Have you spring cleaned your marketing yet?

Hands up if you’ve spent your time in lockdown at home spring cleaning your house from top to bottom? If you think your company’s marketing could also do with a freshen up, we’ve written a housekeeping checklist to help you clear those cobwebs away and get ahead of the game.

Review your online and offline marketing channels

Whatever your business, it’s important that you’re promoting your products and services in the right places - and for this, knowing your audience is key. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to do everything. Not only is that incredibly time-consuming, but it could also end up doing more harm than good. Instead, make sure you do your research and concentrate on the platforms where you know people will be interested in your product or service. For example, you may gain more from an automated email marketing system than you do from posting content across all of your social media channels every day.

The same goes for offline marketing. While online tends to be king at the moment, don’t rule out things like print advertising or direct marketing for the future. It can be just as effective, if not more so!

Fine-tune your social media presence

So, you have Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and Tik Tok? That’s good, but are you using them to their full potential? When it comes to social media, the two things to consider are audience and resource. It is better to concentrate on selecting the best platforms for your business and getting great content out on them, rather than spreading your resources too thin and maintaining a half-hearted presence on ones that aren’t relevant. Make sure you’re active on the ones where your audience is most likely to be and spend time coming up with interesting, relevant content to keep people engaged.

Stake out your competitors

Knowing who your competitors are is a great way of keeping your business on track, not just for marketing purposes. Completing a competitor analysis will not only help you identify your strengths but it will also uncover opportunities that you can exploit within your marketplace. When doing your analysis, try to discover where your competitors are concentrating their marketing efforts and how they’re doing it. Collecting this information will help inform where you should take your marketing next - just remember to regularly update your competitor analysis to stay ahead of the curve!

Make sure your website is bang up-to-date

It’s easy to overlook your website but many customers will get their first impression of your business from it. As a bare minimum, ensure your website content is up-to-date and reflects your current business status (whether you’re operating or not). Additionally, if you want to go one step further, now is a great opportunity to look into SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is a great practice to get your business more noticeable online and it’s easier to get started than you think. Making sure your web pages have correct headings and ensuring where you can that your web page URLs reflect the content hosted there will go a long way to boosting your website’s ranking on Google.

Ticking all - or even one - of these things off your marketing to-do list will have a really positive impact over the next few months. If you want to go further or you don’t know where to start - we’re on hand to help! We’ve built up years of experience working with businesses to achieve their goals through marketing - and we love meeting new faces (through video calls, of course). If you’re interested in finding out more, contact us here.