Spring is here and the warmer days and lighter evenings give a sense that it is time to look our best; mowers are stirred from their winter rest, seeds are lovingly sown into freshly-cleared beds, and in garages up and down the land DIY’ers ponder hardened brushes just long enough to decide that new ones are needed, not white spirit.
While the same sense of renewed optimism takes hold among marketers, it is not always easy to see where innovation should be added or where a winter coat can be shed. After all, anyone who saw a campaign and was not swayed by it is unlikely to want to explain why.
Here are our top three tips for giving your marketing a spring clean; three tips for catching the eye of your audience and holding its attention!
1) Prune your social media to encourage new growth.
10 years ago, you heard that social media was the next big thing and you have diligently created a business account on every new platform that has since appeared. Your marketing team now spends an inordinate amount of time repurposing content for cross-posting. A blog article becomes a Facebook post, becomes a Pinterest Board, becomes a Web Story, becomes a Tweet, becomes a LinkedIn article, and becomes an Instagram Story. With a tiny and unresponsive audience on each and every platform, this scattergun approach produces less interaction than a socially-distanced Trappist convention.
Instead of acting as if every social media branch, twig and shoot is heading in the right direction, take out your marketing shears and get rid of the energy-sapping offshoots that are dwindling in the shade, to allow those most likely to bear fruit the best chance to thrive.
2) Sprinkle a few new ingredients into your marketing mix
Now that you have trimmed the number of platforms needing content, you have more time to spend on each one and should in theory be able to grab more attention and hold it for longer. But how? Pumping out the same old material in a larger quantity will produce the same indifference and lack of interaction, just on a more noticeable scale.
Use your new-found freedom to devise new ideas and, once they have been thought through, to not only launch them but to nurture them with care and attention so that they become as successful as they possibly can.
By adding new ideas into some clients’ Twitter campaigns, we have seen engagement rates rise by over 500% and audiences grow faster than ever before. The increased success of the campaigns means of course that they need more time devoted to them, and with more time devoted to them, the success continues to grow!
3) Look down the back of your marketing sofa, you never know what you’ll find
For many businesses there will be times when enquiries are flooding in and there just does not seem to be time to work on marketing while handling the sales opportunities. Everyone knows that these boom times are the culmination of sustained marketing efforts, and that reducing those efforts because of their success is like letting a Formula One car’s tyres wear out mid-race just to focus on holding up the P1 board.
Nonetheless, marketing and sales are often intertwined in B2B offices, and increased effort in one section tends to require reduced effort in the other.
As part of the marketing spring clean, look down the back of your metaphorical marketing sofa – see what activities were left forgotten when marketing last resumed in earnest. There is sure to be something that was producing results, or at least showing promising signs, when it was put to one side.
Remember, spring is a fantastic time to sow the seeds of marketing success, to nurture the campaigns that show the greenest shoots and to clear away any dead wood. It is a time of renewed hope and almost limitless enthusiasm.
If you would like your marketing spring clean carried out by professionals – ones with the best eye for spotting opportunities and the creative nous needed to add sparkle where it will shine most brightly, please give us a call on 01494 452600 or drop us a line at info@bbi.co.uk.