your website, it’ll be much easier (and cheaper) to maintain a company website.
You need to be aware of the technical performance of your website, including page loading speed, mobile optimisation and content/data security. The right platform will give your website a rock-solid foundation and provide stability for your Financial Services business.
When choosing the best CMS software for your business, look for systems that use a world-class CDN architecture to ensure speedy page load times. Plus, you may want to choose a platform that is protected by a Web Application Firewall and (preferably) 24/7 security support to help keep hackers and threats away from your website.
Choosing the right solution will depend on the specific needs of your business, the size of your team and your budget. However, we’ve outlined 5 top content management systems for Financial Services to help you with your selection process.
The largest and most popular open-source CMS software in the world, WordPress is ideal for smaller Financial Services companies with a focus on building authority and reputation through the publication of informative blogs and articles.
The platform is easy to use, and WordPress can also be installed and modified by anyone for free. This is useful for new businesses who want to build a website with little to no coding experience. Plus, the open-source architecture means that with dedicated WordPress developers, you can mould and customise your site to suit your needs. But this is where the costs can escalate.
WordPress offers many functionality-boosting features that can help you build (and maintain) a world-class website and blog for your Financial Services company. These include the following:
WordPress is free to download and is designed so even users with no technical knowledge can easily build a website with one of their 31,000 WordPress themes, install plugins, post blogs and articles, etc.
Building a business website on WordPress (including the cost of hosting, premium themes, and a domain name) will cost you about £175 at the beginning. After this, there are various hidden costs to consider, such as ongoing maintenance, development and plugins required for various features. For example, adding various popular plugins, that help you stay competitive and grow your site’s performance, can lead to monthly costs of hundreds of pounds.
If you’re looking for an integrated CMS and CRM solution, then HubSpot is the right software for you. As a popular and intuitive CMS platform, it integrates seamlessly with the CRM tools and HubSpot’s other products, Sales Hub, Marketing Hub and Operations Hub.
This all-in-one solution is powered by automation and comprehensive data reporting, making it easy for Financial Services companies to analyse customer data and use it to produce and publish content that generates leads and drives conversions.
HubSpot can provide you with excellent website hosting, blogging, social media posting and email marketing facilities to help convert your warm leads into eager and satisfied clients of your Financial Services company.
Beyond a free option for the basic content management tools, CMS Hub offers a Starter Plan (approx. £23/month), a Professional Plan (approx. £315/month) and an Enterprise Plan (approx. £1,050/month).
As a self-managed CMS platform, Sitecore primarily serves corporate marketing departments, large marketing agencies and other enterprise-level businesses. It offers content and Ecommerce solutions.
Sitecore is typically used by large companies in the insurance, healthcare and Financial Services industries. It facilitates content creation and management that leads to conversions.
Sitecore doesn’t offer standard fixed-price plans like some of the other CMS platforms, but customers will typically have to pay an upfront cost, as well as an annual maintenance fee. It can get quite expensive, which is why this platform may not be the best CMS solution for small businesses.
If you’re looking for an open-source CMS that’s flexible, intuitive and user-friendly, Craft CMS is a good option. It offers Twig templates (and a self-generating GraphQL API) to help you design the perfect website for your business.
In terms of pricing, Craft CMS offers a Solo Plan that can be used for free, a Pro Plan that costs around £260 per project, and an Enterprise Plan with custom pricing.
This open-source system was designed by developers for developers, so it’s more technically complex than many other options. Drupal offers thousands of free themes and more than 46,000 modules to help you customise your site per the needs of your business.
Drupal is a top content management system for Financial Services businesses with in-house developers and other technical resources. If you choose this platform, you’ll need to spend a significant amount of time setting up, configuring, updating and maintaining your website.
Some knowledge of PHP, CSS and HTML would help you make better use of Drupal. In terms of price, Drupal is free to download. But you may end up spending upwards of £13,000 to hire a developer to build and design a Drupal website.
If you’re planning to launch (or re-launch) your website, then the top content management systems discussed above could serve you well. However, HubSpot and WordPress stand out due to their size, ease of use and feature-rich benefits. Here are some of the key areas where both platforms are strong.
High-quality analytics will allow you to monitor the growth of your website traffic and the success of your marketing campaigns. HubSpot comes with built-in analytics software, while you’ll need to install a few plugins to get analytics on your WordPress site. When used in conjunction with its marketing tools, HubSpot’s analytics tools are generally considered to be more robust.
A good blog and compelling content can help you boost website traffic, build your domain authority, demonstrate thought leadership and nurture and convert quality leads.
HubSpot offers an intuitive blogging platform with a WYSIWYG editor and free blogging templates. WordPress, on the other hand, began as a blogging CMS and continues to excel in this area with the new Gutenberg content editor and various useful plugins.
The major difference is that, with WordPress, you’ll probably need to install external plugins to optimise your blogs for search engines. With HubSpot, however, you can write, publish and prime blogs for search engines with no extra plugins or add-ons.
HubSpot and WordPress offer hundreds of themes and templates that you can choose from. Typically, WordPress themes are more customisable, even without any technical knowledge. On the other hand, HubSpot offers hundreds of template packs that (with a bit of coding) can be tweaked to give your entire site a uniform look and feel.
HubSpot also provides you with an on-page editor with which you can customise your theme and make important edits to the website, even without any technical knowledge. Both CMS platforms offer amazing template marketplaces with many pre-built modules and themes.
There are lots of other factors to consider when comparing the suitability of HubSpot and WordPress for your business, such as:
Browse our HubSpot CMS vs WordPress: Comparison Guide and dive deeper into which platform is most suitable for your Financial Services business.
So, if you’re looking for the best content management system for Financial Services, be sure to analyse your needs and priorities before choosing one of the platforms listed above (or others you have under consideration).
If you end up choosing HubSpot, we offer a range of HubSpot services to help you make the most of the platform.
Inbound Fintech (IFT) offers HubSpot CMS development specifically tailored to the Financial Services industry, using a growth-driven design approach to generate high-quality leads, attract your ideal customers and adapt and optimise your website with ease. We also support web builds using other content management systems, depending on your needs.
Explore our website design and development services or get in touch with our team to discuss a potential project.
IFT is a hybrid agency based in London, but with a global team of digital experts. Our experienced team of marketing specialists helps FinTech and Financial Services companies to drive high-quality leads and grow their business online. We are also a Google partner and elite HubSpot agency.