Top 5 Tips For Spring Cleaning Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Top 5 Tips For Spring Cleaning Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Spring has officially arrived, which can only mean one thing – spring cleaning! It’s time to start thinking about creating fresh content, dusting off that marketing plan, and organizing your current digital marketing efforts. You won’t need a set of rubber gloves and a bucket for this one. Just a little dedication, some goal setting, and a whole lot of fun.

Let’s get started!

Here are 5 tips for spring cleaning your digital marketing efforts:

1. Gather The Right Tools

Every company, big and small, should have a marketing strategy set in place at the beginning of every quarter – using the right tools. Notice how we say right tools? That’s because there is no one-size-fits-all across the board. What might work for another company, may not work for you. And just because there are dozens of marketing tools out there, doesn’t mean all of them will fit your needs. Some of the most common tools used in today’s modern marketing world include:

• Social Media Management
• Email Marketing
• Facebook Ads
• Programmatic Advertising
• Content Creation and Blogs
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• Website Analytics
• Direct Mail
• Automation
• Customer Loyalty Programs
  

2. Monitor the Health of Your Business

If you’re not already, it’s time to start focusing on those KPI’s. You want to make sure you’re reaching your goals and objectives each quarter. KPI’s, or otherwise known as key performance indicators, are essential to the overall health and success of your business. They are what determine how effectively your company is achieving key business objectives and goals. And in order to achieve them, everyone in your organization needs to have a clear understanding of what the goals are and how they are going to be met.

In other words, your KPI’s need to be SMART.

Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. Time-Based.

Let’s break it down.

1. Specific: Your goals need to be very specific. For example, “I want to increase my sales by 20% by 2022” is a lot more specific than just saying “I want to increase my sales this year.”
2. Measurable: Not only should your goals be specific, they should be measurable. Are you able to easily track the progress and outcome of your goals? How will you know when you’ve met your goals?
3. Achievable: The goal here isn’t to set you up to fail. You want to meet your goals, so you should make them realistic and doable. If your goals are out of reach, it might be time to reevaluate them. You want to make them challenging – but not impossible.
4. Relevant: Your goals need to make sense. And not only does it need to make sense, it needs to matter. If it doesn’t have significance or importance, your employees will lack motivation to accomplish the goals.
5. Time-Based: You want to set a time for your goals. Setting deadlines will help you and your team stay focused and hold each other accountable.

Poor business health ultimately reduces people’s productivity, focus and overall morale. Setting goals that inspire and motivate is the recipe for a healthy business.

3. Throw Out The Old Stuff

In other words, throw out the things that aren’t working anymore. Digital marketing, and marketing in general, is not static. In fact, it’s changing – all the time!

The same things that worked for your business ten years ago – or even a few months ago – may not work for you now. In other words, if your website is from 1999, it may be time to ditch it. Often times business owners are fooled into thinking traditional marketing is dead, and digital marketing is taking over the world. While it’s true that every business out there should be online, it’s not true that every business out there should stop traditional advertising efforts all together – especially if they’re working.

Don’t throw in the towel just yet. Before you make any major decisions about the future of your marketing, you should look into the why.

• Why are people unsubscribing from my emails?
• Why is my blog not showing up on search results?
• Why is my ad not converting?
• Why is everything just not…working?

There could be reasons your marketing efforts aren’t producing favorable results. Perhaps you’re not using the right keywords. Perhaps the subject line of your email appears like spam to your readers. The best way to know for sure is to consult the professionals. Hire an experienced marketer. Hire a marketing agency to manage everything for you. When in doubt, seek help!

4. Check Out Your Competition

We don’t condone spying, but in this case – we’ll turn the other cheek. We get it. You want to know what your competition is up to, and it’s important that you do. The best way to check on your competition is to:

• Look at their website: What are they offering? What does their pricing look like? How does it differ from yours? Are you at a disadvantage in any way with what you see?
• Check out their social media: Look into community forums, look into what people say, identify the pros and cons.
• Other: Some other things to look into might include their SEO strategy, their email marketing campaigns, their content marketing.5.

5. Make a Plan

Now that you have gathered the right marketing tools, thrown out the old stuff, organized your digital marketing strategies, and checked out your competition – it’s time to make your marketing plan come to life.

Here’s how in 5 steps:

• Conduct a SWOT analysis

  1. Strengths: What advantages do you have?
  2. Weaknesses: What areas could use some improvement?
  3. Opportunities: What could you change to help you grow?
  4. Threats: What are the obstacles standing in your way?

• Identify your target audience

  Unfortunately, not everyone is your customer. We’d like to think so, but it’s just not possible. Everyone has different wants, needs and desires. Identify who this is for you. Some things to consider might be: gender, age, job title, industry, income, and hobbies – just to name a few.

• Set SMART Goals

  Before you decide how to move forward, you need to set those SMART goals we talked about earlier. These will help you be able to analyze how you’ll be able to go about achieving those goals.

• Analyze your next move

  Now that you have goals… how are you going to get there?

• Set your budget

  Before you begin taking action and implementing your marketing strategy and plan, you need to know your budget. Your budget will help you determine where you need to be in order to meet your goals.

Have questions about spring cleaning your digital marketing efforts? Get in touch with our team at VitalStorm. Call us today at 877-311-5695 or visit more of our marketing tips here.