When doing a HubSpot audit, start with a bird’s eye view by analyzing your Year-To-Date (YTD) data. The most significant indicator that something may be amiss with your lead funnel is a low visit-to-contact rate. If this number falls below 2%, that’s a red flag. A low visit-to-contact rate means your site may be getting a good volume of traffic, but your visitors are not taking next steps. Armed with this data, you can begin asking other questions such as:
- What is your year-over-year traffic growth?
- What is your year-over-year lead growth? How about marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs)?
- Which pages are leading to the most exits or bounces?
- Where do you have strong time-on-page engagement?
- On which pages do your visitors convert to known contacts (first attribution)?
Your home page is the first online impression visitors get of your entire company. So, it should speak to visitors in all stages of the buyers journey and funnel your visitors appropriately with relevant content and intuitive navigation. Use these questions to guide your assessment:
- Does your home page pass the blink test?
- Is there a clear value proposition?
- Does your site use imagery to reinforce your message?
- Where does traffic go from your homepage? Is that where you want visitors to go?
Meeting the needs of your buyer personas fuels your business. Without an understanding of who your buyers are, you won’t be able to target, or nurture, anyone appropriately.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is essential to organic traffic growth. Because search engines generate a significant amount of website traffic, you should focus on SEO throughout your HubSpot portal. Investigate whether you:
- Are using metadata and page titles that support your keyword strategy
- Should address technical components of your SEO strategy because they are impacting your rankings, such as page speed and mobile optimizations
- Are leveraging schema markup to make your search results more clear and engaging
Read More: Four Unique Sources for Keyword Inspiration and How to Implement Them
Blogging is one of the most valuable tools you can use to engage with prospects and customers. When auditing your blog, look for:
- Keyword-rich content aligned with your topic clusters
- Content that aligns with every stage of the buyers’ journey
- Both text and graphic call-to-actions (CTAs) that lead readers to next steps
You can measure elements such as organic traffic, time on page, click through rates, and more to help better understand your target buyer.
Read More: Six Things Your Business Should do Before Starting a Blog
Blogging may seem like the obvious way to create content, but content offers can extend your blogging efforts. Content offers include eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, videos, demos, infographics and any other educational resources used to reach your buyer personas, likely through landing page conversions. Determine the success of your content offers by understanding:
- Landing page views
- Landing page conversions
- Time spent on offer page (if viewed as a webpage)
- Social shares
- How many contacts become SQLs or customers after engaging with a content offer
- Engagement with ungated offers (number of views, time spent viewing)
Landing pages provide your marketing team with a direct way to collect explicit data from prospects, like names and emails, making them a crucial part of your inbound HubSpot funnel. The content gated behind a landing page should offer value to a potential customer related to solving a specific pain point. In your audit, look for:
- Relevant calls-to-action (CTAs)
- Forms aligned with the buyer’s journey
- Clear business benefits copy that motivates your visitor to take action
- A clean design that reduces friction in the user experience
- Follow-up email nurtures triggered by a form fill on a landing page
A thank you page is a page you redirect your visitors to after they’ve opted in for an incentive on your website. Generally, it’s used to provide visitors with a link to the content they opted in to, and to thank them for doing so. Thank you pages can encourage further engagement, mainly because you’re connecting with someone who’s already shown a clear interest in your services. Do your thank you pages highlight other offers that can move contacts through the buyers’ journey, such as:
- Links to your most popular content?
- A secondary content offer to move the contact through the buyer’s journey?
- Testimonials?
- A survey to gather more feedback?
- A demo or free trial?
- Buttons for social sharing?
- Links to follow you on social media?
For many marketers, forms are essential, but the strategy behind them isn’t always completely defined. Do your forms utilize progressive profiling, a HubSpot feature that replaces questions that a lead has already been asked to reduce redundancy and to increase the number of contact properties collected? Forms should also reflect the different stages of the buyers’ journey. The questions asked in forms need to correspond to what you’re trying to achieve in that stage. As such, you should ask more questions to people filling out a decision-stage form compared to someone filling out an awareness-stage form.
