It has been an exciting year of growth for deckerdevs. When we took the leap to make our partnership with HubSpot official, we knew that we would boost the business - but we were genuinely surprised to experience the exponential growth we’ve had this year. We’ve met new agency partners and so many HubSpot customers that we’ve helped integrate data, create custom workflows, work better with HubDB, organize resource centers and so many other cool projects along the way. We took all our projects and put them in a graph to see if we could identify some of the trends for requested projects and maybe even make some predictions for what projects we might see increased demand for in 2023. 

Integrations topped the list

Integrations were the top demand in 2022 at 16% of our workload. We saw so many projects where our clients were requesting that data be moved more easily between HubSpot and their ERP software, a third party application, or social media. 

Just a few examples of integrations that we completed this year:

• We helped a real estate developer integrate their property sales with contacts in HubSpot and automate the exchange of data with their ERP software to make executing contracts easier.
• We assisted a remodeling contractor better manage their remodeling projects and HubSpot sales contacts for improved follow-up and more efficient project management.
• We assisted with an integration between Stripe and HubSpot that allowed deal records to be updated when subscription payments were made

Most HubSpot customers pay somewhere between a few hundred to tens of thousands and some hundreds of thousands for HubSpot services and software. When you’re making such a massive investment, but still need to manually enter data between your applications, it can interfere with employee productivity and actually cause a lag in the adoption of new technology or under utilization of HubSpot. By paying to integrate your software with HubSpot, you can eliminate employee frustration, increase productivity and seamlessly move data between applications for improved analytics. This not only helps you get the most out of HubSpot, but boosts employee happiness as well. 

Related: HubSpot API Integrations Improve Organizational Health  

HubSpot consulting was a close second

Figuring out how to do things in HubSpot is as important to you as actually completing them, according to our workload. More than 15% of our projects this year were HubSpot consulting hours. From helping you organize your workflows, doing discovery on your business processes, understanding the complex integrations you’re considering, choosing the best software applications to help you execute your services on an everyday basis or simply consulting on page speed optimization - consulting was #2 on the list of most popular projects in 2022.  

Our experience with HubSpot is longstanding and as a result we do many things that other development agencies won’t even consider or that many marketing agencies aren’t capable of. If you present a problem - there’s always a solution that we can come up with together. Creative development solutions are probably our favorite thing to tackle and we’re always happy to sit down with our prospects and clients and dig in to discuss potential solutions and help them understand their options prior to making a large investment. 

Prospects want to understand their options, what the implications of this means and how they can find the middle ground between their wants, needs and budget - but this isn’t always something that can be discussed entirely in an initial call. Getting expertise from an experienced developer will help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can be associated with outsourcing your web development and go into your interviews a bit more educated about your needs. If we end up working with you, great! If not, you’ll be well-equipped to vet whatever developer you do use - and that’s what matters most. 

Related: Why an experienced HubSpot CMS developer? Your website isn’t a sub sandwich.

Website updates & website overhauls came in third

Coming in 3rd all tied up at 13% of our workload came website updates and website overhauls. This is interesting, because we’ve been making the case for the continuous improvement model for quite some time. While there’s nothing wrong with a complete website overhaul, particularly if you’re switching over platforms or have outgrown your infrastructure, establishing a budget for continuous improvement over time will help save you money in the long term. By moving to a more flexible, scalable platform like HubSpot CMS, you can plan for the growth of your website without bogging it down with additional plugins or add-ons over time. This allows you to focus on growth and making the lives of your marketers easier by constantly looking at data and tweaking your website rather than lumping all the wishlist items into your next redesign. 

A website is never finished. The moment you launch, you’ll inevitably have the pangs of regret that come with not requesting additional options. By carving out a website budget every year broken out into a monthly expense you make things much more predictable and ensure that you improve your website over time rather than growing to hate it for everything it can’t do.

Related: 5 things to add to your website budget in 2023

Online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot

10% of our development time in 2022 was spent on online learning upgrades and help with HubSpot.

So many organizations have added online learning capabilities and learning management systems to their arsenal of online content since the pandemic. Client and customer portals with online login credentials and learning management applications help organizations execute training programs for online staff, continued education workshops, certification programs or other online learning resources. 

However, not all Learning Management Systems are created equal and we encourage you to ask questions prior to purchasing an LMS template in HubSpot or elsewhere to determine if the app suits your needs. It’s likely that you’ll need a little support so be sure to engage the developer or another skilled HubSpot developer to help you customize the LMS and make it your own. We highly recommend HubLMS, a HubSpot Learning Management System built by our friends at Impulse Creative. Be prepared to invest a good amount into this for the futures that you need - and don’t forget, just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. Investing up front in a system that has the features you need and is easy for the end user to navigate will ensure your success down the road and give you much better ROI than purchasing a cheaper one without support.

Across the board - whether it is LMS development, custom workflows, architecting insight for workflows, or help with HubDB, we worked a lot this year on getting you the customized features that you need and helping you organize your HubSpot portals and meet your goals.

Resource Center updates

Next up? We spent 8% of our time in 2022 on resource center upgrades. 

You spend a LOT OF TIME on content. It’s an inbound marketers main focus. You spend the most time strategizing your content, writing blogs, curating downloads, creating landing pages, pillar pages, constantly tweaking and refining your message, begging the other teams to help you create content or provide content ideas, endlessly editing videos, getting buy-in for webinars, interviewing for white papers and case studies… it’s literally limitless. There is no end to the amount of media and content resources that a marketer puts together. When you got started you likely didn’t have a fraction of the amount of content you have now.

This was a top concern for our clients this year:
"How will we organize this content and make sure that our prospects and customers can access it easily?"

Here are some things we did to help you update your HubSpot resource centers this year: 

• We spent some time rehabbing and optimizing resource centers for load speed issues
• We added content drop down filters to allow prospects to browse by content type
• We added checkbox filters to allow prospects to view certain types of content they needed with multiple filters
• We completely re-faced resource centers that were dated and not displaying data in the best way
• We added new HubSpot custom behavioral events so you can really understand user engagement and to provide for future content direction

Making your content more easily accessible to the people that need it is going to do amazing things for your conversion rates. We’ve had really incredible feedback from all the updates that we’ve completed this year and we can’t wait to look back on some of the conversion rate and bounce rate analytics and make ongoing tweaks. 

Related: 5 website optimization tools to boost conversions

Navigation Updates

The last one we’ll cover, which occupied 6% of our time was navigation updates. We’ve spent a lot of time this year rehabbing menus that needed to be more user friendly or offer different options for featuring new content. As we mentioned above, the content arsenal is ever-increasing for many companies and organizing that content to put it in front of your audience is more important than ever. 

This is why we’re such huge proponents of the mega menu. You can use mega menus to present content in a  more aesthetic way that helps your users easily find what they’re looking for, common actions that are taken or popular pieces of content without having to navigate through your entire site to locate what they need.

You can read more on why we think a mega menu should be your next website investment in our blog.

Related: HubSpot CMS development trends - mega menus are here to stay

So there you have it, our personal “wrapped list” for 2022. We took on so many incredible projects, met so many new people and you helped us challenge and refine our expertise even more in pushing the boundaries of what HubSpot can do for your businesses. We couldn’t have asked for a better first official year as a HubSpot Partner!

What’s on the docket for 2023? We think custom web applications, mega menu, superpowered content personalization, and really robust resource centers will top the charts - but integrations aren’t going anywhere for sure. 

Where are you taking your website in 2023? Let us know in the comments.