HubSpot is a powerful tool that businesses can leverage for their marketing, sales, and customer service operations. This portal is flexible, and businesses can customize it according to their needs. However, to fully take advantage of this tool you need to ensure that you are using it the right way. HubSpot gives businesses a ton of options and features they can leverage. But if you are not aware about these tools or not using them effectively, it can affect your performance. This is where a HubSpot audit conducted by an experienced HubSpot partner helps.
To fully understand your HubSpot portal you need to run an audit that can show you the areas that can be improved. Through an audit you can determine which features work for you and the ones that are untapped. In addition, it can also show you what you may be doing wrong, so that you can further optimise your account. In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about the HubSpot audit so that you can evaluate your account and refine it to improve your overall performance.
HubSpot Audit: Marketing
To ensure the success of your marketing campaigns, you need to run a marketing audit. A marketing audit will help you review your marketing efforts and find out the marketing gaps. Evaluate the performance of your campaigns by taking the time to audit your marketing portal. The marketing team is responsible for the first three lifecycle stages: Visitor > Lead > Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL). Find out how your team is performing and if the tools are helping you achieve your goals.
Here is how you can start evaluating your marketing portal.
Gather key data
The first step to your audit is gathering all the important data. In your HubSpot portal you can easily find all the data you need about your marketing activities. You need to collect all insights about your leads and customers. In addition, look at all the data about your landing page performance and conversion rates. Here are some tools that can help you gather all the data you need:
Dashboard: This gives you a summary of the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Sources: This will give you a breakdown of your website traffic and where your leads come from.
Landing Page Analytics: This shows you the performance of your landing page and how it is converting leads.
Complete all the data
Ensure that you have entered all the relevant data in your HubSpot account. This data can be about contacts, content or any other marketing related data that creates leads. If you have imported contact, ensure that you enter all the relevant information related to those contacts. Keeping all the data complete and updated can help you organize and get more accurate results.
Analyze your data
The next step is to interpret and evaluate all the data you have collected. This data gives you tons of insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns. To create successful campaigns, you need to analyze the results of the existing ones, that can help you refine your future campaigns. Start by examining your website traffic performance. Compare your website traffic record in the past with the present to understand it better. Look at if your traffic is consistent or has reduced over a certain period.
Look at where your website traffic is coming from. It can be through various channels like social media, emails, referrals, organic search or PPC ads. This helps you see which marketing efforts are proving more effective for lead generation. Conversion rate is another aspect you should analyze. Are your conversion rates steady or reducing? If you see that they are reducing, it will mean that you need to optimise your campaigns for better results. Analysing the performance of your marketing activities can help you make improvements and drive positive results.
Determine the gap
After you analyze your data, you need to identify the gaps in your marketing strategy. Look at your conversion rate. How much percentage of your website traffic is converting into leads? Or do you have a high conversion rate with little website traffic?
Analyze your lead conversion data to find out more answers. Lead conversion data is the percentage of your website traffic who have become your contacts and are in your database. Examine if your lead conversion is healthy. The average visit-to-lead conversion rate in HubSpot is 0.93%. That means 1 person out of every 100 visitors coming to a website converts into a lead.This estimate also depends on factors like buyer personas, industry and products or services.
Determining conversion rate is important as it helps determine the gap. If you don’t have a healthy conversion rate, then you should focus on improving it. If your conversion rate is healthy then work on increasing your website traffic as it will help convert more leads.
Come up with a plan
Once you have finished analysing all the data and identified the gaps you should create a plan to drive better results. The first step to creating a plan would be to set goals. The goals that you set should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely (SMART). This ensures that you set realistic goals that are achievable. Examine different areas where you need to make changes like increase website traffic, and then set your goals accordingly.
After setting goals, come up with various strategies that can help you achieve them. If you want to increase website traffic the one way to achieve this can be to increase the frequency of your blogs. Create relevant blogs and promote them on social media to generate more traffic. On the other hand, if you want to improve conversion rate, you can optimize your landing page. Run A/B testing on your landing page to find out what works best to drive conversions. You can also include relevant CTAs in your blogs to lead the visitors to more relevant content. This can help them keep interested and boost conversions.
A marketing audit can help you improve your marketing strategy and drive better results. Ensure to dig deep when it comes to your data, as it can show you the gaps in your marketing strategy. Then come up with a plan to tackle all the issues to achieve successful results.
Now that you know how you can get started with your marketing audit, let’s look at all the different areas that you can audit to make the best of your HubSpot portal.
Contact cleanup
Contacts and companies are an important part of your database that need to be cleaned up on a regular basis. This makes it easy for you to organise all your contacts. You need to examine your database and see if all contacts are tagged with their current lifecycle stage, or leads are assigned owners and manage duplicate or unengaged contacts. We will discuss it in depth further when we talk about CRM. Contacts are an important area that you will need to audit for your marketing and sales related activities.
Buyer Personas
HubSpot enables you to create buyer personas. Buyer persona is a semi fictional representation of your target customers. With the help of these personas, you can segment your audience and personalize your marketing campaigns. You need to ensure that your buyer personas are updated. Audit your personas and find out if they accurately represent your target audiences. Update them if you have any new demographic and psychographic information.
After you have updated your personas, check whether your contacts are being tagged with their persona in your HubSpot database. If not, then set up a method that tags your contacts with the relevant persona. Buyer personas are important for your marketing efforts, as personalization marketing campaigns can help drive positive results. Don’t leave out buyer personas during your audit.
