Blog

Key questions to address with a HubSpot Portal Audit | HubSpot Audit

Written by Laura Taftur | Feb 26, 2020 7:39:36 AM

Using HubSpot can help you automate and organize your sales and marketing efforts, but it also provides an opportunity to take a step back, analyze the data, and determine how it all works. This gives you a high-level overview of your sales and marketing alignment, the efficacy of campaigns and marketing investments and efforts as well as a proactive view on what you need to improve. If your business sales and marketing teams aren't using certain tools and capabilities effectively, you might not get everything you could get out of it.

Why do you need to conduct a HubSpot Portal Audit?

A HubSpot Portal Audit is a great opportunity for taking stock of everything you've invested in HubSpot, reorganizing it and reassessing what you're doing with the platform. It allows you to focus your campaigns and efforts work towards your business strategy, on the results you get versus what could potentially be getting. The audit provides you with a unique opportunity to learn and optimize your efforts, your campaigns, the marketing to sales handover and other critical aspects of your sales enablement processes.

Conduct an annual HubSpot Portal Audit!

Any business should conduct an annual HubSpot Portal Audit and continue to run incoming marketing campaigns with up to date aligned processes. A simple example is related to all those legacy data into your marketing workflows or nurturing streams where you forget to update the date for many inbound content pieces and it all seems updated to your new prospect or buyer.

HubSpot specialist and consultant at NNC Services is a certified HubSpot professional consultant who makes sure your HubSpot content is up to date and your portal follows HubSpot best practices in terms of lead nurturing and scoring, contact and lists, sales stages and results reporting. These services will validate your marketing and sales planning, strategy and decisions and allow you to focus on business development and business growth.

An audit can help you reorganize and get your company in order to optimize the marketing strategy of your business. Maintaining a CRM like HubSpot neat and tidy with constant shifts is no easy task. Every time you log in, you can find yourself in a state of chaos.

Key points you need to consider when performing a HubSpot Portal Audit

 
Website Traffic Analytics Brake-down
  • Provided you measured website traffic in the past, what are some of your digital KPIs?
  • Are you satisfied with how much web traffic you get? Do you want to grow it? Do you know what is your potential for growth? What are some good traffic benchmarks in your vertical?
  • How do you rank against your competition in digital awareness?
  • Consider the best performing page, content, campaign, channel, etc. What learnings can you take off of these against least performing ones?
  • How often do you post to your blog? Are you following clear content clusters, topics, are you trying to establish domain authority and thought leadership with your content? It may be very convenient to use HubSpot to publish a weekly blog to establish yourselves as experts or to qualify your leads with a clear lead scoring system. However, most companies are now beginning to realize that a company's marketing automation software is so much more powerful, with a lot of tools not used at their full capacity. This also means that if you are using automation tools, your articles should be reviewed before they are passed on to your sales department, as these pieces of inbound content are the most likely to be bypassed for sales.
  • What channels and sources drive the most traffic to your digital outlets? How about your competitors, are there channels they explore and outperform you? Can you leverage some of these channels?
  • How well do your paid channels perform? What platforms do you usually use for paid advertising?
  • What social media accounts do you have? How is Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and other relevant for your business? Which social media channel converts can get you more relevant or qualified traffic?
  • Review the conversion rates from their highest-trafficked pages to understand the best conversion rate of website visitors to leads:

                     Last year's contact conversion rate

                     This year’s contact conversion rate

                     Last year's customer conversion rate

                     This year's customer conversion rate

Perform a gap analysis of any two stages in the funnel that drastically drop off. Perform a GAP analysis and benchmark against your industry conversion rates and against your competition digital sales funnels.

 
Marketing campaigns audit in HubSpot

Now that you have a baseline understanding of what’s driving consistent traffic to your website, let’s learn about your marketing campaigns. Evaluating what you did last year can help guide you on your required inbound or outbound new portal configurations. You can determine what campaigns were most successful, what is the best time to run certain campaigns, what you need to work into your portal to get the best results for your time and money.

