If you have ever run a marketing campaign, you understand how important it is to measure the success (or failure) of your marketing strategy through an audit of your inbound marketing strategy. Understanding where your campaign is falling short, which areas are performing strongly, and which areas can improve or may need further development is imperative to the future success of your campaign. The easiest way to tackle this is to perform a simple marketing audit. This may feel overwhelming or daunting at first, but don’t fret. Whether this is your first time performing an audit or you’ve had a little bit of experience, we have your back! Below, you will find a simple step by step guide to walk you through how to perform an audit of your marketing strategy as well as how to move forward after your audits completion! Let’s get started.

What is a marketing audit?

First things first. What is a marketing audit? A marketing audit is a high-level review of your website traffic and conversion rates. As previously mentioned, the goal of the marketing audit is to find areas of your marketing campaign that are performing well as well as areas that may need improvement in order to generate more leads.

How do I gather data and interpret it?

Now that you have a firm understanding of what a marketing audit is and why it is important, let’s discuss the first step in a marketing audit → collecting data. Everything that you will need lives right inside your HubSpot portal, so don’t worry about having to collect data from multiple sources. The tools that you will need to take a look at specifically are the analytics on the: dashboard, sources, and the landing pages. Each of these tools will provide a high-level overview of the health of your marketing efforts as well as a breakdown of your web traffic, leads, and how your leads may or may not be converting. Once you have collected all of the necessary data, the next step is to take an analytic view of the data and interpret it. Let’s dig in. First, take a look at your website traffic. Start asking yourself questions like the following:

• How many visitors have you had the month to date?
• Is this higher, lower, or the same as past months?
• Did you expect more traffic or less?
• Has there been an event or something that has affected website traffic?

Take a closer look at the ‘sources’ tool to identify traffic trends. (Compare month-over-month and year-over-year to determine any possible trends in the website traffic). You should also look at where your traffic is coming from by the traffic source. Understanding where your traffic is coming from by source and identifying potential trends is imperative to determine whether your marketing efforts are successful and where there are still areas with room for improvement.

What about my lead conversion data?

Next, you will need to analyze the performance of your lead conversions. Take a look at your lead conversion rate. (You can find this on your HubSpot dashboard.)  This will help you determine the percentage of your website visitors who have become leads in your HubSpot contact database. Start by setting a date range. Be sure to check the box that allows you to see your visits-to-contacts rate. Similarly to how you interpreted your traffic data in step one, look for trends and for anomalies:

• Has your conversion rate remained consistent?
• Has it steadily decreased/increased?
• Is there a particular day, week, month that conversions were higher than the rest?

Analyzing your data with the above questions in mind will help you uncover anomalies that can uncover ways to drive your conversion rate upward. Make sure you spend considerable time focusing on this part of the audit (you’ll thank yourself later, we promise!). Now, let’s take a look at your landing page tool to identify more specifically what is driving your conversions. Go to your landing page tool (if you haven’t already) and look at how each of your landing pages contributed to your overall conversion rate. We encourage you to sort by each of the tool options like submission rate and new contact rate. At this point in your audit efforts, you should be able to immediately determine if something is unusual or stands out and then identify what pages are performing well and make a note of the landing pages that are performing lower than the others.

Where are the gaps in my marketing strategy?

You’ve analyzed your website traffic and your lead conversion data, now let’s figure out where the gaps are! Based on your data, determine whether you have a gap in your lead conversion or your website traffic. You can determine this by confirming whether or not your website is converting a healthy percentage of web traffic to leads. You may be asking yourself, “what does ‘healthy’ mean?”. The term ‘healthy’ will depend on your specific circumstances (i.e. your buyer’s personas, your industry, and your product/service). For perspective, a general benchmark is .93%. Using this benchmark, compare how your conversion rate is performing. If you determine that your lead conversion rate is just fine, then you will need to work on increasing your website traffic. If you determine that your lead conversion rate isn’t optimal, place your focus on improving it. (A healthy conversion rate is critical to the success of an inbound marketing strategy.) 

The marketing audit is complete, but now what?

Now is the fun part! It is time to take ACTION utilizing all of the information that you have obtained by gathering your data, analyzing it, and identifying the gaps in your marketing efforts. By identifying the gaps in your marketing strategy, you have also identified whether you will need to increase your web traffic or increase your conversion rate. Get with your team and create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely) goals to improve the area that needs the most improvement in your marketing strategy. Try to tie your goal into an upcoming revenue goal that you need to reach. Feel free to jump back into HubSpot Academy if you need a quick refresher on how to set SMART goals, this will help you craft a more successful Inbound strategy in the future. Tip: Add your SMART goal to the ‘Goals’ tool on your HubSpot dashboard to remind yourself every day what your goal is and how you and your team plan to achieve it. For more great help in setting up your marketing strategy, download our Marketing Checklist here! It has a quick guide to all the basic pieces you should have for a successful inbound marketing strategy.