Your HubSpot portal may be something that you use every single day, but if you aren't making the most of the tools and features that it has to offer, you're never going to get the results that you need from the platform. Here, we've covered 7 questions to ask yourself during an audit of your portal - check them below to see if you're set up for success!
Rule number one of inbound - get your personas right. Your buyer persona isn’t just an exploration of what your ‘ideal customer’ is; it’s also a concept that should inform every part of your marketing strategy. From your content, to your user journeys, and even to the way that you analyse your portal, you should always have your buyer persona in mind. Within your HubSpot portal, you have the ability to create and assign buyer personas to each of your contacts, meaning that you can effectively measure your results and adjust your persona or strategy dependent on the results.
One easy way to keep track of your data within the HubSpot portal is to use the campaigns tool. You’ve probably spotted it already, but if you aren’t using it correctly, you aren’t getting the most from your portal. The campaigns tool offers you the opportunity to group together blogs, landing pages, CTAs and forms to effectively check on how your entire campaign is doing, rather than just a single page. It’s invaluable when you are checking results, and gives real-time data that can inform future campaigns.
Social media isn’t going anywhere - that’s clear by now. That’s why the social tool within your HubSpot portal should be something that you consistently keep an eye on. Not only does it allow you to schedule posts in advance, so that you don’t have to remember every day, but it also has a feature to carry out social monitoring. This is when you keep track of your mentions, tags, and industry news, and it’s much easier to do when you have an all-in-one system to track it for you. Your HubSpot portal is great for this - if it’s set up correctly. You can add competitors within the social media tool, and it automatically refreshes to show you a feed of their posts, in addition to notifying you whenever you have new activity.
Automation isn’t just sending out follow up emails - it can help streamline and improve your marketing efforts, in addition to providing a great experience to your prospects and customers alike. The workflows tool, for this reason, is not a tool you should be underusing. Within your HubSpot portal, you can use workflows to create a full story for each of your site visitors, based on what they download, what pages they visit, and more. Using workflows, you can then build a timeline for them - sending relevant information at the right time, updating their contact record - the possibilities are endless.
Your HubSpot portal is only as good as the data it can provide. And if you’ve neglected to properly integrate Google Analytics and Search Console, then the data you get is going to be frustratingly little. Without the correct integrations, your portal won’t be able to show you time on page, bounce rate, or where you are sitting in the SERPs. This is important, so make sure you have this set up.
How many times have you opened your HubSpot portal and suddenly remembered that your contacts aren’t organised properly? Keeping track of which contact goes where, who has a phone number attached, and which company they work for can be tricky if you’re working with a contact list of over a thousand people - the task of organising it can seem like a massive job. But, if this information isn’t in there correctly, it can have a serious impact on your portal.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to fix it. You can use the workflows tool to automatically update contact information, as well as to automate your marketing processes. If you build lists of contacts that are missing information, you can create a workflow that automatically pulls the data using HubSpot’s own AI system. It takes minutes, and it makes it exceptionally easy to clean up your contact list, ensure that information is up to date, and identify contacts that you know very little about. It’s a fairly unknown, but pretty nifty trick to save you a lot of time and effort.
If you’re working within your HubSpot portal, you likely want to see some serious data. The system automatically shows you a sales and marketing dashboard, but many don’t use these to their full potential. You can add and remove the elements you want to track, down to a specific timescale, a persona, or just track how many leads have hit your website this month. Make it a priority to set up dashboards that are specifically tailored to your goals, and your job will be a million times easier - just log into your HubSpot portal, check the data in front of you, and you’ll know instantly whether or not you are on track.
When you’re using HubSpot, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of features that it has to offer. You may be using your portal every single day, but if you haven’t effectively set it up in a way that aligns with your business, your goals, and your marketing strategy, you simply aren’t going to see the results that you want. We recommend a regular portal audit, to make sure that everything is performing as it should be, and to make sure that each member of the team is well-versed in how to get the most from your HubSpot portal.