Managing Complex Blog RSS Feeds with Custom Objects and HubSpot Automation

For organizations managing multiple blogs with diverse audiences, delivering the right content to the right subscribers can be a daunting challenge. Traditional RSS feed management tools often fall short when dealing with multi-blog ecosystems, tag-based filtering, and audience-specific distribution logic.

At Goodwood Consulting, we recently worked with a financial services client who needed a scalable way to manage complex blog RSS feeds across multiple properties. The solution? Leveraging HubSpot's Custom Objects alongside intelligent workflow automation.

The Challenge: Content Distribution at Scale

Our client operated several distinct blog properties, each targeting different audience segments: institutional investors, financial advisors, and retail investors. Each blog contained dozens of tags representing topics like market commentary, product updates, and regulatory news.

The core challenge was threefold:

• Subscribers needed to receive content based on specific blogs AND specific tags within those blogs
• A single subscriber could follow multiple blogs with different tag preferences for each
• The distribution logic had to be fully automated with no manual intervention

Standard HubSpot marketing email tools and basic RSS modules could not accommodate this level of granularity. We needed a data model that could represent the many-to-many relationship between subscribers, blogs, and tags.

The Solution: Custom Objects in HubSpot

HubSpot's Custom Objects gave us the flexibility to model the exact data relationships we needed. Instead of trying to force this logic into contact properties or static lists, we designed a purpose-built data structure.

How We Structured the Data

We created a custom object called Blog Subscription that served as the junction between contacts and their content preferences:

• Blog Subscription Object — stores the blog identifier, subscribed tags, delivery frequency, and format preferences
• Association to Contact — each subscription record is associated to a contact, allowing one contact to have multiple subscriptions
• Association to Blog — a second custom object representing each blog property with its available tags and RSS feed URL

This structure meant that when a new article was published on any blog, the system could query which contacts had active subscriptions for that blog AND matching tags, then trigger the appropriate email distribution.

Automating Distribution with Workflows

With the data model in place, we built a series of HubSpot workflows to automate the entire distribution process:

1. RSS Monitoring — a scheduled workflow polls each blog's RSS feed at regular intervals, checking for new posts and extracting metadata including title, summary, tags, and publication date
2. Tag Matching — when a new post is detected, the workflow cross-references the post's tags against active Blog Subscription records to build the recipient list
3. Email Assembly — personalized emails are dynamically assembled using the post content and the subscriber's preferences, including digest vs. immediate delivery
4. Delivery & Tracking — emails are sent and engagement data flows back into the Blog Subscription record, allowing us to track open rates and click-through rates at the subscription level

Real-World Use Case

Consider an ETF sponsor managing five distinct blog properties: a flagship market commentary blog, a product-specific blog for each of their three fund families, and an advisor education blog. Each blog has between 10 and 25 tags.

A single financial advisor might subscribe to the market commentary blog for “fixed income” and “macro outlook” tags, the growth equity fund blog for “quarterly updates” only, and the advisor education blog for “practice management” content. The custom object model handles all of this without any manual list management.

The result is a fully automated, highly targeted content distribution engine that runs entirely within HubSpot's native ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

• Custom Objects are not just for sales data — they can model any complex relationship in your business
• The many-to-many relationship pattern (Contact → Subscription → Blog) is a powerful construct for managing preferences at scale
• HubSpot workflows can be chained together to create sophisticated automation pipelines that rival custom-built solutions
• Tracking engagement at the subscription level provides much richer insights than standard email analytics