Spring
Cleaning for your Marketing
By Susan Young, President, AimFire
Marketing
April 2007
So
we're into the fourth month of the year. You had good intentions
for your marketing plan and budget this year but somehow your
efforts have slipped. Or are some of you thinking -- what
marketing plan? Never fear. Spring is the time for rebirth and
renewal. It's also the time to revisit your marketing efforts,
whether you've tackled them yet or are just getting started. So
give your marketing strategy a "spring cleaning" by
reviewing the following checklist:
1. Your marketing plan and budget. Review your marketing
strategy for the year, as well as your marketing investment for
the first quarter. Do you need to decrease your budget, spend
more wisely or increase it to keep up with demand? It's
important to plan what you're going to spend throughout the
year, as well as the best marketing tactics for the dollar.
Otherwise, you're just wasting your money as well as your time
and effort. If you find yourself without the time to devote to
executing your marketing plan, hire a consultant or internal
marketing person to help out, even if it's just part-time. Or
promise to spend 30 minutes a day on marketing your business.
2. Your website. How well is your website performing?
Check out your site statistics over the last quarter, or for the
past year if it's been ages since you looked at your web
statistics. Where are people finding you? Are they gravitating
toward certain pages or exiting on certain pages? Does your site
reflect your current company, marketing message and
product/service line? Could your website
use an updated look? Does it need to be optimized
for search engine visibility? Most importantly, is your
website properly contributing to your company's sales
goals?
3. Your customer and prospect database. Do you regularly
communicate with your prospect and customer base, or do you even
know if some of the people on your list are still at that
address or phone number? Do you need email addresses for your
contacts? Now is the time to consider appending or updating your
database. You can hire a company to do this, or you can have
administrative staff update the list by making calls or
verifying the information online. This will ensure that you
aren't wasting your marketing dollars on people who are no
longer working at your prospect's place of business, and makes
your company look more professional. If you need to increase
your database, consider a promotional campaign to generate new
contacts, or utilize business cards from tradeshows or other
networking. If you're not communicating with your database,
consider outsourcing telemarketing efforts, start an eNewsletter
or devote an hour a day to prospecting by phone or email.
4. Your brand. Take a look at your existing logo, tagline
or even your company name. Is it current and does it adequately
represent your brand? If not, maybe now is the time to consider
re-branding. Sometimes a new look can make all the difference,
and make your company stand out as hip, current and "in the
know." You don't have to spend a ton of money on a new
look, either. Check out some of your competitors' brands to make
sure you are keeping up and that your brand coincides with your
position in the marketplace.
5.
Your marketing materials. Have you been sending out the same
tri-fold brochure or sales sheet for the past five or 10 years?
If so, it's time to take a hard look at your current marketing
materials to ensure that you are presenting the right image to
prospects. Think about revising both the design and the
text to make them more current or simply to offer something new,
especially if the materials are not doing the job of converting
leads to sales.
6.
Your advertisements and promotions. Again, the same here
with your advertisements. Are they outdated? Have you been
running the same promotional campaigns or coupons again and
again? If they are working well, obviously keep doing what
you're doing, but perhaps a few tweaks or tests here and there
could make your campaigns even better. If you haven't been doing
advertising or promotions, or you'd like to supplement your
existing ads, maybe now is the time to think about how to
introduce them or make them better. This goes for both print and
online advertising such as
pay-per-click advertising.
So wipe the dust off your marketing plan. Maybe your spring
cleaning efforts will contribute to a fantastic rest-of-the-year
result.
Susan Young is
president of AimFire Marketing, an Indianapolis, Indiana marketing,
public relations and website development firm that works with
growing companies to implement effective marketing
communications programs. You
can contact Susan and learn more about Aim Fire Marketing by
visiting www.aimfiremarketing.com.
Copyright
- Aim Fire Marketing. You can reprint this article on your
website or newsletter by including this and the above paragraph.
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