Spring cleaning isn’t just for your home. Marketing efforts also need periodic polishing, and this is a good time to complete some of those cleanup tasks that might have been on the back burner.
While marketing spring cleaning may take a bit of effort, it shouldn’t have much impact on your marketing budget. The results can help your company, brand, and marketing programs shine a little brighter.
Website
As one of your most important marketing assets, your website always needs to look and perform its best. Here are some cleaning tips:
- Purge any pages that are no longer relevant, and update those that are out of date.
- Refresh pages that play a role in your SEO efforts by updating content on those pages and making sure you are using the right keywords. Don’t forget to update meta tags.
- Check that all internal and external links are working properly, including navigation elements and links in footers.
- Review any conversion forms you have to make sure you are collecting the appropriate information from prospects and that the forms are getting delivered to the right people in your company.
- Check all other contact information on the website for accuracy.
- Make sure news items such as press releases are still relevant.
- Replace any outdated logos and product imagery.
- Review downloadable content such as white papers, presentations, and data sheets to ensure you have the most recent versions.
- Play videos from beginning to end to check for any issues.
Marketing Content
- Audit your other marketing content, including whitepapers, technical content, and videos to make sure they are up-to-date and accurate.
- Eliminate old content, lacks current messaging, or is no longer useful.
- Take note of any holes you have in your content marketing portfolio. If you don’t have the resources to create new content now, you can
- still compile a wish-list of your content needs and estimate the time, effort, and cost to get the job done.
Social Media
- Over the past few years, you may have opened accounts on a variety of social media platforms as they were introduced or became popular. If you no longer use those channels or rarely post to them, consider closing the account. If you close any accounts, don’t forget to remove those icons from your website or other locations.
- You may also choose to keep a page but make a post informing readers that the page is no longer active. You can then redirect them to your website or a page where you are still active.
- For channels you continue to use, update your company profiles for accuracy and currency, including descriptions, products, logos, imagery, and contact information.
- Review what companies and individuals you are following on social media. Stop following those that are no longer relevant. Conduct some quick research to discover any social media accounts in your industry that you should be following but haven’t yet.
- Delete any inappropriate user or spam comments on any of your social media posts. In contrast, negative comments are not necessarily inappropriate—and can often be enlightening. It is better to keep constructive criticism or negative reviews on your page, as deleting them can backfire and cause the negative poster to leave more reviews.
Programs
- Check that you are tracking the relevant metrics and KPIs for your marketing programs.
- If you take advantage of marketing hubs or product discovery solutions such as those offered by GlobalSpec, make sure your profiles, product listings, and content are accurate and up to date.
- Do a quick refresh of stale programs. For example: Update the headline in an advertisement to focus on a different benefit. Swap in new imagery for old. Change typeface and colors. Change the offer. Advertise in a different e-newsletter. Reposition an ongoing webinar.
- Contact your media partners to set up reviews of your programs and to discover any new marketing possibilities you might have overlooked.