Spring has sprung, and with this new season comes spring cleaning.
As you tidy up around the house and your physical office space this year, 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.
The reality is, digital marketing tactics 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 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.
When you completely refresh your home, you typically go room by room, right? Follow this same process as you optimize your digital marketing endeavors. If you need, jot down a list of all your digital marketing efforts so you don’t forget any crucial approaches or platforms.
First, take inventory of all the social media platforms 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 Goal Sizes
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
Perform A Collective Cleanup
Step 1: Build Your 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 techniques. Instead, you should prioritize allocating funds to better meet your new goals.
A prime example of this is pushing more money toward the channels 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 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, if possible, a long history.
Next, examine the accounts you follow, including removing any fake or inactive followers. Also 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, now is the time to start building remarketing efforts. You’ll really want to reach your audiences who previously purchased around that time, and upper-funnel campaigns can help you do that.
Furthermore, check on — and analyze — the conversion tracking for your current paid campaigns. 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 connected your clients’ CRMs to the platform properly, which will ensure the attribution process is as seamless as possible
Finally, perform competitor and impression share analyses. Spring 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 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 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.
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.
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? 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, 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 spring cleaning 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.