HubSpot Audit:
A Comprehensive (Self-Service) Guide for You
17 min read
Think of the keyboard on your computer or laptop -- you touch it every day, you eat lunch over it, your kids and fur babies hover over it, maybe you even cry over it. Every time you tap its keys, you leave remnants of your workday. You know you need to run a sanitizing wipe over the keys to kill the grime, but you’re not always as vigilant as you should be. When you’re not vigilant though, you’re more susceptible to catching a cold or the flu.
Your HubSpot portal is sort of like that. It can get soiled quickly. Maybe you forget to scrub your contacts, or clean the cobwebs on your workflows. If you’re a busy marketer juggling multiple initiatives everyday, it’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day production and often you don’t realize how “dirty” your HubSpot account is getting.
And, after months of quickly adding and naming contacts, workflows, sequences, assets, and lists, your inbound marketing strategy can get (and stay) sick when you don’t take preventative and curative measures.
From reviewing your settings, to organizing, optimizing and tracking your output, a HubSpot audit should result in a list of ideas and action items that will help you more easily measure the ROI of your investment, and show your marketing efforts aren’t all for naught.
That’s because a cluttered HubSpot can leave you and your team guessing:
While HubSpot’s capabilities are endless, when things are broken, missing, or not performing as well as they should, it ultimately means that you’re not getting the most value out of your HubSpot investment. And, worse, a messy portal can actually cost your organization money.
The best way to ensure you’re maximizing your marketing dollars, your marketing strategy, and your HubSpot portal, is to perform routine HubSpot audits and check in on the overall health of your account.
Read on to learn more about what a HubSpot audit is, when you should perform one, and the specific steps you should include in your self-guided HubSpot audit to keep you efficient.
The primary goals of a HubSpot audit are to:
At the end of your HubSpot audit, you’ll have an actionable list for optimizing your HubSpot performance. Be warned, depending on how frequently you conduct HubSpot audits, your list of action items will range from simple quick-wins, like turning on HubSpot snippets, to more time-consuming tactics like cleaning up workflows, or reworking your content strategy.
There are lots of reasons to perform a HubSpot audit, apart from if you simply just haven’t done one in a while. For example:
Additionally, HubSpot is an innovation machine. The company frequently announces product improvements and new releases, which are always very exciting and help HubSpot remain the powerhouse tool it is. But, if you fall behind on the updates, you’re at risk of decreasing your leverage of the platform you’re paying for. To stay on top of the many factors that can contribute to a messy HubSpot portal, quarterly or bi-annual audits are recommended.
There are lots of ways to go about your HubSpot audit, and the tactics involved to optimize your portal will range from low lift items (like cleaning up HubSpot contacts) to more involved processes (like reorganizing workflows, or updating your entire content strategy.) Before diving in, consider the following steps:
Below, we’ll cover what a comprehensive audit looks like, so regardless of what your organization’s goals are or how big your organization is, you’ll know which areas to check, and how to deploy next-step actions.
Below is a process for a comprehensive HubSpot audit, bucketed into categories to help you cherry pick which items best serve your KPIs.
Download an interactive checklist with instructions for each item here.
In your setting tab in HubSpot, check the following options routinely to ensure your HubSpot is clean, and those who need access to HubSpot updates have it, and those who don’t are removed:
Additionally, if your organization works within the EU market, you have obligations for protecting and collecting personal data. If this is the case for you, it is wise to check in on your GDPR functionality within the HubSpot settings as well. Is it turned on?
MarketingOps in HubSpot is an essential component to ensure your marketing and sales teams are running efficiently, and your processes are working to support your marketing strategy. A few key areas that help improve your processes, and automation within HubSpot include:
HubSpot only charges users for the ‘marketing contacts’ within a system, meaning those who are opted-in for your marketing emails or ads (as opposed to unsubscribed contacts). But, just because you aren’t paying for each unsubscribed contact doesn’t mean there aren’t other worries to consider with a messy list.
For example, exceeding contact limits, or accidentally sending messaging to those who have opted out and decreasing your email sending reputation should be top concerns for your organization. For that reason, regularly looking at your contact and company lists will help keep everything continually organized.
After getting your list to a point where contacts are as tidy and as lean as possible, start adding the correct information to improve each contact’s value:
While you’re working through your lists, it’s also important to do a clean up of all lists you’ve aggregated (or inherited) over the years:
Do you have hundreds of workflows in your HubSpot account? If so, you’re not alone. But, without review of existing workflows, your contacts could be getting bombarded by emails that you didn’t even know existed (especially if you’re inheriting a HubSpot account.)
It’s important to understand when your leads, prospects, and customers are getting sent marketing and sales collateral so you don’t bombard them with too many messages, and so the materials that go out to them are all hyper-specific to their use cases.
Other items to consider as next steps:
Another area to check in on is the “conversations” tab in HubSpot, which is a hugely underleveraged tool in HubSpot, but incredibly powerful for 1 to many ABM marketing strategies.
To ensure you’re able to easily analyze your blog performance -- down to the individual page or post level -- make sure your content is tagged and organized in a way that enables you to find what you’re looking for quickly. For example:
Marketing is an iterative process, and not every tactic will remain a component of your marketing strategy forever. But, when starting and stopping new campaigns, the number of forms, CTAs, landing pages and emails that become unused can quickly clutter your system. A quick review of what’s in active in your HubSpot can help tidy up the CRM, and optimize the performance of your highest performing content:
As you sort through each section of your CRM, ask questions about your current capabilities: Can you tie your actions and results back to the company goals? Can the data you’re aggregating be used cross-functionally? Is your customer experience solid?
A Hubspot audit can help highlight where your reporting shortcomings are, and where you can improve to showcase your ROI more prominently:
It is not enough to audit HubSpot in a silo. Oftentimes, bad offline processes can also create a messy Hubspot Portal. And, no matter how many times you give your portal an audit, disorganized offline processes will continue to clutter your account time and time again.
For example, let’s say you attend a trade show, and after the event you do a mass import of all the contacts you met at the event. Without looking at contacts who may already live in your HubSpot, and without de-duplicated these contacts after the import, you’re contributing to a cluttered account without even realizing it.
When completing a comprehensive HubSpot audit, it’s vital to look holistically at your entire marketing strategy and processes, not just the tool, to find areas where disorganization may clutter your goals.
Once you’ve organized your account, and started analyzing the performance of assets and contacts that remain in your system, you can start to see the connection between your marketing efforts and KPIs more clearly. To continue painting this picture, take a deeper look at what’s converting, and what marketing gaps need to be filled.
Think back to your KPIs. What problem are you trying to solve with your marketing? For example, if your goal is to increase the number of conversion from your website each month, ask questions like:
As painful as the process may feel, it’s important to look at places where your marketing campaigns are falling short, so you can make improvements to fill the gaps. For example:
If you have a group of teammates solely dedicated to the HubSpot Audit, great!
Putting deadlines to each of your tasks, and holding members of your team accountable for getting everything done, should be no problem at all. If you want help frameworking the next steps, start by creating your Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant Timely (S.M.A.R.T.) goals.
For those who are tackling the majority of the audit alone, you’ll still want to start your process by setting SMART goals, but the timeline for you to implement your tasks may come with a longer timeline. To avoid burnout, or feeling too overwhelmed by the process, try to set 10 hours aside each month to work through all of the items.
See how MTR can assist throughout the audit process, as well as the strategic and tactical steps required to complete your audit’s action items.
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