With spring, or any new season, there is often a need for identifying areas to clean and organize. Tidying up around the house and physical office space is essential and likely needed, but while you’re doing that, consider looking at your digital marketing efforts as well.
You may feel tempted to keep things as they are — after all, it’s easiest to “set it and forget it.”
However, this mentality can limit you and your company’s potential.
Regardless of the digital marketing efforts or marketing tactics you are utilizing and benefiting from, the reality is that they change all the time — not to mention your priorities have likely changed as well. So, you must remain agile and adjust your digital marketing strategies to keep up with new technologies.
Here, we’re offering some key tips for spring (or any season!) cleaning your digital marketing efforts.
Reevaluate Your Goals
Because the change in seasons is a fresh start, it’s an ideal opportunity to reflect on goal progress.
The first step is to understand and prioritize SMART goals. You’ve likely heard of SMART goals but it’s an acronym for goals that have five aspects to them. We’ll dive into these quickly before identifying other areas of your digital marketing goals to look at.
- Specific
By having specificity in your digital marketing goals, that means you are — seemingly — focused on the tasks at hand that ladder up to your goals. Incorporating specific goals is vital for the long-term planning of how all of your digital marketing channels and their own specific KPIs interact and become successful. - Measurable
With some metric being able to be attached to measurable SMART goals, this means that there is something by which you can gauge the effectiveness of the goals. - Achievable
Think about it: We’ve all set some goals up in our heads that are usually pretty, pretty lofty. And in that case, there’s a place when lofty goals become unachievable due to the timeframe, the bandwidth, or the breadth. That’s why have difficult, albeit achievable, goals is ideal. - Relevant
Some goals can be tenuously linked to a certain objective or broadened marketing campaign. This can be helpful but what’s even more effective is having relevant goals that you know can ladder up and eventually become interconnected with the overall focus of what is being worked on. - Timely or Time-Bound
If a goal has no timeframe or due date, then it can be easy to just pass it off. That’s why it is crucial to incorporate time-bound goals, so as to be able to evaluate yourself and how the goals are progressing at certain points.
Now that the first step of creating SMART goals is out of the way, what else is there? think about when you completely refresh your home: you typically go room by room, right? Follow this same process as you optimize your digital marketing plan and the endeavors and tactics that come with it. If you need, jot down a list of all your digital marketing efforts so you don’t forget any crucial approaches or platforms.
Here are some of the checklist items to work on:
Take inventory of all the social media platforms — including but not limited to LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram (Meta!), X (or, if you prefer it, Twitter), Pinterest, and TikTok — you currently utilize. Then, examine each and determine what seems to be effective and what seems to be unproductive.
For example, upon your review, you may find little to no engagement, so you commit to increased activity on your social media accounts. If you’re currently posting once a month, create a goal to post weekly. Or, if you’re posting weekly, challenge yourself to post daily.
Perhaps after evaluating your approaches for each platform, you’d like to try promoting your business with new services. In fact, maybe one of your goals is utilizing Amazon.
By taking the necessary steps to begin advertising on the site, you’re certain to reap the benefits from promoting your offerings within the space.
You may even want to start, or strengthen, your email marketing strategies. Strategize how you can launch campaigns so you begin benefitting as soon as possible.
Now, if these initiatives seem daunting, consider enlisting support from an agency. The longer you wait to roll out the efforts, the more you may miss out on critical opportunities for your business.
Assess the Breadth and Size of Your Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Once you identify and tweak your goals, think about how you’ll attain them.
In most cases, you won’t be able to complete a considerable initiative overnight. Businesses may even benefit from breaking larger strategies into smaller tasks.
For instance, if your goal is to rebrand, create separate tasks for:
- Brainstorming new color scheme
- Redesigning your company logo
- Assessing current and future offerings
Beyond your SMART goals that you set out, brainstorm how those will ladder up to achieve and surpass your organization’s overall business goals. Whether the business goals include introducing a new service like email marketing, search engine optimization and content marketing, Amazon advertising, or paid search and social verticals (like what we have here at Logical Media Group!), it is putting a percentage number on client and customer retention, or simply increasing business revenue, assessing goals and KPIs is important for the health of an organization.
Perform A Collective Cleanup
Step 1: Build Your Digital Marketing Budget
Now that you’ve gotten more specific about how you’ll tackle your goals, it’s time to take on the actual cleaning process.
Your first task is an obvious one: to optimize your digital marketing, you must start with your budget. After all, you may discover money hiding behind ineffective digital marketing techniques (or, might we be bold enough to say, digital marketing campaigns as a whole). Instead, you should prioritize allocating funds to better meet your new goals.
A prime example of this is pushing more money toward the digital channels that your target audiences actively use versus the channels you utilize “just because.” Likewise, you could consider setting aside more of your budget for marketing automation, which provides a more convenient way to reference ROI across all your different platforms.
