With tax season just wrapping up, the word "audit" might make you break out into hives (ha - sorry for the pun). But audits can be a good thing - especially when it comes to your most important business tools.
If you're a current HubSpot user, you've probably heard that you should be doing an audit. But how important is it really? And how often should you do one?
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Before we dig in, let's go over a couple definitions and explanations.
First - what is an audit? For the purposes of this blog, a HubSpot audit is an in-depth analysis of your portal, Hubs and users. That means everything that exists in your portals - content, lists, emails, workflows, sequences, pages, etc. Yes, it's a lot!
Second: this blog isn't going to cover the "how to" of an audit. You can find plenty of tutorials from HubSpot on how to complete a proper audit. Instead, let's focus on the why of auditing. After all - audits aren't quick processes (ours typically take about 40-80 hours).
The Importance of Auditing Your HubSpot Portal
No matter what Hubs you have and at what level, one thing is true: your HubSpot portal is a living ecosystem. Users and automation constantly add, update and remove CRM data on a daily basis. All that activity makes it easy for your portal to spiral out of control.
The goal of an audit is simple: to clean data and identify inefficiencies/areas for improvement.
Clean up Junk & Make it Easier to Use
Removing obsolete or unused data will make it easier for your HubSpot users to find exactly what they need. This is particularly true for contact properties, which get messy quickly - it's extremely common to have duplicate properties that all mean the same thing, just with slight title variations (ex. "Address" vs "Location").
Likewise, files and assets themselves can expire and clog up your system. If you have a bunch of old emails that you no longer need to track floating around in your email section, that adds a few more minutes of time your team needs to spend scrolling and searching to find what they're looking for. An audit will identify outdated assets that are no longer necessary.
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Improve Data Integrity
An audit also identifies inaccuracies and inconsistencies in your data. Once you know what they are and where they exist, you can come up with plans to fix them. For example, an audit might reveal that your sales team is manually uploading new lists each month, instead of automating imports - something you can fix and streamline to save time and ensure good data health.
When to Audit Your HubSpot Portal
Now that you know the importance an audit, how often do you really need to do one? With the amount of data you have to sift through, undertaking an audit is a serious time commitment. Below are the intervals we recommend conducting an audit.
Regular Yearly Audit
Pick a time each year - ideally when business is slow - to conduct an audit. Regular audits help you stay ahead of potential issues and optimize your HubSpot portal for success. Yearly is typically a good cadence for most businesses, but if you are parsing a lot of data and using multiple Hubs (Marketing, Sales, Service) you may want to consider quarterly instead. We don't typically recommend monthly or weekly, as it's too short a time period to identify what data and content is "outdated."
Before a Big Change
Conduct an audit before launching a major marketing campaign, introducing a new service, redesigning your website or making any other big moves that will impact your business. Doing an audit before the big change helps wrangle any messes that might interfere with the success of your new launch.
Before Adding New HubSpot Services
If you're upgrading an existing Hub or adding a new Hub to your HubSpot portal, it's a perfect time to conduct an audit. Because all Hubs speak to each other, junk data or inefficiencies from one Hub will bleed into the others.
Recommending audits is easy: actually doing them is the difficult part. However, conducting an audit is well worth the time and effort involved. If you simply don't have time to conduct one yourself, partnering with an agency is an excellent way to offload the work and ensure your audit is done right.
Audit Smarter with a HubSpot Agency
Auditing your database can easily take up 40 hours or more of work. Why spend all that time yourself and pull your team away from more important work when you can partner with an experienced agency that will do it for you?
BizzyWeb is a HubSpot Platinum Partner: we offer full-service HubSpot onboarding, enablement and strategy for all hubs. Our team has over 196 certifications in HubSpot (and constantly growing). No matter what your HubSpot needs are, our team is ready to handle them.
Plus, we are the only agency in Minnesota with a Platform Enablement Accreditation from HubSpot - sounds fancy, but it means we're top-notch in making HubSpot work within your business.
BizzyWeb is a Minneapolis-based digital marketing and web design agency that helps companies get the high-quality leads they need to grow and thrive. Our tactics include inbound marketing, SEO, advertising, web design, content creation and sales automation. We are an accredited HubSpot Platinum Partner and we offer full-service HubSpot onboarding, enablement and strategy for new and current users.
