1. Assess your current strategies 🕵️

The first step to a spring clean is to get everything out, look at what you’ve got and decide what’s needed and what needs to go. 

Review your overall strategy 

Assessing your digital marketing strategy is no different. Ask yourself these questions and start making a list: 

• What channels am I currently using? 
• Which channels are delivering the best results? 
• Which channels are not delivering anything? 
• Are there any channels you’re not using that you could be? 
• What are your competitors doing? 
• What content do you have? 

Making a list of the campaigns you’re already running and the materials you have will give you an overview of where you’re spending your budget and whether you need to review any activities. 

Review individual channels 

Once you know what’s running and what’s available to you, have a look at each channel. How has each channel performed for your business over the last six months? Are there any areas you could improve or are there any channels that simply aren’t delivering? 

Deciding on how your channels are performing will help you to identify where there are areas for improvement. Think about the following: 

• Are there specific campaigns that have performed better than others? 
• Do some social posts gain more engagement than others? 
• Do you have one or two channels that seem to deliver more sales or enquiries? 

Understanding the answers to these questions will allow you to optimise your campaigns and take anything that’s not working out of your strategy. Then, you can focus on the strategies that work and deliver sales or enquiries for your business rather than wasting budget or time on things that don’t work. 

Refresh on best practice 

If you haven’t reviewed your campaigns for a while, it might be worth getting online and getting a refresher on the latest best practice for each channel you’re using. Digital marketing is always evolving so you might find there has been slight tweaks to advised best practice that could help you squeeze more out of your campaigns. 

2. Clean up your content 🧹

A key part of all your digital marketing activities is your website. This is where you’ll be driving traffic from SEO, social media and Google Ads so it’s essential that it tells your customers exactly who you are and what you do. 

Audit your website content 

Start with your homepage, product pages, services pages and about us pages. Make sure the content answers your customers questions and it’s relevant to them. Our biggest piece of advice when creating your website content is to think about the problems or pain points your customers have when purchasing from your and centre the content around this rather than just telling them what you do. 

Think about how your products, services or business can help your customers with their problems and the solutions you offer - and then tell them! Don’t forget to do a little bit of keyword research too so you know what keywords and phrases your customers are using when they’re searching online for what you do.

If you haven’t updated your website for a while, just make sure the information is still relevant and accurate. Can you update any stats or figures? Is information on your opening times or contact details up to date and correct? 

Refresh other content 

Once you’ve had a look at your website overall, go back and have a look at your existing blog content.

See if there’s anything you can update with new information or refresh to make the content more helpful or relevant to customer’s pain points. We also recommend conducting keyword research around the longer tail keywords (questions or phrases) your potential customers are using to find out more about the product or service you offer. 

Optimise your content to include these keywords and make sure you’re following helpful content guidelines to give your content the best chance of encouraging customers to enquire or take the next steps with you. And to help your content rank in the search engines. 

Consider removing outdated content or content that’s just not performing. You’ll need to look at Google Analytics for this and find the content that hasn’t driven any visits to your website at all. 

Plus, if you find your website is missing something content-wise, create it! 

3. Freshen up your social media presence 🌸

If you’re using social media to promote your business, now is the time to review your social media profiles. 

Make sure the information is still accurate and that you’ve completed all aspects of the profile to make sure customers know who you are and what you do. Many customers will either find you on social media or they’ll check your profiles as part of their due diligence so making sure they’re up-to-date will help to build trust with potential customers. 

Alongside the information on your profile, use this opportunity to update your profile pictures and cover photos too. Keep everything on brand and make sure it matches your website for consistency and to ensure a smooth user experience. 

4.Review your SEO efforts 🔎

Keyword research 

As we’ve already mentioned, the key to making sure your website is found when your customers are searching online for your products and services. So, conducting keyword research around your industry can help you to identify new opportunities. 

There might be a blog you could write to cover additional questions potential customers may have or there could even be another product or service page you could add to your website to attract more visitors.  

Plus, it’s always worth checking existing pages to make sure they’re optimised correctly and for the most relevant keywords. 

Update other elements 

As well as optimising your blog or products and services pages, once you’ve done the keyword research, make sure your meta tags and page headers are optimised properly too. Including the right keywords in these places can really help to boost visibility and make sure your website appears in the search results at the right time. 

In addition, think about checking your website speed and whether it’s mobile friendly both to improve user experience and boost your rankings. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool for free which will provide you with a score in terms of the speed of your site and show you the improvements that could be made. 

5.Reevaluate your paid advertising campaigns 💰

For any PPC campaigns you’re running, now is a great time to check in on them and make sure you’re getting the most from your spend. 

Go right back to basics and refresh yourself and your team on what exactly you’re trying to achieve through your campaigns. What metrics are you tracking and what’s the ROI you’re looking to achieve? 

Understanding this and refreshing your mind will help you to see whether or not your campaigns are delivering in the way they should be. 

Once you know which ads are performing and which aren’t, you can tweak the targeting, ad copy and bidding strategies to ensure the campaigns deliver the best results for your business. Just remember that you need to keep an eye on PPC campaigns on a regular basis so you can make tweaks and improve performance over time. You’re not going to be able to set them live and then expect them to deliver straight away. 

6. Embrace new trends and technologies 🧑💻

To get the most from digital marketing, we always recommend trying to keep ahead of new trends and technologies on the various platforms you’re using. 

Stay informed about industry updates and best practices and tweak your campaigns accordingly. This will ensure you’re always getting the most for your spend. 

It will also provide you with information on any new tools, platforms or techniques you could be using to appeal to your target audience. Just knowing if there are any new channels your customers are using can help you to avoid missing an opportunity to reach even more people.  

Remember that just because there is a new shiny channel that other brands seem to be using, it doesn’t always mean it will be effective for your business. Always research a new channel and make sure it’s where your customers are likely to be spending their time. This will avoid wasting budget on activities that won’t work for your business. 

7. Monitor and measure the progress of your campaigns 📏

This isn’t just something you should do when you’re spring cleaning your campaigns, this is something we recommend you do on a daily, monthly and weekly basis. 

If you haven’t already, now is a great time to set measurable goals and benchmarks for your digital marketing activities. These will probably be aligned with your overarching business goals and will help you to focus on the channels and strategies that are most likely to work. 

Keep track your KPIs alongside analytics data and keep it updated on a monthly basis so you can see how your spend and activity is performing and whether it’s helping you to reach your goals. This information will help you to adjust your strategies based on performance insights.

The tracker doesn’t have to be complex - just a spreadsheet or Google Sheet with the information tracked will be enough for you to see how everything’s performing. 

Key takeaways… 

Spring cleaning your digital marketing campaigns is essential for utilising them to reach your business goals. Checking each channel and how it’s performing on a regular basis will give you an overview of which channels are most effective for your business and which might need tweaking to drive improvements. You might even decide to turn some campaigns off and focus your time, money and efforts on the activities that are driving your business goals. 

We have suggested a full spring clean of your campaigns but, once you’ve done this, our advice is always to check your marketing strategies on regular basis and ensure they’re well optimised for ongoing success. It’s also much less work to review channels on an individual basis regularly than it is to review and tweak everything at once every three to six months. 

Digital marketing and the methods involved are constantly evolving so staying proactive and adaptable when it comes to your campaigns is essential. You’ll get the most from your budget and drive the best results for your business. 

If you’d like to know more about how your campaigns are performing, why not contact us for a free digital marketing audit? We’ll show you how everything’s performing and provide guidance on what you can do to improve.

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