- Are the length of your forms equivalent to the value your visitors are getting out of an offer?
- Do you use progressive profiling to gather the right data about your leads?
- Have you standardized your forms to ensure you can measure results and optimize them over time?
Well-placed CTAs throughout your email campaigns and website, including your blog content, motivate your visitors to take the specific action you want. While a standard HubSpot CTA is better than none, you’ll receive a higher conversion rate from customized, graphical CTAs with both images and text. These include buttons, slide CTAs, and text CTAs. Furthermore, use smart CTAs, which are a customized button shown to your different visitors based on rules you set related to the data stored on their HubSpot contact record.
- Do you use a variety of CTAs, aligned with stages of the buyers’ journey?
- Do your naming conventions allow you to sort and analyze them accordingly?
- Are you actively A/B testing CTA designs, copy, or placement?
- What is the conversion rate of each CTA?
Workflows essentially transfer information based on a set of rules. HubSpot workflows, however, are in no way limited to just email automation. In addition to triggering emails, workflows can trigger nurture campaigns, change contact profile properties, score leads, send internal notifications, and sync to a CRM system based on when a lead has met a set of conditions. Workflows are also helpful in identifying when leads are sent to sales.
- Are you using workflows in these ways?
- Do you have clear naming conventions in place to sort and analyze these different types of workflows?
Social media is another component of a good HubSpot inbound marketing strategy. It’s a great place to engage, interact, and learn more about your audience. Social media builds trust and consistency with your audience through promotion and engagement. HubSpot’s social media analytics tools can also provide content-related insights to target your audience better.
- How do the results of your social strategy stack up?
- Do you have more or less followers or fans than your competition?
- How is your social engagement as measured by number of likes, shares, and comments?
- Which platforms drive qualified leads?
- Are you posting with enough frequency?
- Do you interact with your users and display authenticity?
Email is still the preferred method of communication for marketers. Still, many companies don’t have a clear email strategy or email practices. What does that mean? Sporadic email sends, long subject lines, outdated designs, and a lack of segmentation are common pitfalls. What makes an email campaign successful? In your audit, evaluate:
- Your email designs
- Subject lines and open rates
- Click rates, to get insight into relevancy
Lead scoring, both traditional and predictive, is the process of qualifying your company’s leads, specifically as SQLs or MQLs, based on who they are and the actions they take when interacting with your company’s website, marketing campaigns, and other content. The process of lead scoring includes creating a system through which you assign point values to crucial pieces of criteria, properties, and behavioral actions that contacts within your CRM take. You can assign positive and negative points to specific activities.
- Is your company ready for lead scoring? It’s best to implement when you have more leads than your sales team can handle.
- Is your criteria accurate and have you validated it?
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your company’s ideal customer based on market research and data that already exists about your current customers. While most companies have identified their ideal buyer personas, not many companies utilize them properly.
Before beginning a buyer persona project, identify your buyer profile. A buyer profile defines which companies are a good fit for your product or service. Some characteristics you might use in your buyer profile are company size, annual revenue, and industry vertical. Your ideal buyer profile may be a manufacturing company with annual revenues of $20 million with 15 or more employees.
Your personas serve to define the buying patterns of individuals within your buyer profile. For example, you may want to target specific individuals in certain departments or with key responsibilities. Aim for no more than three buyer personas. You may feel there are more, but often those are likely key stakeholders or influencers, rather than actual buyers.
When creating buyer personas, consider factors such as behavioral patterns, demographics, motivations, and goals. To successfully create a buyer persona, you need to interview people within your company, likely sales representatives or account managers, as well as ideal customers you're working with. Questions you should ask to guide the conversation include:
- Describe your education
- What is your job title, function, and key responsibilities?
- Who is your supervisor?
- How do you measure success?
- What does your typical day look like at work?
- What skills help your job performance?
