Why Is a HubSpot Audit Important?
HubSpot is a powerful cloud-based marketing, sales, and customer service platform that companies use to accelerate their growth. But to get the most out of your investment in HubSpot, you need to ensure that you are leveraging this powerful tool fully.
HubSpot is a powerful cloud-based marketing, sales, and customer service platform that companies use to accelerate their growth. But to get the most out of your investment in HubSpot, you need to ensure that you are leveraging this powerful tool fully.
That’s where a HubSpot portal audit comes in. An audit will help you structure your data and plan for the future.
What Is a HubSpot Audit?
A HubSpot audit thoroughly analyses your HubSpot account to ensure it was set up correctly, identify what is working efficiently and to uncover areas that can be improved.
The audit aims to help you better organise, fine-tune and streamline your digital marketing and sales activities, as well as customer success, with the intention of improving performance.
The scope of an audit will depend on which HubSpot products you need to optimise your investment in, which can include:
- HubSpot CRM
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- HubSpot Sales Hub
- HubSpot Service Hub
- HubSpot CMS Hub, and/or
- HubSpot Operations Hub.
Why Is It Important To Audit Your HubSpot Regularly?
Every company is unique and is on its on trajectory. From organisational strategy, personel, and market landscape, everything is changing constantly.
It’s precisely because of this constant change why HubSpot audits on a regular basis are so critical. When you have an audit done, you can see what you’re doing well, what you can do better, and what resources you lack but could use in the future.
CRMs can become cluttered over time, collect incorrect data and, if left unmanaged, can turn into a large unstructured list of contacts. Perhaps accessing lead conversion data is challenging. HubSpot CRM audits are a smart option if you’re developing lists, workflows, and forms regularly.
For example, if contact records are lacking information, contact properties aren’t optimised to your unique business, or there are multiple duplicate contacts, they can cause unreliable automated workflows or less optimal lead nurture experiences since they are receiving irrelevant or incorrect emails.
In the next section we outline the top reasons why your business might need an audit of your HubSpot account.
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:
- Visitor
- Lead
- Marketing qualified lead (MQL)
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.
12 Benefits Of a Hubspot Audit You Don’t Want To Miss
A well-functioning HubSpot platform eliminates friction as contacts progress through the buyer’s journey. Customers will keep coming back for more if you make the buying process easy and fun for them. As more leads progress through the funnel, an audit examines whether the tools create the best possible experience.
If you want to save your team time and headaches, a HubSpot CRM audit will look for ways to make their jobs easier.
1. Maximise your marketing investment
Many pillar pages, landing pages, blog posts, tutorials, videos and emails may already exist or have been deployed, but do you know which ones generate website traffic?
The fundamental reason to audit your HubSpot is to maximise your marketing investment. The intended outcome of the audit will be to align your content with your buyer personas, buyer journey and lifecycle stages, and the right keywords to build authority.
2. Identify marketing and sales funnel gaps
Your content is the key to attracting new customers and boosting your sales efforts. At each point of the buyer’s journey, your content and landing pages should prompt them to take some action. It should also improve the user’s overall experience.
A funnel gap analysis aims to understand if leads are being lost at any stage. That way you can create ways to improve the performance of your funnels and pipelines.
3. Engage with your CRM database
Preventing your CRM from becoming an unengaged HubSpot contact list is critical. The benefit of a HubSpot audit is to uncover how different approaches to engagement can improve lead flow and sales.
4. Improve segmentation and personalisation
Segmentation of contacts in your CRM is to target customer groups rather than the public to organise effective campaigns. By focusing their efforts on personalised campaigns, segmentation helps marketers save money, time, and other resources. A CRM
5. Improve Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Auditing your HubSpot and website will reveal any opportunities for improving call to actions (CTAs). Where CTAs are in place on a landing page with higher website traffic, a low CTR may be the result of uncompelling language or a content offer that doesn’t suit a particular buyer persona.
6. Increase lead conversion rates
A HubSpot audit lets you reassess your website’s effectiveness, such as lead generation and conversion. Uncovering missed opportunities or underperforming conversions on a web page or landing page enables you to A/B test ways to improve conversion rate.
7. Improve lead quality
Auditing and uncovering areas for improvement in your HubSpot portal will include assessing buyer personas, engagement and the type of content used to nurture prospects and leads. By focusing on attracting specific types of leads, and qualifying them with content, you can improve the overall quality of leads your sales team nurtures and converts.
8. Optimise lead scoring
An audit of the contacts and companies in your CRM will include assessing your lead scoring.
Lead scoring is a process of ascribing points to contacts based on a range of factors including demographics, lifecycle stage, and how they interact with your digital content assets which HubSpot can track. A HubSpot audit can help show how to better optimise your lead scoring.
9. Shorten lead cycles
It is possible to shorten lead cycles and positively affect the sales process by improving lead qualities. Your sales team will be engaged and nurturing more highly engaged contacts as a result of a better leveraged HubSpot platform. A HubSpot audit can point you in the right direction.
10. Identify automation opportunities
The automation potential of HubSpot is a major leverage point but it’s hard to know where to get started or how to improve. A HubSpot audit can identify workflow automation opportunities for you to leverage.
11. Consolidate reporting
When your data and reporting is spread out, it is difficult to understand how to monitor and adjust, let alone understand effectiveness. A HubSpot audit can show where you can consolidate reporting into efficient dashboards.
You can easily observe how your strategies in your Marketing Hub boost your pipeline for sales teams through comprehensive data.
12. Prioritise activities
It is much easier to prioritise activities once you have visibility of everything. A HubSpot audit can rank effectiveness of actions items and provide recommendations around where to place focus first.
Ready To Get The Most Out Of Your HubSpot Investment?
You can increase the quality of your traffic and the conversion rates of your marketing efforts by performing an audit.
Get the most out of your HubSpot investment with a Filament HubSpot audit. We are HubSpot experts who can audit your account and advice, helping you to identify what’s working well and where you can improve your overall performance.
Contact us today for your HubSpot audit.