At this stage of your HubSpot Portal Audit, you need to brainstorm how you can reuse and repurpose the best performing content and inbound campaigns, convert them into different types of lead generating offers like blog posts, video marketing, webinars, e-books, etc.

Understand the reasons why some campaigns performed amazing and others poorly, and avoiding making those mistakes again is key to unleashing new business growth. You need to pivot and focus your efforts into the best performing inbound solutions, tools and services that will work for your business based on clear data analysis.

 
HubSpot Marketing campaigns key points to consider
  • Best and worst performing campaigns. What are they, what are the indicators, what are the results, how can you close the gap between these? What are the lessons to learn?
  • Do you have any buyer personas that were not reflected in any of last year’s campaigns and were these left out intentionally?
  • Consider the campaigns’ ROI. Which ones are successful and which ones are not? Include your sales team in this analysis. How do marketing and sales each measure campaign success (leads generated, page views, etc.)?
  • Do campaigns follow your business goals like launching a new product, new services? Are your current campaigns aligned with your business outcome? What topics should you incorporate in future campaigns?
  • Do you use inbound campaigns and optimization tools properly?
  • Based on your benchmarked campaigns, how can you set up your future campaigns?
 
Guide to Contact and Lists in your HubSpot portal

It is important to make sure that you do not have any contacts occupying space that could be used for potential sales. HubSpot CRM experts have found useful ways to break clean your HubSpot CRM every time; many of our customers enjoy the HubSpot intelligent deduping function. From how to clear out contacts to the best practices for how you keep your transactions clean and organized, here are practical ways for you to test your own nurturing system.

Some companies use CRM and Marketing Automation software for only one specific purpose, to have marketing and sales aligned with more tasks on the same platform, one dashboard to unify all efforts.

 
Analyze your data correctly in the HubSpot dashboard

In particular, you must know your audience, to be able to personalize your content and inbound efforts according to their preferences and needs and use automation to send timely targeted messages. Spend time learning from your reports as studying the data collected by your software enables you to automate your marketing efforts so that you can build a human, useful and holistic inbound strategy. Act on your data - collect software in your emails to enhance customer personalization.

Step back from the data and analyze it in a way that helps you better understand your marketing campaigns and tactics. When HubSpot is fully integrated with the rest of marketing and sales, it can bring to the surface the channels that resonate with your target audience.

How can NNC Services add business value with a HubSpot Portal Audit?

Auditing is all about making sure that you're going in the right direction with your tactics. Whether it's through your marketing campaigns, your sales tactics, or your social media campaigns, you can control your results only if you understand your Marketing methods in order to rationally correct or nullify your actions.

Get a 20% increase on your current marketing campaigns ROI right now!

Any organization that has anything to do with HubSpot or any marketing automation system for that matter must hold regular audits. Audio recording is not just an organizational task, it's really useful to revise and improve your marketing and sales efforts. If you have not performed at least one portal audit in the last 12 months, do so as soon as possible. Our data shows that as soon as we have completed an audit (one-day free audit), you can immediately see a 20% increase in the outcome of your current marketing campaigns.

The HubSpot Portal Audit is a great opportunity to view HubSpot as a whole and make plans to improve and manage your marketing and sales enablement efforts. This includes cleaning up your file system, reading through it and identifying areas for improving how you use your data. I recommend promising yourself that, in order not to lose important files, clutter, or outdated content, you will check in on the data every six months or at least once a year. Conduct an internal audit of your organization's accounts, which will guide your marketing efforts while making it manageable and easier for employees to work.

If you're wondering whether you are maximizing HubSpot and want a second opinion, schedule your free consultation HubSpot Portal Audit. Schedule a consulting time with a member of our HubSpot team of certified consultants, and we will guide you with tips and suggested improvements in one actionable clearly outlined report that can help you implement incoming marketing more effectively for your organization.