Spring is infamously known as a time for cleaning things out and refocusing on what matters the most. In his bestselling book, Essentialism, author Greg McKeown, advocates for distinguishing “the trivial many from the vital few.”
We recommend doing this with more than just your closet, so we’ve compiled a little guide for spring cleaning your marketing strategy – 2018 edition. (Click here for the 2017 version.)
Here’s What We Recommend:
1 – Audit your website.
Read your website’s copy and audit it for broken links, old information, team changes, and other needed updates. Even without doing a complete overhaul or rebrand, you can keep your website feeling current by simply paying attention. Your website is your online business card and one of the best tools for marketing on auto-pilot so use it wisely!
2 – Data doesn’t lie.
Leverage powerful, free tools like Facebook Insights and Google Analytics to assess your performance. Without getting overly complicated, you can easily review what your most popular content has been, who you audience is (vs. who you thought they were), and whether that audience is growing.
For example, are you seeing a rise in engagement? More traffic? A decreased bounce rate? If you’re not doing so already, create a simple Excel document that tracks these and other relevant metrics month-to-month.
3 – Keep quality over quantity in mind.
With recent changes like Facebook’s algorithm update, we all know that organic reach is going down. Among other things, it means that throwing out content as frequently as possible isn’t going to cut it. In fact, less may actually be more.
Take some pressure off yourself and refocus your attention on creating less, but better content. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Is this of value to my target audience?
Is this relevant and shareable?
Does this invite my ideal client into a story?
Does this help solve their problems?
Is it clear? Is it interesting?
Would I ‘like’ it?
These will help you tailor your content to achieve maximum organic impact.
4 – Refresh your ad creative.
An important metric within advertising is “frequency”. It is defined as the number of times someone sees your ad.
Although sometimes it does take someone seeing your ad more than once to be moved to action, engagement actually starts to go down once frequency goes up.
You want to strive for continually presenting new assets when getting multiple touch points on your audience, as to not be overly repetitive.
In plain language – running the same exact ad on the same exact platform over and over again might be hindering you more than it’s helping you.
When working with our clients, our in-house creative team works to help develop new ad creative each month to keep things from going stale.
Creating slightly different variations will keep your advertising efforts consistent but fresh. And most importantly, more effective.
Here are examples of various ads we created for our MyStorage client:
5 – Try A/B testing.
We get it; sometimes it’s hard to know whether this image or that image or this copy or that copy is going to perform better. That’s why A/B testing can be so valuable.
It sounds fancier than it is, but the basic idea is that you present two different options to similar audiences and monitor which one is better. Once that’s determined, the lower performing one gets pulled, and the winner remains.
This also gives you information in the future regarding the style that resonates with your audience.
You can do this within an email marketing provider, Facebook Ads, digital ad placements, and more. If you have questions about this one, definitely get in touch to see how we can help!
6 – Try something new.
Once you know what’s working and what’s not, maybe it’s time to try out something new. Will 2018 be the year you finally implement email marketing or add a new social media channel? What about digital streaming radio advertisements (like Pandora) or a retargeting campaign?
You don’t know the results you could achieve with your marketing mix until you tweak it and try it!
7- Perform a market evaluation.
There are many ways to do this, and some can take a more in-depth dive than others. A market evaluation is something we’re proud to offer potential R&A clients because we’ve seen first-hand the essential findings it produces.
If you’re interested in a no-cost, no-obligation review of your existing marketing strategies, click here to complete a short form and get in touch. When requested, be sure to enter the offer code: RESULTS.
We look forward to hearing from you and turning your questions into answers!
There you have it – an overview to spring cleaning your marketing strategy. What stuck out most to you? What would you add to this list?
-The R&A Team
