HubSpot is a powerful and comprehensive tool that can revolutionize the way businesses operate. It offers an array of features that help in better customer engagement, lead generation, and marketing automation.
However, to reap the maximum benefits of HubSpot, a thorough understanding of the tool is essential. This is where conducting a HubSpot audit comes in. Whether you have just set up your HubSpot account or have been using it for a while, conducting an audit can enable you to identify areas that need improvement and optimize your usage.Â
From assessing your onboarding practices to evaluating your lead management strategies, a comprehensive audit can provide valuable insights into how to leverage HubSpot for business growth. So, take the first step towards maximizing your HubSpot usage and conduct an in-depth audit today!Â
Let’s chat about how to conduct a HubSpot audit!
Why should you conduct a HubSpot audit?
HubSpot is an incredible asset that offers numerous opportunities to various departments such as marketing, sales, and analytics. However, with so many features to manage, some improper information entries or statuses may be overlooked. Therefore, it is recommended that you take some time to sit down with your team and audit your entire portal to ensure that you are utilizing this asset efficiently and correctly.
Conducting a cleanup for your instance is essential for better data segmentation, organized database, and business performance. A HubSpot audit can assist you in understanding what is currently being tracked by the portal and what else needs to be tracked. Moreover, it can help you find gaps and rectify them, reorganize your database, and catch hold of which fields are not synced between external CRMs like Pardot and HubSpot.
Although there isn’t a standardized process for a HubSpot audit, there are certain key areas you can begin organizing to achieve a well-groomed HubSpot instance. Let’s find out more about them one by one!
How to conduct a HubSpot audit for your business
1. Reorganizing contacts and companies
When it comes to cleaning up your contacts and companies section, there are a few key questions you can ask yourself to ensure you’re doing it effectively.Â
First off, take a look at each contact in your database and ask yourself whether it contains all the necessary information, such as a valid contact number or email ID.
 Next, scan your database for any duplicate companies or contacts and make sure to remove them to avoid confusion and disorganization. It’s also important to tag each contact according to their current life stage, whether they’re a new subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, or sales qualified lead.Â
Additionally, make sure to remove any contacts that have resulted in a hard bounce or have unsubscribed, as they can negatively impact your email deliverability.Â
Finally, be sure that all leads have an assigned owner to prevent any confusion or miscommunication. By taking the time to realign your contacts and companies information, you’ll be able to improve your email deliverability and ensure accurate reporting.
2. Executing buyer persona activity
The importance of understanding your buyer persona cannot be overstated. By taking the time to develop a clear understanding of your buyer persona, you can more effectively tailor your outreach campaigns to best suit their needs, interests, and preferences.
With HubSpot’s dedicated portal for buyer persona implementation, you have everything you need to succeed at your fingertips. However, it’s important to make sure that you’ve uploaded all of your target buyer personas to this portal, and to continually update and refine these personas as needed.
To get started, it’s essential to ask yourself a series of important questions, such as: Have all of my target buyer personas been uploaded to the portal? Have I identified any new traits or characteristics of my buyer persona that need to be included? Are all of my personas accurately reflecting the needs and preferences of the audiences I want to reach?Â
By taking the time to answer these questions and continually refine your buyer persona, you can ensure that your outreach campaigns are targeted, segmented, customized, and personalized to best serve your audience.
3. Analyzing your email health
Email marketing campaigns are a crucial aspect of any business looking to expand its reach, generate leads, or improve sales. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the performance of your email marketing campaigns regularly.
Fortunately, the HubSpot dashboard provides powerful insights into your email performance. With its comprehensive email performance report, you can measure your email open and click rates, among other metrics, which can be crucial to improving your campaigns.
For instance, suppose you are an ed-tech company, and your HubSpot dashboard suggests a 5% email open rate. In that case, you can compare this figure with the industry standard, which averages at 8%. This data can reveal useful insights for a future improvement plan. With this knowledge, you can set your goals and develop a strategic plan to reach a similar level of performance.
Once you have analyzed your current email performance, you can read up on the 10 tactics to solve your email marketing woes for more information on how to improve your campaigns and reach a wider audience effectively.
4. Auditing your workflows
Effective workflows are integral to the success of any business. Therefore, it is essential to conduct regular audits of your workflows and revise them as necessary. To begin with, identify the workflows with the highest engagement rates and work your way down the list.Â
Once you have pinpointed these workflows, access the performance report and conduct a thorough analysis. This should include comparing the expected goal conversion rate versus the actual rate, assessing workflows against their expected outflows, and reviewing the total number of active and dormant workflows, both internal and external. It may also be helpful to review the naming convention or folder structure for creating workflows, emails, files, or lists.
