Spring Clean Your Marketing For Success

Just like closets and cupboards, marketing strategies and assets can accumulate clutter over the course of the year – It’s time for some spring cleaning.

Here are three ways to make sure your marketing is current, polished, and efficient:

Clean up your lists

Bounced back and duplicate emails are ineffective and can damage your goodwill with customers, journalists and other stakeholders. Go through your lists to verify that names, email addresses and other information are still current. Delete inactive addresses as well as duplicate or incomplete entries.

This is especially important for your media list. Journalism is a fast-changing world and writers move to different outlets and cover different topics. Ensuring that you’re contacting the right people with your news is critical when it comes to generating publicity for your business.

Revisit your social strategy

Take stock of how you are using your social media channels and content. If you’re neglecting certain channels or networks, consider deactivating them until you have the time and/or resources to maintain them regularly. Focus on cultivating the channels that serve your business best.

Check that your content still aligns with your overall marketing goals.

• Has your strategic message changed at all?
• Have your social media goals changed?
• Do your analytics show any weak areas that need improvement?

Answer these questions to evaluate whether you need to update your social strategy.

Update your boilerplate and website

It’s easy to forget about your company boilerplate. Take stock of your accomplishments and milestones from the last year and update your boilerplate accordingly.

The same goes for your company website. Have you hired new team members? Secured killer press coverage? Launched a new product or service? Now is the time to update your website to reflect your recent growth.

Don’t let out-of-date information and content weigh down your marketing. Spring-cleaning your strategy is crucial to long-term success.

Lead Generation - Getting to the perfect world

In the perfect world, your sales reps would only speak to prospects ready to buy.  This is how you got to work towards that perfect world.

Develop a nurturing program
Many leads are still in research mode, so emails and offers should provide best practices, statistics, research, etc. to help the customer frame their research.

Progressively understand your prospect’s needs
Every campaign the prospect responds to tells you about their interests. Every page they visit on your website tells you about their interests. Every link they click, and every piece of information they fill out on a form, tells you more about them.

Track anonymous visitors and tie their data to new leads
Simple code on your Web pages help you track prospects, whether anonymous or known. As anonymous prospects complete forms on your website or landing pages, any previous web visits can be automatically attributed to the new lead.

PR by Pin: Tying Pinterest into Your Marketing Strategy

You've probably heard the buzz around Pinterest by now. You may already be using it to 'pin' your favorite images from around the Internet to share them with your friends. But did you know that you can use it to market your business? Like other social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest is all about networking, sharing new things, and linking to content, which makes it ideal for driving new customers to your product or service. Here are three ways to use Pinterest to promote your company's content and website. 

1 Pin the images in your news releases.
A quick way to expand the reach of your online news releases is to embed an image in the news release and then pin it. The image could be your company logo, a product shot or even a headshot of the company spokesperson. For a news release about a new organic flower shop opening in Springfield, include an image of the new location and pin it to the appropriate board on your Pinterest account—that could be places, news or favorite things like flowers. 

2 Optimize your images.
Choosing SEO keywords that describe your business and incorporating them into the titles of your images or the copy that accompanies them will help customers find you via search engines. Drawing on the example from above, the title of the pinned flower shop image should include the keywords "organic flower shop Springfield." When customers search for flower shops in Springfield, this will help your new shop appear near the top of their search. 

3 Be yourself. 
Although Pinterest is a great tool for marketing your business, it's only as effective as the real people behind it. Personality sells, both in person and on social media, so don't be afraid to be yourself and pin things just for fun as well. Being authentic builds trust with new prospects.

Just as retweeting on Twitter and reciprocal liking on Facebook helps to build your network, taking the time to pin a few images to group boards each week and 'repinning' others in your network builds connections and brand awareness, which helps drive new business over the long term. Think of each social media interaction as another investment in your overall public relations equity—supporting a strong marketing strategy overall.

The Marketing Measurement Checklist