Get the Most Out of HubSpot: Your Guide to Conducting a Portal Audit

HubSpot is like the Swiss Army Knife of business platforms, it's got everything you need to take your marketing, sales, and customer service game to the next level. But with so many shiny tools at your fingertips, it's all too easy to get lost in the data maze and miss out on some of the awesome growth opportunities that HubSpot has to offer. 

That's why conducting an annual HubSpot portal audit is crucial - it's like a yearly check-up for your HubSpot account, to make sure you're taking full advantage of all its features and identifying areas for improvement.

Today, we're going to dive into what a HubSpot portal audit is, why it's just as important as brushing your teeth every morning, and how to do it right so you can ensure you are getting the most out of your HubSpot investment. Let's go under the hood and give your HubSpot account a much-needed tune-up!

What Does HubSpot Have to Offer?

Before we even think of conducting a portal audit, let's go back to basics to understand what HubSpot actually is and take a fly over view of everything that it has to offer.

HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing, sales, and customer service platform that offers businesses a single place to manage their online presence. It provides a range of tools and functionalities, including inbound marketing, sales enablement, and customer service, making it easier for businesses to attract, engage, and delight customers.

In addition to the core CRM platform, HubSpot is divided into five premium “hubs,” each of which offers a range of features and functionalities to help businesses with different aspects of their marketing strategy. Alongside these hubs, features like automation and analytics allow you to streamline your process and provide valuable insight into your data.

Before we conduct our first portal audit, let’s quickly brush up on these major components of HubSpot:

CRM

Customer Relationship Management is the backbone of HubSpot, and the CRM Hub provides businesses with a single place to store and manage all customer data. It allows businesses to see a full picture of their customer interactions and history, making it easier to manage relationships with customers and close more deals.

Marketing Hub:

Providing businesses with a range of inbound marketing tools, the Hubspot Marketing Hub is where you go when you need to reach and engage with your customer base with relevant and targeted content. This is where your marketing team will conduct email marketing, social media management, content creation, and lead generation.

Sales Hub:

The Sales Hub is where your sales teams will find a suite of sales enablement tools that make it easier to manage the sales process and close more deals. This includes features like lead management, deal tracking, and appointment scheduling.

CMS Hub:

HubSpot's Content Management System, or CMS HUB, is a powerful platform for creating, managing and delivering content. It provides content strategy tools for website creation, landing pages, and blog management and will turn your website into a lead generation machine through CTAs and forms that can pull customer information directly into the CRM.

Service Hub:

Hubspot provides businesses with a range of customer service tools that help them manage customer support and resolve issues quickly within their Service Hub. It will allow your customer success teams to tackle ticket management, send out customer feedback surveys and provide information to FAQs through knowledge base articles.

Operations Hub:

The Operations Hub in Hubspot provides businesses with tools and features that help streamline business operations and improve efficiency. You can do this with features including project management, reporting, and analytics.

Automation:

The Automation feature will save you time by allowing you to create workflows and automate repetitive tasks. This can be used for processes like lead nurturing, sales follow up, customer service and data management and will increase efficiency all while improving customer engagement.

Analytics:

Hubspot's Analytics tools provide businesses with real-time insights into the performance of their marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. Features like reporting, dashboards, and custom reporting allow you to make data-driven decisions and improve your results over time.

Why Should I be Conducting a HubSpot Portal Audit Annually?

Conducting a HubSpot portal audit annually is crucial because it helps you to ensure that you are making the most of the platform and identify areas for improvement. Skipping out on a yearly audit can lead to cluttered data, missed growth opportunities, and a lack of focus in your marketing strategy.

But that's not all! Regularly conducting an audit helps you to:

• Keep Your Data Clean and Organised: Annual audits will help you ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date, making it easier to access and utilise when you need it. Clean and organised data will also help you make more informed decisions, as you will have a clear understanding of your current status.
• Identify Opportunities for Growth: Conducting a HubSpot portal audit annually can help you identify areas where you can improve your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. By reviewing your current use of the platform and its features, you can identify areas where you can streamline processes and make changes that will drive growth and success.
• Ensure that You are Utilising all of the Features Available to You: With so many features and functionalities available in HubSpot, it's easy to miss out on potential opportunities for growth and success. A regular audit will help you ensure that you are utilising all of the features that are relevant to your business, and help you identify any areas where you can make improvements. This will help you maximize your investment in HubSpot and get the most out of the platform.

Okay, But How Do I Actually Conduct an Audit?

Here at Neighbourhood we conduct an absolute ton of portal audits! So, I'd say the easiest way to go about conducting an audit is to sign up for a free audit at the link below (wink wink, nudge nudge). We bring all the insight of working with HubSpot day-in-day-out for over eight years to provide you with a clear and streamlined process to better integrate your marketing, sales and customer service efforts.

But, shameless self promotion aside,  if you really want to do one yourself, we aren't going to stop you! Here’s a list of the nine things we look for when conducting an audit:

1. Contacts

The first step in conducting a portal audit is to go through your contact records and ensure that the required data is filled out, they are all assigned to an owner, and buyer personas are being used. A clean and organised contact database is critical to the success of your marketing and sales efforts. Take some time to review each of the necessary contact properties and make sure that all the information is complete and accurate.

