Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Hubspot Audit
The decision to invest in HubSpot would have been a major organisational decision and not taken lightly by the leadership team and marketing pros involved in the process. There’s the marketing budget allocation aspect, as well as the commitment to onboard new marketing technology and IT infrastructure into the business.
It’s critical that every company that made this decision is leveraging maximum value from their investment and is continually optimising its use within operations.
Here are the top reasons why you need a HubSpot audit.
1. Hubspot is underutilised
Teams that start under-utilising HubSpot over time do so for many reasons, some of which can include:
- Time constraints
- Lack of expertise, and
- Budget factors.
A common analogy is of “the Ferrari idling in the garage”. A decision was made to invest in the tool, but it’s simply just not getting used.
If not used to its full potential, it’s challenging to see a strong ROI, whether that’s money or time. Performing an audit can provide valuable insights into the inner workings of the company. Also, it reveals potential areas that need improvement.
Implementing audit recommendations has measurable effects on your marketing strategy and operations. As a result, your clients will have a better buying experience, and your team will be more productive.
2. It is challenging to quantify results
A HubSpot is a great tool to deploy marketing campaigns or manage sales activities. But if you’re unable to see the results and understand why they happened, it’s hard to know how to measure success. Performing a marketing audit is a great way to examine your current campaigns and identify any areas for improvement.
Take the time to audit your marketing portal to see how your campaigns are doing. The marketing team handles the first three lifecycle stages of the customer lifecycle:
Find out how well your team is doing and if the tools you’re using are facilitating you in reaching your goals. An audit can help you improve your marketing metrics. Use your data to identify marketing strategy gaps. Then develop a strategy to deal with all the issues and achieve results.
3. There has been turnover in the team
Your HubSpot portal can function well for now, but it may not be as simple if you have a personnel turnover and there are no HubSpot users in the company.
If managing HubSpot implementation was “owned” by a single marketing manager, HubSpot generally goes under-utilised if that team member departs.
Performing regular audits will verify that the systems put in place by previous employees are still relevant. So, new employees will not waste time figuring out how the tool works.
4. Unsure if HubSpot was set up correctly
If your company went through direct onboarding with the HubSpot team, that process would have been a facilitated process and your marketing team would have implemented the set up. Alternatively, a HubSpot Solutions Partner may have completed the onboarding for you.
Since every company is unique, you may be unsure if the tools were set up in a customised way that works best for your needs and goals. You may even have doubts about whether there were gaps in the technical set up or onboarding process.
A HubSpot audit will provide the necessary insight to understand whether it was set up correctly, and if gaps are found, what to do to resolve them.
5. Database is unsegmented
Your contact database is critical to the growth of your revenue as it’s an immensely valuable tool for your strategic marketing. Having a curated and qualified database of prospects, leads and customers drives a series of benefits for your organisation, including shorter sales cycles, increased close rates, profitability and growth.
But managing and maintaining an effective database is not a simple undertaking. If this was left unmanaged, the database may have become impractical and ineffective as a strategic marketing tool due to the fact that a disproportionate amount of information is missing or incorrectly categorised, i.e. has become bad data. Also, any duplicate contacts will need to be cleaned by merging contacts in CRM.
Clean data improves segmentation, which facilitates how you interact with your customers. A system clean of soft bounces, hard bounces or contact details that are no longer valid can provide better clarity of email metrics and performance as well.
Knowing where your leads are in the customer lifecycle is easier when your database is clean and reliable. As a result, you will craft targeted inbound marketing messages that speak directly to them.
6. Database is not engaged
Irregular or lack of communication with your HubSpot database reduces engagement over time. If your prospects or leads don’t hear from you, they go cold. Many leaders equate the strength of their database by its size. The reality is that a large database with unengaged contacts and companies likely is not as strong as previously believed.
Lack of contact engagement can also occur where contacts don’t have assigned owners.
You can measure the level of interaction of each of your contacts by looking at contact properties and attributes such as:
- The latest email open date
- The recent date of conversion
- The recent reply to a sales email
A HubSpot audit will uncover how many contacts are unengaged. You can then can sort unengaged contacts by the date they were most recently engaged or simply remove outdated contacts.
7. Reporting is not tailored to management requirements
For HubSpot to truly be effective, the reporting needs to be customised to the needs of the company and make sense to leadership teams.
If the HubSpot dashboards and reporting are not tailored to the needs of management, an audit is needed to identify how it can be customised.
8. Buyer personas are not actively used
An effective inbound tool is the creation of buyer personas. Using these “persona” representations of your actual customers, you can use them to improve the way your marketing communicates with your contacts.
Buyer personas make it easy to develop persona and contact-specific messages and relevant content that resonate with your target audiences. These activities also improve conversion rate.
If you’re not using buyer personas in the HubSpot tool, an audit will help identify how they can be leveraged to help identify qualified leads in your CRM.
9. No email strategy in place
Emails are an important part of both marketing and sales campaigns. Checking your email’s health is critical. HubSpot gives you a lot of information about how well your emails perform with your contacts. You can track the success of your email campaigns by looking at the open and click-through rates.
Using industry standards as a guide, review your email performance. Besides metrics, look at other things like the design of your emails as part of the audit process.
Are your emails optimised to achieve the best results? Make sure you personalise marketing emails for the recipients. Use A/B testing on your emails to see which elements, such as the layout, CTA, subject line, and message, perform best.
If your marketing communications doesn’t include an email strategy, a HubSpot audit will make the case for why one is needed.
10. The time cost of repetitive admin tasks is too high
The time cost of too much administration can be high, especially when it comes to sales teams.
HubSpot enables you to cut down on admin with automated workflows and sequences, depending on which tools you are using. You can create workflows for various activities to take place based on lifecycle stage, deal status, close dates, or based on many other contact records to trigger activities.
You could create an active list for any contact who doesn’t have a persona assigned to them or to assign contacts to the right primary contact.
A HubSpot audit can help identify how workflows will help you keep your database up to date and reduce your time on periodical database cleanup. It also saves you time and money.