Emails
Emails play a key role in both marketing and sales campaigns. Hence, checking the health of your emails is important. HubSpot provides many different insights about the performance of your emails. You can analyze your email open and click rates to track the progress of your email campaigns. Review your email metrics based on the benchmarks of your respective industry. According to Mailchimp, the average business email open rate is 21.56% and click rate is 2.72%.
Along with metrics, you also need to audit other aspects such as the design of your emails. Have you optimized your emails to drive the best results? Ensure that your emails are personalized based on the audiences you send it to. Run A/B testing on your emails and test various aspects like layout, CTA, subject line, messaging, and layout.
SEO strategy
Search engine optimization is vital to help your website rank better on the search engine results page. If you are not using the pillar page/topic cluster tool on HubSpot, then ensure that you do. Pillar pages help you build authority on a topic and help improve your ranking. It is a great way to find out relevant keywords and subtopics that you can use to create your blogs.
HubSpot also gives you recommendations on how you can improve your SEO efforts. Go to Marketing > Planning and Strategy > SEO > Recommendations. Audit your SEO efforts and use these recommendations to make improvements.
Forms and CTAs
Review the performance of your forms and CTAs. If certain forms are not performing well, ensure that you update them by removing unnecessary fields. Create forms that are relevant to the offers you make. Test your CTAs to see which phrases and designs capture the audience’s attention better.
Landing page
Lastly, review important landing pages. Ensure that the design you use in your landing pages is consistent. Use fonts, colors, layout etc. based on your brand image. Always run A/B testing to create high performing landing pages. When using any landing page templates from HubSpot, ensure that they are updated and optimized to provide a great user experience.
HubSpot Audit: CRM
Now, let’s dive into the sales efforts. The sales teams are responsible for the second half of the lifecycle stages: Sales Qualified Leads > Opportunity > Customer. It is important that sales teams use CRM software efficiently. Hence, ensure that you review your CRM system and improve it so that your sales team can use it more efficiently.
You should start by checking the overall health of your data. Is your data relevant, updated and useful? Bad data can be a hurdle to the success of your sales campaigns. To avoid errors and make the information more manageable, start by reviewing your contacts data. Here is what you can do to improve your contact data.
Delete contacts
Remove or delete the contacts that have hard bounced, meaning contacts with incorrect emails, and unsubscribed. Create a list of all the outdated contacts and delete them from your database.
Find Duplicates
Look for duplicate contacts and determine where they are coming from. With a Professional or Enterprise subscription in HubSpot you can use the duplicate management tool. This tool uses machine learning to identify duplicate contacts and companies.
When you find duplicate contacts, you can merge them. When merging contacts make sure that you determine which is the primary one. The primary contact will stay in the system. Scanning for duplicates can help make more room in your database and save you money.
Filter unengaged contacts
The dates on properties like last marketing email open date, recent conversion date, or recent sales email reply date can be used to determine the level of engagement of a particular contact. You can filter contacts based on dates and remove contacts that have not engaged in a while.
Bounced emails
Another way to find outdated contacts is through bounced emails.
Hard bounces: This happens when emails are rejected by the server. It usually happens when a contact’s email address is wrong. Find these contacts and remove them.
Soft bounces: This occurs for various reasons. It may be due to a contact’s inbox being full, or the email you sent was too large and rejected by the receiving server. You can filter your HubSpot contact list based on email bounce. There may be many old contacts whose information is no longer valid. Remove these contacts from your database.
Assign contacts to buyer personas
If you have created buyer personas in HubSpot then ensure that you have them assigned to your contacts. This makes it easier for your sales teams to determine what type of lead or customer they are dealing with and communicate with them better.
Update lifecycle stages
Lifecycle stage property allows your team to determine where a contact is in terms of their buyer’s journey. Ensure that all your contacts are updated with the correct lifecycle stage. This helps you update your system with the status. It helps sales teams communicate better with contact when they know what stage they are at. Sales teams can also be more organized and communicate with a contact based on their lifecycle stage.
Filter duplicate contact properties
You may have duplicate contact properties in your system which can cause confusion. Find out if you have duplicate contact properties. To do this navigate to your property settings and scan any properties that are similar. You can delete the duplicate property or use workflows to copy data from one property to another.
Keep deals updated
Ensure that sales teams are often updating the deal status in HubSpot. Deal stages help the sales team to see when a deal is at the point of closing. Sales teams use deal stages to track the progress of an ongoing deal in HubSpot. Updating deal stages can help keep the system clean and organized. You can update the close dates, amount of the deal, or associate the relevant contact and companies to a deal.
When you keep your CRM database clean, organized and updated it sets your sales team up for success. Both sales and marketing processes can benefit from this. Ensure that you spend time managing your CRM data to help make your sales process more efficient.
Use HubSpot More Efficiently
With HubSpot businesses have the potential to grow. It helps businesses plan and implement their marketing and sales strategy. However, to see growth and success you need to ensure that you are using this platform to its potential. If you are new to HubSpot you may not be aware of various tools and features that can make your work easy and efficient. With a HubSpot audit you can identify these features to serve you better.
Through an audit you can refine your campaigns and speed your way to growth and success. With better quality traffic and improved conversion rates your company can grow faster. When sales teams are more efficient they can easily close deals and form long-term relationships with customers.
To get the most out of your HubSpot portal run an audit to see more opportunities for growth. If you are overwhelmed and feel like you need help with your HubSpot audit, get in touch with us. We are HubSpot experts and can help you audit your account and provide recommendations that can enable you to achieve your goals.