It’s spring-cleaning time, and nowhere is it more important to tidy up than your business.
Have the well-organized strategies and practices that once felt necessary come to resemble the clutter in your home? This season is the perfect time to get cleaning—but we’re not talking about dusting your filing cabinets. Instead, you should clean up and improve your operations to escalate your business’ success. Most importantly, you should start by analyzing your activities and optimizing them.
Identify what needs a good cleaning.
Most people are constantly on the lookout to adopt new marketing strategies, but when the business environment alters, they sometimes accumulate and linger. Certain strategies don’t always work as well as you planned, and sometimes companies cannot keep up with unforeseen demands when things get busy.
It’s almost like the handful of clothes that have been accumulating in the back of your closet since 2005—it’s a tough feat to face, but it’s certainly time to get rid of them. There comes a time when you have to get rid of old strategies, as difficult as doing so may be. Whether it’s a lack of time or a nostalgic attachment to it, it’s important to look past your reservations and clean up the outdated strategies that are holding you back.
Tidy up your practices.
A good way of identifying the processes that need to be thrown out is to ask yourself if you have a sustained marketing effort, especially when competition gets tough or the unexpected occurs. Ask yourself some questions:
- Are your strategies providing measureable results?
- Do you need some outside help with organization and improving?
- Are you getting attention like you should be? How are you credible?
By identifying what could you improve and what you WANT to improve, the steps necessary for tidying up will become a lot clearer.
Other specific factors (such as data quality) can have a great impact on the conversion rate from lead to customer. A clean database can help you maintain email deliverability, and by sorting through your unsubscribes or bounced messages and identifying who is actually engaged with your messaging, you can create more valuable interactions. Ultimately, it’s most beneficial to create a process in place to avoid human error and to automate that part of data cleansing.
Set realistic expectations and throw away anything that lacks value.
One of the hardest parts of sorting through your marketing clutter is doing so while managing your expectations. For example, strategies like social media may not generate hard leans in a way that you’d prefer, but it’s crucial for delivering a level or trust and credibility.
Look for ways to drive web traffic, such as pay-per-click advertising, and strive to implement a customized and comprehensive strategy.
A thorough clean up may take quite a bit of effort, but it is more than worthwhile!
