Introduction

When it comes to cleaning up, you should always clean up!

The mess in your life and on the HubSpot portal as well!

Source: Giphy

HubSpot is an amazing tool for businesses, only if you know how to maximize its usage and grow your business in an impactful way. If you have recently set up your HubSpot business account or have had it up and running for a long time, it’s time you conduct an in-depth HubSpot audit.

Before jumping into the “how” of the HubSpot audit, let’s throw some light on the “why” of it!

Why should you conduct a HubSpot audit?

Amidst the immense opportunities that HubSpot offers, be it for:

• Marketing department (managing ads, emails, landing pages, social media platforms, website blogs, SEO, campaigns, lead capture, files, and templates)
  
  
• Sales department (managing deals, forecasts, tasks, quotes, etc)
  
  
• Analytics department (viewing the analytics tools and dashboards)

it is impossible to locate every single instance of an improper information entry or status. Therefore, sparing some time, sitting down with the team, and auditing the entire portal is crucial for utilizing the asset completely and efficiently. 

A few reasons you should consider a cleanup for your instance:

• Say, for instance, you need a report on the leads generated in a month, and HubSpot doesn’t provide you accurate numbers, you need to conduct an audit to understand what is currently being tracked by the portal and what else needs to be tracked.
  
  
• Or, if you are unable to find out the owner of a particular lead, you need to reorganize your database and probably run a cleanup process to find out gaps and rectify them.
  
  
• Imagine you have integrated an external CRM, like Pardot with HubSpot and it’s totally out of sync, it can wreak havoc on your business processes. A HubSpot audit can help you catch hold of which fields are not synced in both the portals and you can realign them.

A step-by-step audit of your HubSpot instance would offer crystal clear and clean data for better data segmentation, organized database, and business performance.

Though all businesses are unique and there isn’t a standardized HubSpot audit process, there are certain key areas you can begin organizing on your journey towards a well-groomed HubSpot instance.

Let’s get to know them one by one!

Steps to conduct a HubSpot audit for your business

1. Reorganizing contacts and companies

For any business, database contacts and companies are the backbones! These should be cleaned up frequently to enable analyzing data effectively. 

Source: HubSpot

How should you begin cleaning up your contacts and companies section?

Ask yourself a few questions once you have your contacts and companies database open in front of you:

• Does each contact contain all the requisite information about it, like the contact number or email id?
  
  
• Are there any duplicate companies and contacts and whether the duplicates have been removed?
  
  
• Does each contact have the right tag associated with it according to its current life stage, is it a new subscriber, a lead, a marketing qualified lead, or a sales-qualified lead?
  
  
• Are the contacts (with a resultant hard bounce when reaching out to them, those who have unsubscribed, or those who have not engaged for a long while) been removed?
  
  
• Do all the leads have an assigned owner for it?

Realigning your contacts and companies information is crucial for enhancing your email deliverability and ensuring correct reporting.

2. Executing buyer persona activity

Why care about the buyer persona?

Because they are an essential part of executing your outreach campaigns! Rightly knowing your buyer persona helps in properly targeting, segmenting, customizing, and personalizing the communication that you have with your audience. 

HubSpot has a separate fold on the portal that takes care of the buyer persona implementation process, only if you help it correctly function.

Source: HubSpot

A few questions to ask here:

• Have all my target buyer personas been uploaded on the portal?
  
  
• Do I have a fresh set of buyer personas that I need to include here?
  
  
• Do I have any freshly discovered traits of my target persona that needs to be included?
  
  
• Are all my personas depicting the entire and exact set of the target audiences I intend to reach out to?

Note- Once you are done updating your target persona on the HubSpot portal, ensure each contact in the database is tagged with the respective buyer persona.

3. Analyzing your email health

Emails are a very important aspect of any marketing or sales campaign. Analysis of your email performance can also be done through the HubSpot dashboard.

Source: HubSpot

The dashboard offers a comprehensive email performance report in terms of the email open rate and click rate, among other metrics.

Pro Tip- Once you have the key metrics data in front of you, research the industry benchmark and compare your performance with the industry standard to analyze where you currently stand and what can be improved.

For instance, you are an ed-tech company, and your HubSpot suggests a 5% email open rate. But the industry standard is averaged at 8%. This data can reveal useful insights for a future improvement plan. Set your goals and make a strategic plan to reach somewhere near that average.

Once you have analyzed your current email performance, read the 10 tactics to solve your email marketing woes!

4. Auditing your workflows

Your workflows should be audited and revised on a regular basis. You can begin with the workflows that have the maximum engagement and go down from there.

