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Marketing & Sales Automation Uncategorized

5 Reasons to Conduct a HubSpot Audit

Beyond your top landing pages and the most recent emails you’ve sent, how much do you truly know about your HubSpot instance? You wouldn’t invest in an expensive, brand-new car and never take it in for routine maintenance. Give your HubSpot portal the same tune-up. Otherwise, minor oversights could snowball into bigger problems that will be much more difficult to resolve later. A regular comb-through of your contacts, reports, campaigns, and workflows will uncover opportunities to streamline your pipeline.

Here are 5 big reasons you should consider a checkup for your instance.

  1. Reporting Headaches

    Your CEO asking for revenue and influence reports shouldn’t set your heart racing. When fully integrated with the rest of your marketing and sales stack, HubSpot can surface your most successful lead sources and campaigns; which channels resonate with your target audience; and more. However, are you visualizing that data correctly through HubSpot dashboards, or do you see a jumble of numbers?

    Take a step back from the data to analyze it in a way that helps you optimize your marketing campaigns and tactics.

    Perhaps HubSpot isn’t giving you the kind of drill-down information you need to report accurately to the higher-ups. If HubSpot’s default Lead Source and Lead Source Drill-down properties aren’t capturing data about how people are finding your company (and not just landing on your site), or aren’t giving you the level of granularity you need, a HubSpot audit will identify what you’re currently tracking. Uncovering any gaps is a great first step to building out the full-funnel reporting of your dreams.

  2. Database Chaos

    If you’ve ever combed through your opp reports looking for influence data and found yourself thinking “Who’s lead is this anyway?”, or looked at the performance of an email and been shocked at the bounce rate, then it might be time for a database clean up. Whether you’re approaching your HubSpot contact limit or not, clearing out junk emails will vastly improve your deliverability scores.

    A thorough audit of your contact data won’t just be about cleaning out unengaged or ‘bad’ contacts. It’s also worth spending time ensuring opportunities are attached to contacts and data entry is standardized.

    For example—do you have contacts with state values that are both two letter codes and full names? That could be interfering with crucial lists and programs without your team realizing. An audit will uncover these discrepancies that could balloon into bigger problems down the line.

  3. Troublesome Templates

    Over time, templates get duplicated, their core CSS gets edited, and they may lose key functionality or branding information. One wrong text alignment can break a whole template or make it unreadable on mobile. Running through your templates, deleting unnecessary duplicates, and working on your active ones is crucial to ensuring a consistent brand image.

    A template audit will also allow you to check that you have a generic email ready for each email type that you need—newsletter, announcement, sales outreach, etc.—and that those templates are easy to edit and update according to your needs.

  4. Sync Errors

    If you’re using an external CRM that integrates into HubSpot (like Salesforce) when was the last time you checked the sync settings between those systems?

    Finding your sync errors in HubSpot isn’t the most intuitive process, and many people don’t realize that data is not being passed as they expected. Maybe you haven’t mapped custom fields properly between HubSpot and your CRM, or a duplicate rule is preventing leads from being synced with new information.

    Without checking for sync errors and issues as you diversify your fields, campaigns and software, you could be missing crucial data on either side without noticing. Your HubSpot audit will reveal whether everything is connected smoothly, or you have some realignment to do.

  5. New Updates

    As part of a growing (and likely bootstrapped) team, it can be hard to keep up with all of the feature enhancements and new product announcements that come with a marketing automation platform like HubSpot. When you’re occupied with the day-to-day tasks of demand generation, reporting, and simply making sure your funnel is full, it can be hard to think of everything else. New product releases and software update announcements can go unnoticed and remain unincorporated into your strategy because there simply isn’t the time to learn about them thoroughly.

    For example, HubSpot just released a major overhaul of its Lead Scoring functionality, but with product changes comes… you guessed it, process changes. Scoring for multiple products, personas, or lifecycle stages is a functionality that HubSpot users have long dreamed up, but that also means more needed brainpower (and time) to dig into how using these new scoring properties can help companies better market, qualify, and sell to their target audiences.

    There’s no time like the present to get up-to-date on what’s new in HubSpot and incorporate the latest features into your marketing strategy.

What’s your HubSpot Score?

So, now you know how crucial a HubSpot audit is to the health of your platform and marketing strategy in general. But with so many tools and features to look at, where do you begin? To help you get started, we’ve put together this up-to-date HubSpot Scorecard quiz.

This comprehensive, but quick, assessment shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete and is meant to guide you through each of HubSpot’s core functions (contacts, automation, reporting, marketing, and sales). Along the way you might hear some terminology that isn’t familiar to you, or the questions may inspire you to revisit something crucial inside of your HubSpot portal, like lead scoring or your lead nurturing strategy. Not only will you be able to see where your HubSpot use stands out, you may also identify some opportunities for improvement.

Fill Out Our Marketing Automation HubSpot Scorecard

Armed with more info about what’s working well (and maybe not so well) in HubSpot, you’ll have a clear understanding of what to focus on inside of this technology platform.

SmartAcre® can help

And if you’re short on time or resources, the experts at SmartAcre are happy to help. Get in touch with our team of MarTech experts and we will schedule a time to connect.