How to Run a Simple Audit to Fix the Gaps in Your Marketing

Have you ever run a campaign that didn't hit its goal? Could you tell where it fell short -- and if not, did it frustrate you? Much too often, marketers know that part of their marketing isn't generating results ... they just don't which part.

So what should you do now?

By running a simple audit using your HubSpot analytics tools, you can identify the areas in your strategy that are performing strongly, as well as the areas that may need some development.

What is a simple marketing audit?

A simple marketing audit is a high-level review of your website traffic and conversion rates. The goal is to find the area(s) of your marketing that you could improve in order to generate more leads -- in other words, locate the marketing gaps.

In addition to identifying gaps in your strategy, running a simple audit can show you whether a recent campaign was successful or not. It can also help you answer your CEO's tough, intangible questions like, "How can we get more leads without spending more money?" 

How to Run a Simple Marketing Audit

1. Gather the Right Data

The first step is to collect your data. Lucky for you, all of the data you'll need to run this audit lives inside your HubSpot portal. Here are the specific tools you'll be using:

• Dashboard - This will give you a high level summary of the health of your marketing.
• Sources - Here you'll find a detailed breakdown of where your web traffic and leads are coming from .
  
• Landing Page Analytics - This will show you how your landing pages are converting visitors into leads.

2. Interpret the Data

The next step is to dig into your data to reveal the true health of your marketing machine. We'll start with your website traffic data.

Interpreting Your Website Traffic

Take a look at your visits so far this month. How do you feel about the number? Are you getting more traffic than you expected? Less? 

To audit your website traffic, you will need to dig in a little further and evaluate it over the long term. Is your current traffic consistent, or is there something that has caused it to recently increase or decline? To put your web traffic into perspective, you will need to take a close look at your Sources tool.

Now that you are in your Sources tool, here are some of the ways you can put your current web traffic into perspective:

• Look for traffic trends. By toggling the date range at the top of your Sources tool to display your traffic over the past year or two, you can compare your current traffic to previous months -- and even previous years -- to identify any trends.

• Dig in by source. Take a look at where the majority of your web traffic has come from historically. What trends do you see? Have some sources become stronger? Have some become weaker? The three sources you should look at most carefully are organic search (green), social media (turquoise) and referral (yellow), as they are the hardest to achieve yet the most directly-related to your top of the funnel marketing efforts. 

Dive in to your historical traffic data and see if you find anything worth noting. Was there a particular instance where traffic was high? Dig in and see what that caused that spike. Has traffic from a particular source been steadily decreasing? What did you do differently at that time? Maybe it's time to put more focus on the tools that affect that source. 

Interpret Your Lead Conversion Data

To interpret your lead conversion data, let's look at three key reports that will help you shed light on your lead conversion performance.

First, return to your HubSpot dashboard. This time, let's focus on that little number in the gray box -- your lead conversion rate. This is the percentage of your website visitors who have become leads in your HubSpot contact database.

To fully explore what this number means, let's head over to your Sources tool.

Like you did with your traffic data, set the date range of your sources data to see your traffic over a long time span. Then check the box at the top of your graph to show your visits-to-contacts rate. Now you'll see how well you've converted your traffic into business leads over time. Look for trends. Has your conversion rate steadily increased? Was there a particular week or month that conversion was particularly high? Looking for these types of anomalies can uncover ways to drive your conversion rate upward.

But the conversion rates you see here are simply the result of your many conversion efforts. What if you want to find what specifically drove conversions over a certain period? To do that, let's go to our final stop at your landing pages tool. 

From your landing pages tool, you can dive in and look at how each of your landing pages contributed to your overall conversion rate. Sort your landing pages by views, submission rate, new contacts rate, and much more to observe the impact of your different landing pages. Anything stand out? Is there a page that performs either impeccably well or lower than the others? Why do you think that is?

If you want to view all of your landing page data at once or calculate your average landing page conversion, you can hit the "Export" button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and download your data to Excel.

3. Identify Your Marketing Gaps

Now that you’ve interpreted your marketing data, it’s time to identify the gaps in your marketing strategy.

The first step is to determine whether you have a gap in your website traffic or in your lead conversions. To do this, you should ask yourself: Is my website already converting a healthy percentage of web traffic into leads?

Keep in mind that your estimate for a healthy conversion rate will depend greatly on your customer personas, your product/service, and your industry. But for a general benchmark, the average traffic-to-lead conversion rate among all HubSpot users is approximately 0.93%. That means that for every 100 people that visit a website, about one person converts into a lead.

So how does your conversion rate compare? Do you feel that you are converting a healthy percentage of your traffic? 

• If yes, you should work on increasing your website traffic so that you can grow your total leads number. 
• If no, you should work on improving your lead conversion rate to increase the number of leads that come from your current traffic.

Determining whether your conversion rates are healthy is critical -- the outcome indicates your gap! Now, deciding how to fix that gap is your next step.

4. Create a Plan to Improve Your Results

Now that you have gathered your data, interpreted it, and identified the gaps in your marketing strategy, it's time to take action. The first thing you will need to do is set a SMART goal to either increase your traffic or your conversion rate based on what you've identified as your marketing gap. As a refresher, here's what a SMART goal means:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

Here's a great example of a SMART goal: To increase Q3 website traffic by 20% in Q4. This goal is specific because it focuses on one area of marketing, measurable by using HubSpot, attainable through content optimization, relevant in its relation to your current gap, and timely by including a specific time frame for completion.

Review your marketing performance and set a goal that would be an improvement from your recent results. Perhaps relate it to an upcoming revenue target you need to reach. On the HubSpot marketing team, we try to walk the line between ambitious yet possible. Pick your goal, and perhaps even add it to your Goals tool on the HubSpot Dashboard so you can see what you need to achieve on a daily or weekly basis to make it happen. 

Now that you've picked your goal, here are a few suggestions for how to reach it. 

Tactics for Increasing Web Traffic

• Increase your blogging frequency. Use our free blog topic generator to get started.
• Increase your social media promotion. Here's an editorial calendar for planning your social posts.
• Start tracking and optimizing for relevant long-tailed keywords. Enjoy our free class on improving SEO with your Keywords tool. 

Tactics for Increasing Conversion Rates

• Add CTAs to your five most visited website pages. Here are 50 free CTA templates for you to use.
• Optimize your thank you pages for additional conversions. Learn how in this great blog post on using thank you pages.
• A/B test a few of your landing pages. Enjoy a helpful guide to A/B testing.

These are just a few examples of tactics you could use to fill the gaps in your marketing strategy. Whatever tactic you choose to employ, remember to keep monitoring the relevant data to stay on the pulse on how your efforts are working. 

Other Ways to Locate Your Gap and Fix It 

Crafting and executing a successful inbound strategy can be a lot of work. It requires a clear understanding of inbound marketing and a proficiency in your HubSpot inbound marketing tools.

Before you try and build a new inbound strategy, consider going through some training or consultation beforehand. As a HubSpot customer, you have access to a number of exclusive trainings, certifications, and other services. Take a look and see which one is best suited to help you hit your goals and conquer the world of inbound marketing.

What are some of the ways you've identified gaps in your marketing strategy? How have you fixed them?