2. Marketing

The next step is to look at your marketing function. Ensure that all ads and social media accounts are connected and that forms and campaigns are being utilised effectively. Check to see if you are getting the results you expect from your marketing efforts and if there are any areas that need improvement.

3. Email

In this function, you’ll want to look at all key email metrics like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates and bounce rates to determine whether your emails performing highly enough. You’ll also want to examine the contents of your emails, including the subject lines, content, unsubscribe links and business addresses to ensure they are optimised for the reader both in-browser and on mobile devices. This will give you a good idea of how your emails are being received by your audience and if there are any areas that need improvement.

4. Website

Check to see if your website is hosted on HubSpot and if the landing pages, chatbots and the range of content strategy tools are being used effectively. Your website is often the first interaction a potential customer has with your business, so it’s important that it makes a good impression and effectively communicates your message.

5. Blog

If you have a blog as part of your Hubspot portal, it's important to assess whether it's actually delivering results for your business. To do this, you'll want to take a close look at your content performance and see if it's meeting your expectations. If you aren't getting the results you've been hoping for, take the time to determine where there are areas that you need to improve.

6. Sales

For the sales function, you need to ensure that stages are set up logically and that the meetings, tasks, and document tools are being used effectively. A well-organised sales process will help your sales team close more deals and increase your revenue.

7. Service

It's important to make sure you're using all the tools in the Service Hub effectively. This includes things like tickets, feedback surveys, your knowledge base, and customer portals. By taking the time to assess the effectiveness of these tools, you can make changes to improve your customer service and build a more loyal customer base.

8. Automation

Examine your automation workflows to ensure that they have goals and that there are no errors or unused workflows. You’ll also want to check you have workflows set up for basic functions like lead nurturing and deal automation. A strong automation function will help you streamline your processes and improve efficiency.

9. Dashboards

Finally, check to see if dashboards and custom reports have been set up and if all reports are being used in a dashboard. Dashboards are a critical tool for monitoring and analysing your data, so it’s important that they are set up correctly and used effectively.

What now? How do I Put the Results into Practice?

So, you've conducted an audit of your portal and have a list of all the amazing opportunities for improvement. It's time to put those findings into action!

• Implement quick wins: After conducting the audit, you should have a list of areas where you can make immediate improvements that will make the biggest impacts in the shortest time period. Implementing these quick wins will help to increase your productivity and efficiency from day one.
• Clean up your data: Data is a crucial aspect of your HubSpot portal, and it is important to keep it organised and up-to-date. Cleaning up your data will help to ensure that you are getting the most accurate and relevant information for targeting leads, communicating with clients and making data-driven decisions.
• Provide Training and Development Opportunities: One of the key outcomes of a portal audit may be identifying areas where your team needs additional training or support to use the HubSpot platform more effectively. Providing access to training resources, online courses, or workshops can help your team improve their skills, increase tool usage and get more value from the platform.
• Support Adoption of New Features: A portal audit will often uncover new features or tools within the HubSpot platform that your team could benefit from using. Encouraging the adoption of these features and ensuring that your team has the necessary training and support to use them effectively can help to drive better results and increase your return on investment.
• Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Finally, conducting a portal audit and using its results to drive change within your organisation can help to build a culture of continuous improvement. This can help to ensure that your team is always learning, growing, and adapting to new technologies and best practices, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve and achieve your marketing goals.

By putting the results of your audit into practice, you can maximize the potential of your Hubspot portal and see a positive impact on your business outcomes.

Is this all sounding a bit hard? Well, How About Getting an Agency to Conduct a Portal Audit For You?

Getting an agency involved in your portal audit can bring a fresh perspective and some much-needed expertise to the table. By partnering with an agency (like, hmm, let me think... Neighbourhood maybe?), you can take advantage of their know-how and get an unbiased review of your portal's performance.

No more struggling through the process alone! Heres are some of the benefits of getting a free portal audit. 

• Saves time: This is the obvious one as the process of conducting a portal audit can be extremely time-consuming when you don't know what you're doing. An agency can take care of it faster, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business.
• Greater expertise and insights: An agency has more knowledge and experience in conducting portal audits, and can provide you with more comprehensive insights and recommendations.
• Impartial review: By having a third party conduct the audit, you can eliminate any potential bias and ensure that the results are accurate and impartial.
• Fresh perspective: An agency can bring a fresh perspective to the audit and identify areas for improvement that you may not have considered.
• More efficient use of HubSpot features: Agencies can help you identify any features you're not currently using and help you optimise your tool usage, which can improve your overall results.

Well, that's everything!

We know how to conduct a portal audit and put the results into action, so now it's time to wrap things up. Conducting a HubSpot portal audit is like giving your portal a good old-fashioned spa day. It's an opportunity for you to take a closer look at what's working and what's not, and figure out how you can give your portal the boost it needs to succeed.

Now, you have two options: you can either do the audit yourself or get us to do it for you. Either way, the important thing is to actually use the results of the audit to make changes and improvements. I mean, what's the point of all that hard work if you're not going to use the results, right? So go ahead, take the plunge, and give your portal the TLC it deserves. Your business will thank you!

If you are still looking for some help, then Neighbourhood's Free Hubspot Portal Audit is a must-have. We'll give your portal a good once-over and provide you with a report on its performance and where it could use some improvement. So why not take advantage of the free offer and make sure your portal is working its hardest for you?