Once you zero in on the workflows, consider accessing the performance report and analyze the following:

• The expected versus the actual goal conversion rate

•  Workflows against their expected outflows

• Total workflows

• Active workflows

• Dormant workflows

• Internal versus external workflows

• The naming convention or the folder structure for creating workflows, emails, files, or lists

After you have all the information in front of you, make a plan to improve on whichever area’s performance is lagging behind.

If one workflow is sorted, consider creating new workflows as per your requirements, such as cart abandonment, lead nurturing, or anything else.

5. Streamlining lead scoring

If you don't know what lead scoring can help you achieve, read the importance of lead scoring in identifying the best quality leads.

Your HubSpot lead scoring fold should correctly depict the ranks of the prospects on the basis of their current engagement and whether they are sales-ready, or not yet.

If not, consider revisiting your lead scoring module and look for red flags in the weighing criteria, on the basis of which your leads are being evaluated and ranked. If the process was developed years ago, ensure making it effective to the recent engagement updates and adding new weighing attributes to evaluate your leads on.

Source: HubSpot

An incorrect lead ranking or criteria can be harmful to your business. Learn how are CMOs NOT using lead scoring properly!

6. Ensuring consistency in the designs

HubSpot also offers website hosting services, which include creating templates, writing content, including interactive elements, and publishing the content for blogs or other landing pages.

While you are at it, ensure accessing all the templates that you use and evaluate the font style, graphics, and overall brand image. You should target having consistency in these areas across all your assets or properties.

Take note of any inconsistencies in the navigation across your domain/subdomain/pages and check for the design and layout in your templates. If not consistent, update them for greater user engagement.

7. Connecting Google Search Console with HubSpot instance

 If you don’t know what Google Search Console does, here’s the explanation!

Google Search Console provides you information about the search ranking of your asset and the average number of views and clicks your web page receives for specific search queries.

Read more on how to set up Google Search Console - Part 1.

For more information, read how to set up Google Search Console - Part 2.

Ensure your HubSpot instance is connected with the Google Search Console so as to evaluate the search data and understand your content and SEO performance from a single dashboard.

8. Revisiting your SEO strategy

HubSpot dashboard has a functionality wherein you can create pillar pages/topic clusters for creating pages/topics of relevance. This helps build up authority for the search terms/topics that are in line with your business offerings. 

Consider using this feature to access information around your targeted topics and create links between your pillar pages and individual blogs/other assets therein.

Source: HubSpot

Conduct a HubSpot audit to understand if these pillar pages/topic clusters seem outdated and if there is a need to create fresh pillar pages.

Also, HubSpot offers in-depth suggestions and recommendations on blogs. These recommendations include meta descriptions, title tags, alternative texts for images, and more.

Make a note of these suggestions and consider rectifying those marked “high” in the SEO impact field.

9. Reviewing your forms and CTAs

Attractive and well-built forms and CTAs ensure getting leads for your business!

As a part of the HubSpot audit, you should consider reviewing your forms and CTAs to ensure that your lead capture assets are well-groomed for increasing conversions. HubSpot analytics tool can help you with evaluating the performance of your forms and CTAs and provide recommendations on the areas for improvement. 

Source: HubSpot

Source: HubSpot

Research the benchmark performance standard for conversions in your industry. If you are below that benchmark, consider tweaking your forms and CTAs. For example, you can change the font size, color, and copy of your CTAs. You can also include gated content links to your blogs, like a case study in any of the related blog topics.

10. Managing your users, assets, and folders

Once you have details around the total number of workflows, users, assets, and folders, consider organizing them for easy recognition and for greater efficiency.

Source: HubSpot

If you come across workflows or assets that have not been used for long, consider archiving them. For multiple folders, consider having a naming convention for easy identification and segregation. 

This would ultimately help you save tons of time and confusion with just a few days of spending hours organizing them.

Way Forward

To make full use of the automation marvel that HubSpot is, ensure you follow the above steps for an exhaustive HubSpot audit. 

Once you have completed the audit process, you might have a list of gaps that need to be addressed on your HubSpot instance. It is okay if this seems like a lot of work to you, but we ensure the results of a few days of putting in the hard yards would be highly rewarding for your business.

Out of all the recommendations, make sure that the ones which have the highest impact are prioritized first and then move forward with the medium and the low impact changes.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to conduct a HubSpot audit for your instance or are not sure where to begin, let us at RevX do the grind for you!

Get in touch with us, Today!