March has arrived and that means it’s time to clear out the clutter that has accumulated over the past year. While you’re it, this is a fantastic time to give your marketing a good spring cleaning as well.
It’s hard to move forward when you’re weighed down with extra baggage. When you take control of how you’re spending your energy, your time, and your dollars, you’ll automatically free up resources you can use to accelerate your growth.
Here’s a look at how the Dolphins approach our spring-cleaning task list:
- Declutter
- Downsize
- Drop
Let’s get started!
Step One: De-Clutter
Marketing clutter shows up in a few different places – on your hard drives, in your creative, and in your database. Taking a moment to look back at the last 12 months, and either archive or delete the things that no longer serve your business is a fantastic way to get your team focused on the right stuff to drive your business forward.
Drowning in duplicates?
Over the course of a year (or longer), your marketing assets have probably accumulated a lot of bloat. You’ll be amazed at how much drive space you can save simply by getting rid of duplicate or out-of-date files. Not to mention that once you’re done, finding the exact assets you need to create your next campaign will be a whole lot faster.
Crowded creative?
Are you asking too much of your ads, emails, and other creatives? Does each ad you’re running have a clear ask and a single call to action? How about the keyword lists for your performance marketing campaigns? Do they make sense? Is there duplication? Could you streamline some of your efforts or improve your targeting by getting rid of terms and phrases that just don’t fit any more? You’ve probably tried a lot of things in the last year – it’s ok to let go of the ones that simply didn’t work.
Dirty database?
Are you holding on to contact records that are inaccurate or out of date?
- Send a re-engagement campaign to those who haven’t opened or clicked on your content in months. Those that don’t respond? Delete them from your ESP. Getting deadweight of your lists helps you optimize your budget by ensuring you aren’t paying for a higher database tier than you really need. Even better, your response data will be much more useful because you’ll get more accurate results.
- Are bounced email addresses piling up? This is a great time to delete the ones that aren’t recoverable, and flag those that could be for updating. Just don’t forget to assign responsibility for the updates to a person on your team, and set a deadline to complete the work.
- Flush Your Pipes. You sales pipeline that is. Most organizations have a few opportunities hanging out in the pipeline that have been stalled for so long, nobody’s sure they’re even real any more. This is a terrific time to reach out to those opportunities and if you aren’t able to get clear forward momentum, close them as lost and move the contacts into a nurturing stream.
Step Two: Downsize
You really can have too much of a good thing. Take a hard look at the volume of… everything. Is there anywhere in your routine marketing activities that less just might be more?
For example, would your emails be more effective if you included fewer articles in each newsletter? Could the copy for your sales emails be shorter and tighter? Are all the social platforms your team is scrambling to be active on REALLY necessary? Has your website code become bloated, reducing overall performance? Could streamlining improve your core web vitals – and by default your overall Google ranking?
What about your budget? Have inefficiencies crept into your advertising spend? Do your retainer agreements with vendors still make sense? Do you really need to print 1,000 business cards for every new hire? (When was the last time you actually handed someone a physical business card?!)
Need some motivation? Imagine discovering that you already have everything you need to move forward with that exciting new campaign?
Step Three: Drop
It’s time to get tough about your time. What are you doing that is pulling your focus away from the core activities that move the needle on your revenues?
- Are you really serving your business when you attend those networking events filled with really ‘nice’ people whose company you enjoy, but whose networks aren’t aligned with your best customers?
- Do those ads in the local news website really help if your best customers are distributed across the globe? Have you really gained good connections from that referral network?
- If you’ve been rehashing the same conversation with that coach or consultant for months, do you really need to keep working with them?
What’s Next?
Now that you’ve taken stock of what’s not serving you or your goals, put your newfound resources to work in support of your growth.
Not sure where to start? The Dolphins have a proven framework for doing just that. It’s called the Growth Architecture BlueprintTM and we’d be happy to and figure out if it could work for you.