- What are your challenges and concerns in your current role?
- How do you continue learning about your job or industry?
- Which social media platforms do you use?
- Which industry associations are you involved with?
Once you have buyer personas in place in HubSpot, you can determine how to segment your data, where to focus marketing resources, how to prioritize product/service development, and more.
Read More: Four Ways HubSpot Buyer Personas Can Help You Get Results Faster
Step 5
Determine KPIs and Goals
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and the goals related to them are one of the most important elements of an effective HubSpot lead funnel. Your marketing and sales departments likely have their own goals, so KPIs allow your company to manage progress across all departments.
High-level KPIs can measure the overall performance of a company, while low-level KPIs may focus on measuring a campaign’s impact or other activities in individual departments.
Read More: Reverse Funnel Calculator: Are You Meeting Your Revenue Goals?
Measuring your KPIs will help you progress toward your business goals—whether it’s to increase revenue, double leads, or triple website visitors. Use the information gathered in your reporting audit (see step one) to inform these target metrics. KPIs provide the visibility you need to ensure that you're making progress toward your overarching goals. Here are some examples of common KPIs to track:
Read More: What KPIs Should You Measure in Your Content Strategy?
Step 7
Complete a CRO Audit
Your team can get more leads from your existing traffic through an important concept known as conversion rate optimization(CRO). By designing and modifying certain parts of your webpages, you can increase the chances site visitors will convert into a lead or customer before they leave.
You can get the data you need to fuel CRO efforts by installing various marketing tools like Hotjar, as well as using available tools in HubSpot, to see how your visitors interact with your website. Then, you can adjust elements of the user’s experience accordingly. Most CRO Audits focus on high-value landing page, and other examples include:
Homepage
Your homepage is an ideal candidate for CRO, as it's the first impression of your company, and usually gets the most traffic. CRO here can include changing the placement of links, updating CTAs, adding next steps along the buyers’ journey, and changing copy on content blocks.
Blogs
Because your blog houses educational content about your services, CRO can be highly effective here as well. This can include adding CTAs throughout an article, linking back to other helpful blogs, or inviting readers to learn more about a topic by submitting their email address in exchange for an eBook or whitepaper.
CRO is an often overlooked step in creating a solid HubSpot lead funnel. Don’t forget what you learned in middle school science class: only test one variable at a time and wait for statistical significance to draw conclusions and make updates.
Step 8
Build Reports
To determine whether or not your HubSpot lead funnel was successful or if you need to alter or revisit certain aspects, you must become familiar with HubSpot reporting.
Standard Reporting
Every HubSpot account comes with default reports for your marketing and sales dashboards. They include:
- Marketing performance
- Landing page performance
- Top landing pages
- Blogging performance
- Top blog posts
- Email performance
- Top emails
- Contact performance
- Top personas
- Contacts created by day
- Contacts overview
- New contacts by source
- Most recently created contacts
- Returning contacts
Custom Reporting
There are four types of custom reports you can use to get the data you need. These reports are valuable to track more specific KPIs, like marketing-attributed revenue. You can segment your reports in the following ways:
- Single data set. This report lets you report on one dataset, including anything from your contacts, companies, deals, tickets, activities to products.
- Across data set. This report allows you to report on the same data as above but across two different datasets, which allows you to see the relationship between properties. Therefore, you can analyze the connection between a deal and a contact. If you’re beginning to expand into a particular region of the country, you can create a report that shows deals linked to contacts from that area.
- Funnels or pipelines. These reports show progress relating to your contacts, deals, and events. With this, you can see how a deal is moving through your lead funnel and where you may need to optimize your marketing campaigns.
- Attribution. To see how your visitors are interacting with your website, you can create a custom attribution report. These reports show a contact’s engagement with your site, how they got there, and what led them to contact you. If you want to see how many of your visitors became contacts through a specific source, like Twitter, for instance, custom attribution reports will show this.
Read More: Getting Multi-Attribution Reporting with HubSpot Marketing Automation