Step 2: Shape The Organic Social Media Side
Following your budget audit, another tip for spring cleaning your digital marketing efforts is to tidy up across platforms.
Start with deleting old social media posts — just be careful not to delete too much. Your account should still convey that you’ve been a reputable expert in your industry, and this will mean showcasing your know-how and, if possible, a long history.
Next, examine the accounts you follow, including removing any fake or inactive followers. Also, if applicable, remember to update your accounts to reflect promotions for any upcoming holidays as well!
Step 3: Plan Your Paid Media Campaigns
Look at your paid media efforts as well. Whether you’re just starting a PPC campaign or you’re maintaining it, you’ll want to frequently check on its performance.
If necessary, clean up ad copy, ensuring you avoid some of the most common mistakes. You may also realize your campaign needs better target keywords. Be sure to conduct thorough PPC keyword research prior to committing to specific terms.
We’ll add that, if your business relies heavily on interactions during the summer months, the time to start building remarketing efforts is going to be around the start of every year. You’ll really want to reach your audiences who previously purchased around that time, and top of funnel campaigns can help you do that.
Furthermore, check on — and analyze — the conversion tracking for your current paid campaigns, including any paid search landing pages to ensure they’re accurate. Make sure that:
- All conversion action items are firing correctly
- There is attribution to each platform and the value is being recorded accurately
- You’ve set up Thank You pages
- You’ve properly connected your clients’ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to the platform, ensuring the data collection and attribution process is as seamless as possible
Finally, perform competitor and impression share analyses. Your digital marketing spring cleaning is ideal for acquiring more reliable information than, say, the past six months; previously, you probably prioritized a heavy spend during the holidays and then scaled back on spend earlier this year. These insights will only help you to make sound decisions for your paid campaigns moving forward — and who doesn’t want that?
Step 4: Watch Your Website, Including SEO, Content Marketing, and User Experience
Of course, you also must visit your website and review everything. Keep in mind that ecommerce sites may require different optimizations versus non-ecommerce, or B2B, sites.
Here are several considerations:
- Rework website navigation, which will provide search engines with ease of access to your pages, as well as alleviate user frustration
- Improve page load speed. If your pages load slowly, visitors will likely bounce.
- Optimize images. After adjusting your images, you will likely notice a difference in page speed
- Remove broken links and pages that don’t serve a purpose. By doing this, you are clarifying functioning and updated pages to crawlers. Plus, you will prevent user confusion that stems from navigating to 404s or irrelevant content
- Ensure all URLs are the HTTPS versions of the pages. It’s important to provide users with a secure experience, especially when they offer sensitive information
Additionally, inspect the actual copy on each page. Refresh duplicate or old content, and plan your upcoming blog posts. Strive for informative, unique, quality content that’s up to date and caters to your audience’s interests, taking advantage of relevant terms where they make sense.
Above all, focus on intent. People want accurate and thorough answers to their queries and more, so think about how you can provide as much helpful information as possible without prematurely sending users away from the site.
Lastly, improve user experience for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. Every session should be seamless for your users — from the second they land on your homepage to the moment they click to confirm their purchase. Looking for ways to help achieve a better user experience on your website? Conversion rate optimization, which includes heat mapping and A/B testing, is a great resource for understanding the user journey as well as any hang-ups that visitors may encounter.
Through CRO initiatives, you will likely gather enough information to update and optimize your live website, leading to more qualified website traffic, including consumers from all parts of the marketing funnel.
By making these changes, you’ll notice a huge difference in the time spent on your site. Plus, you’ll likely see more conversions, meaning more revenue and better relationships with your customers.
Get Curious And Check Out Other Stuff
Finally, when it comes to understanding how to “spring clean” your digital marketing strategies, do some research and gather inspiration! Revisit the effective campaigns you’ve seen from other companies, regardless of if they’re in your industry or not.
Better yet, it can be refreshing to find inspiration from organizations that have little to no connection to yours, as this allows for creativity in brainstorming future digital marketing campaigns that, once tweaked to your own audience, could acquire great data points.
Additionally, check on your fellow industry competitors and analyze what they’re doing. What does their website offer? How do their ads look? What about their social media pages? Are they utilizing different digital marketing tools versus what you are (for instance: if a post goes up on a social media platform, it often is signified in the time stamp of that post) and how, if possible through learned experience, are they using those tools to their advantage? If their approaches seem to be working, identify ways to utilize these to boost your own digital presence.
Closing Thoughts
When you’re cognizant of your digital marketing’s current performance — and you take action based on missed opportunities — you’re certain to see positive results, such as authority, brand awareness, new customers, and conversions.
However, after you optimize your digital marketing, make sure to periodically check back in. Generally, you should review your initiatives every three to six months or, at least, once annually.
We hope our tips for cleaning up your digital marketing efforts aid you this year, but if you are in need of more help, we’re here for you! Our teams will collaborate with yours to devise powerful plans to meet your unique needs. Contact us today.
