In simple terms, a HubSpot marketing audit is the scrutiny of a business’s marketing activities to discover what is being done right, as well as what could be improved upon.
Once you’re determined to grow your business, you have to first identify what’s in the perfect state, what needs improvement, where and what new technology is needed, as well as a roadmap to the much-desired destination.
A HubSpot account audit ensures that you have a clear vision and that you kick it full throttle towards your goals. This post examines the various beams that prop up HubSpot-focused marketing audits.
Let’s examine them one after the other.
1. Comprehensive
The first pillar of a HubSpot-focused marketing audit is comprehensiveness. A marketing audit needs to be holistic and thorough. It should cover every cranny of your marketing aspirations as this will help identify new points of strength and opportunity, as well as expose any unnoticed weaknesses.
A thorough HubSpot-focused marketing audit considers not only HubSpot but the entire tech stack and the various integrations.
In order to have closed-loop marketing reporting, and eliminate data leaks, we need to make sure not only that things are cleaned up and organized in Hubspot, but that everything working within your marketing strategy is connected correctly for reporting and measurement.
The HubSpot audit in itself should be detailed too; touching everything from the settings to reworking your content strategy if you notice KPIs aren’t being hit.
Thus, it pays attention to a company’s content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, ad campaigns, and everything else involved.
2. Systemic
A HubSpot-focused marketing audit will be for naught if it’s disorganized. Method and structure are necessary for the forthcoming execution of action items from your audit. They ensure that there is a boost in the efficiency of your marketing performance. Using methods that are tailored to suit your business ensures that nothing slips through the cracks during the process.
Since the ultimate goal is to improve marketing efficacy, a winning marketing audit, instead of being chaotic or disrupted, follows a step-by-step procedure. The steps are:
- Observing the marketing environment
- Paying due attention to the internal marketing system
- Analyzing the business’ marketing efforts
- Identifying the existing problems
- Drawing up a plan to eliminate the problems
Another element of the systemic pillar of a marketing audit is its periodic nature. A company must avoid the temptation of waiting until an obstacle is encountered or a loss is suffered before conducting a marketing audit.
Marketing audits should be conducted periodically; we strongly recommend a quarterly audit. Even if no problem surfaces, the audit makes it possible for the company to assess its performance, and re-organize for what lies ahead.
It should not be sporadic, but targeted and calculated.
3. Evaluation
Evaluation is a core tenet of marketing audits. A marketing audit studies and weighs the company’s marketing objectives, strategies, plans, policies, and programs to lay bare the strengths that can be leveraged, as well as the insufficiencies that can be improved upon.
What’s more? It helps the company to eliminate the ineffective and feeble, and build solid marketing tactics in their place. As a pillar of a marketing audit, it even aids the company to save resources by tweaking and readjusting campaigns that are not achieving the desired result.
Evaluation as a tenet of marketing audits encompasses checking for changes in sales, learning directly from the consumers using polls and questionnaires, observing your progress toward your business goals, comparing your strategies to those of your competitors to identify any differences in content, frequency, quality, and even the response generated.
4. HubSpot-Focused
This is the central pillar of a HubSpot-focused marketing audit. HubSpot is a powerful business tool possessing an array of features that aid your marketing and other processes.
Cleaning up HubSpot with an audit makes a comprehensive review of your HubSpot use to assess your performance, weigh your usage, and pinpoint opportunities to bolster the effect HubSpot can have on your bottom line.
As the audit rolls to an end, you can expect a compendium of best practices and tips for enhanced use, management, and implementation of the suite of HubSpot tools to kick your marketing, sales, and general performance up a gear.
Some results from the focus on HubSpot include:
- A guarantee that your current setup becomes more functional
- More value from your HubSpot subscription
- Better management of your HubSpot
Here are times when you need to focus on HubSpot in your marketing audit:
- When your sales and marketing are missing KPIs
- If it seems you’re not getting optimum value from HubSpot
- You’ve recently onboarded new members and everything seems new to them
- You are unsure of whether you’re using HubSpot correctly
- You’re inheriting a HubSpot account
- Your business objectives have changed
- You’re about to release a new product or feature
5. Curative
Thanks to the pillar of evaluation, a HubSpot-focused marketing audit is curative in nature. Once the issues and weaknesses in the company’s marketing strategy are identified, the audit’s recommended actions get the issues sorted out.
To iron out some issues, it’s usually imperative to assign accountability to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. Also, there’s the need to set SMART goals. These are goals that are specific and defined for the company and the entire marketing initiative. The goals also should be measurable, with KPIs set to illustrate how much success has been achieved.
The targets should also be attainable. They should not be so lofty that they are unable to be accomplished. Following that is the need for the goals to be realistic. Realistic goals present targets that the team can hit.
Finally, the goals should be timely. The space of time it will take to hit the set targets should be known. This ensures that the marketing adventure is smooth.
A marketing audit ensures that remedial steps are taken to undo the mishaps existing in the company’s blueprint. It essentially rectifies whatever was previously out of place by prioritizing the actions to take. An optimized portal keeps your contact list pruned and spices up your email marketing- a marketing strategy that boasts a 4200% ROI.
6. Preventative
An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Isn’t that what they say?
Well, that embodies one of the core pillars of marketing audits. Marketing audits make the most of expertise and best practices to anticipate issues that might present themselves in the future. As a result, such matters can be either handled instantly or adequately prepared for.
Essentially, marketing audits nip problems in the bud as early as possible even before they can pose a challenge or threaten the company’s ambitions.
Summing it up
Having discussed the pillars of HubSpot-focused marketing audits, it’s crucial to stress that auditing HubSpot only will not suffice to bring your marketing dream to reality. HubSpot is only a tool, and auditing the tool can only last for a moment. Reviewing the complete marketing system, including the use of the tool stack, is the key to getting the most out of your audit.
Do you think that you might need help with your marketing audit? Then contact us now!
