A thorough HubSpot audit is crucial for ensuring your platform operates at peak efficiency. By taking the time to audit your HubSpot account, you can uncover areas for improvement and fine-tune your marketing efforts to align with your business goals. This process helps optimize your workflows, data management, content strategy, and automation, ensuring that every aspect of your HubSpot instance is performing at its best. With a structured audit plan, you can enhance your marketing strategies, boost engagement, and achieve better results.
Here are seven essential steps to guide you through a successful HubSpot audit and optimization.
1. Review Your Current Setup
Begin by thoroughly reviewing your HubSpot setup, documenting both your system configuration and your current business processes. This helps identify gaps between where you are and where you need to be.
- Account Settings: Ensure details like company name, address, time zone, and fiscal year are accurate.
- User Permissions: Check the number of admin users and restrict access to only those who need it.
- Integrations: Verify that all integrations are active and functioning properly, especially if you’re synced with a large database or CRM. Address any sync errors promptly.
2. Analyze Your Data Quality
Ultimately, data quality is the backbone of effective marketing. You should start by thoroughly reviewing your contacts, companies, and deals to identify duplicates, incomplete records, and outdated information. Clean data ensures more accurate reporting and better decision-making. In addition, check your custom properties as well. Open text fields might be useful for notes but are less effective for reporting and automation. Where possible, replace text fields with dropdown properties to maintain consistent and clean data. Consider making key properties required when creating records or moving through deal stages to avoid incomplete data.
As you review your data, also think ahead to the KPIs and data points you’ll want to report on later. If necessary, create additional custom properties now to ensure you have the right data to support your future reporting needs. You can utilize HubSpot’s tools for deduplication and data enrichment to automate part of this process, keeping your database reliable. Clean, structured data enhances segmentation, personalization, and overall marketing effectiveness.
3. Evaluate Your Workflows
To optimize your HubSpot workflows, start by examining the entry criteria, goals, and overall effectiveness of each one. Ensure that your workflows are aligned with your current marketing objectives, and identify any that are underperforming or no longer relevant. Consider creating suppression lists to prevent certain contacts from enrolling in specific workflows. For example, in lead nurture campaigns, make sure only the appropriate contacts—such as leads, not current customers—are included in the journey.
Next, use the “Needs Review” tab on the workflows home page to check for any workflows with errors, such as contacts with invalid email addresses. Regularly reviewing and resolving these issues will help maintain the integrity and functionality of your automation processes. Additionally, periodically test your workflows to ensure they’re functioning as intended. Adjust triggers, actions, and conditions as needed to keep everything running smoothly and efficiently, ultimately saving time and increasing productivity.
4. Assess Your Content Strategy
Begin by thoroughly reviewing the content in your HubSpot account, including blogs, landing pages, and emails. As you evaluate each piece, focus on performance metrics to identify any content gaps that may exist. Optimizing your content strategy through this HubSpot audit is crucial for improving both engagement and lead generation.
Make sure your content aligns with your current marketing goals and resonates with your audience’s needs. Regular updates and repurposing of existing content can keep your strategy fresh and relevant. By analyzing which types of content perform best, you can uncover opportunities to create more high-impact materials. Utilize HubSpot’s analytics tools to track performance metrics, and use these data-driven insights to continually refine and adjust your content strategy for optimal results.
5. Check Your Reporting and Analytics
Effective reporting is crucial for measuring success and making informed decisions. Start by reviewing your dashboards and reports to ensure they accurately reflect your key performance indicators (KPIs) and overall performance metrics. As you assess your reporting setup, revisit the properties you established in Step 2 to ensure your system is equipped with the necessary data points for accurate reporting.
Consider what data you may want to exclude from reports, such as information related to vendors or competitors, to keep your analysis focused and relevant. Additionally, think about building custom dashboards tailored to different user levels within your organization—such as Executive, Manager, and Sales Rep dashboards—so each group has access to the most pertinent information.
Regularly review and update your reporting tools to align with any changes in your marketing strategy and business goals. Optimizing your reporting setup will not only provide better insights into your marketing efforts but also clearly demonstrate the impact of your strategies to stakeholders.
6. Optimize Your Email Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools in HubSpot, and optimizing your campaigns can significantly boost engagement and conversions. Start by analyzing your email performance, focusing on key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. Identify areas for improvement, whether it’s refining subject lines, enhancing email content, or better segmenting your audience.
To elevate your email strategy, consider implementing A/B testing. Experiment with different elements such as subject lines, call-to-action buttons, and email designs to see what resonates most with your audience. This data-driven approach allows you to continually refine your campaigns for better results.
Segmentation is also crucial—tailor your messages based on behavior, demographics, and other relevant factors to ensure your content is as targeted and relevant as possible. By continuously testing, personalizing, and optimizing your email campaigns, you can create more impactful communications that drive higher engagement and conversion rates.
7. Set Up Regular Audits
Regular audits are crucial for keeping your HubSpot account optimized and in sync with your evolving business needs. Just as your business requires ongoing maintenance to perform efficiently, so does your CRM and other tech platforms. By scheduling periodic reviews of your setup, data, workflows, content, and reporting, you can ensure that your HubSpot instance adapts as your business grows, catching issues early and aligning your platform with your strategic goals.
The flexibility of a SaaS-based platform like HubSpot enables you to continuously modify and refine your CRM to meet your needs as you scale, often without needing to add more employees. Establishing a routine audit process—complete with a checklist of tasks and assigned responsibilities—will help maintain your platform’s efficiency and effectiveness. The insights gained from these regular audits allow you to make data-driven decisions, optimize your HubSpot usage, and enhance your overall marketing strategy, ensuring sustained growth and success.
Conclusion
A successful HubSpot audit involves a comprehensive review of your account setup, data quality, workflows, content strategy, and reporting. By following these steps and leveraging the expertise of a certified HubSpot partner, you can optimize your HubSpot account for peak performance.
For expert assistance in optimizing your HubSpot account, consider partnering with TribalVision. Our team of certified HubSpot specialists can guide you through a thorough audit, helping you drive your marketing success and elevate your business. Regular audits and optimizations ensure that your HubSpot account remains efficient, effective, and aligned with your business goals, ultimately leading to improved marketing results and sustained growth
