Spring is here, and just as you prepare for the warmer months, it’s the perfect opportunity for you to spring-clean your marketing efforts. By Stella Powers Price, Marketing Assistant, Creative Pod

Just like cleaning up a physical space, it’s also good to clean up your marketing, as this helps you to get on top of those areas that may often get neglected in the everyday hustle. This process can help you to optimise performance and discover new growth opportunities.

Branding

Spring is a great time to consider refreshing your brand identity, communicate updated values and missions, and align these with your new business goals for the year ahead. Spring also presents opportunities for seasonal marketing campaigns, making it an ideal time to unveil a fresh brand image and engage with customers in innovative ways.

Website - Make sure your homepage passes the “grunt test”

The “grunt test” is used to assess the effectiveness of a webpage. It’s a concept that emphasises the importance of quickly and clearly communicating key messages to audiences in a way that is easily understood and memorable.

The term “grunt” refers to a basic, instinctive reaction – similar to the sound one might make when something is immediately understood. In the first five seconds of looking at the page, you should be able to answer

1. What do you offer?

2. How will it improve my life, or why should I care about what you sell?

3. How do I buy?

Email - Clean up your email list

Cleaning up your email list is an important process to maintain email deliverability and engagement rates.

It’s important to identify and remove inactive subscribers – these are subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for a long time (six months or more). Having inactive subscribers can negatively impact your email deliverability and open rates. Most email service providers will put together a list of addresses that haven’t been opened.

Before you remove these inactive subscribers, it may be worth sending them a re-engagement campaign. Encourage subscribers to re-engage by offering special promotions and valuable content or simply asking them if they still want to receive emails from you. Those who don’t respond or show interest can be removed.

You can also remove any email addresses that consistently bounce, as they can harm your sender’s reputation.

Social - Evaluate your social media presence

It’s important to regularly assess what platforms are working for you and are delivering the best results. It may be worth stripping down your social media presence, as it’s common for businesses to just jump on every new platform to keep up, but some platforms might not be right for your brand.

When going through your platforms, ask yourself:

• Is this a platform where I can best serve my customers?
• Do I have enough time to manage this site?

It’s important to consider that social media isn’t just about putting posts out into the abyss and expecting your platform to grow. Community management matters now more than ever because of the ever-changing social media landscape. It’s not just about creating content but about nurturing relationships with your followers by embracing two-way communication.

Once you have decided which platforms are working for you, now would be a great time to ensure that you are utilising them and their different functions. For example, you could go through your Instagram profile, delete any old highlight content that is no longer relevant, and update your highlight covers to align with your page and fit your branding. You can also update your reel covers, so they are relevant! This will help make sure your feed is easy to navigate for those who visit your page.

You can try carousel posts, as these are great for engagement; or polls on LinkedIn can help harness the community engagement element of social media as you can get a sense of your followers’ opinions on topics of interest.

Paid social

It’s a great idea to take some time out to re-evaluate your paid-ad performance. Ad fatigue can occur for many reasons, such as overexposure, decreased relevance and audience saturation. To help combat this, think about ways to refresh your paid ad strategies,
it can be as simple as changing up your ad copy or graphics.

If you’d like to find out a bit more about how we could help your business with design and marketing to maximise your opportunities and increase your brand presence, then get in touch at hello@creativepod.uk.com or visit our website at www.creativepod.uk.com