After analyzing all relevant data, create a plan to improve the performance of any under-performing workflow. It may also be beneficial to create new workflows based on specific business requirements, such as cart abandonment or lead nurturing. Regularly auditing and revising workflows will help to improve your overall efficiency and ultimately increase your business success.
5. Streamlining lead scoring
Lead scoring is a vital aspect of identifying the best quality leads for your business. If you are uncertain about its significance, we recommend that you check out the blog on the importance of lead scoring in identifying the best quality leads.
It’s crucial that your HubSpot lead scoring fold provides a correct depiction of the prospects’ ranks based on their present engagement and whether they are sales-ready. If you find that this is not the case, you must revisit your lead scoring module and search for red flags in the weighing criteria that determine how your leads are evaluated and ranked.
If your lead scoring process was developed a long time ago, make sure that you update it with recent engagement updates and add more weighing attributes to evaluate your leads. An incorrect lead ranking or criteria can be detrimental to your business. To understand why and how CMOs are not using lead scoring effectively, you can read our informative blog post on the topic.
6. Ensuring consistency in the designs
When it comes to website hosting services, HubSpot is a great option to consider. In addition to hosting your website, they also offer a variety of services to help improve your content marketing, including the creation of templates, engaging content writing, and interactive elements.Â
Not only will they publish your content for blogs and landing pages, but they’ll also work with you to ensure that your brand image is consistent across all of your properties. It’s important to review and evaluate your template styles and graphics to ensure that they align with your overall brand image.Â
Take the time to carefully consider the design and layout in your templates to maximize user engagement. If you notice any inconsistencies in the navigation across your domain, subdomain, or pages, make sure to review and update accordingly. By working with HubSpot, you can improve the overall quality and effectiveness of your website.
7. Connecting Google Search Console with HubSpot instance
Google Search Console is a powerful tool that can help you understand how your website is performing in search results. By providing you with valuable information about your search ranking and the average number of views and clicks your web page receives for specific search queries, Google Search Console helps you make informed decisions about your SEO strategy.
For those not familiar with the tool, we recommend checking out our introductory guide on how to set up Google Search Console, where you can learn the basics of how to connect your website and start receiving data about your search performance. If you want to take your knowledge to the next level, we also have a Part 2 guide that provides more advanced tips on how to optimize your website for search.
One important thing to note is that you can integrate your HubSpot instance with Google Search Console to get an even more comprehensive view of your search data. This will allow you to evaluate your content and SEO performance from a single dashboard, making it easier than ever to make data-driven decisions about your website’s optimization.
8. Revisiting your SEO strategy
The HubSpot dashboard is an excellent tool for optimizing your website’s content. One of its standout features is the ability to create pillar pages and topic clusters. Essentially, you can use this feature to plan and create pages of relevance to your business, which helps build authority and boost search rankings for specific keywords.Â
Take the time to explore the insights and data around your targeted topics and make sure there are links between your pillar pages and individual blogs or other assets.
It’s also worth conducting a thorough HubSpot audit to understand if your pillar pages and topic clusters are outdated and whether new content is needed. This platform provides detailed recommendations on blog content, including meta descriptions, title tags, and image alt texts, to improve the SEO impact.
Take note of these recommendations, especially those flagged as “high” in the impact field, and consider rectifying them. By doing so, you can optimize your website’s content for optimal success.
9. Reviewing your forms and CTAs
Getting leads is an integral part of any business, and having attractive and well-built forms and CTAs is crucial for achieving it. As a helpful tip, you may want to consider reviewing your forms and CTAs as part of your HubSpot audit.Â
Evaluating the performance of these crucial components will provide recommendations for improving your lead capture assets, which can increase conversions.
You can utilize HubSpot analytics tool to assess the effectiveness of your forms and CTAs, and ultimately make data-driven improvements. In doing so, you can research the benchmark performance standard for conversions that is specific to your industry.Â
If your current performance falls below this standard, you can tweak your forms and CTAs in various ways. For example, changing the font size and color of your CTAs could make all the difference.
Additionally, including gated content links to your blogs, such as a case study relevant to a particular topic, can further enhance your lead generation efforts.
10. Managing your users, assets, and folders
As you go through this process, you may find that there are assets or workflows that have not been utilized in quite some time. In these cases, it may be worth considering archiving them to free up space and simplify your digital workspace. Additionally, when working with multiple folders, consider establishing a naming convention that will aid in identifying and separating out different aspects of your workflow.
By prioritizing organization and taking some time to get everything in order, you can save yourself valuable time down the line and minimize confusion and inefficiency. With just a few days of work, this small investment can pay major dividends in the long run.