Polish your Marketing in Spring-Cleaning Efforts

Every year around this time in the Midwest, I’m reminded that good things come to those who wait. And I’ve been waiting (somewhat patiently) for spring. It is arriving with green buds on trees, flowers poking through a brown ground, and the sun lasting a bit longer in the sky, elongating our days.

It’s during this time that many of us take on spring cleaning in which we beat the dust off our outdoor furniture, polish our windows to let the sunshine through and update our wardrobe (for those who left the house during the winter months).

Spring also is a good timeframe – no matter when your fiscal year starts/ends – to review your marketing efforts to ensure they are working for you rather than you needing to adhere to strategies and goals that were outlined months ago.

Read on for some easy reference points to conduct the best spring-cleaning efforts for your marketing initiatives.

Dust Off Your Annual Marketing Plan.

What did you outline a few months or a year ago as your marketing objectives? Based on the state of the world and the industries you serve, are they still realistic and achievable? Have new opportunities arisen that you can/should leverage for the business? Take time to walk through your marketing game plan and make changes now to make an impact sooner. We regularly guide clients through strategic facilitations and ask the hard questions to help ensure they are not following outdated and non-relevant goals because it was written in last year’s marketing plan.

Sweep Out the Old/Sweep in the New Ideas.

Have you been waiting for the “right time” to begin your social media or digital campaign? With more eyes on screens than ever before, if you’re not marketing online now, you’re losing out on some great opportunities. Alternatively, with your competitors potentially shrinking their marketing efforts, it may be time to reinforce your products and services through your website SEO or traditional advertising efforts. Letting the dirt settle around you and staying with what you’ve always done, will commit you to the outcomes you always get. Want more? Think differently. Act differently. Take action.

Purge Your Brand.

Just like many of us who turn over our clothes during the change of seasons, this also a great time to renew your brand positioning. Is it meeting your needs? Has COVID and any of its implications made you rethink how and what you’re marketing? For example, we are helping many of our economic development clients tell their stories in different ways to both their B2B audiences and to those businesses’ potential workforce. Remote workers, transportation and logistics changes, and the significance of ecommerce has transformed the world as we knew it just a year ago. Is your business and its brand reflecting the change you need to be?

Just like spring cleaning, reviewing/updating your marketing efforts can be overwhelming. It’s easy to say that you’ll clean those windows next weekend or dust off the outdoor furniture sometime in the future. Taking just one step at a time, even making a list of what spring-cleaning chores need to happen and by when, provides you a roadmap to help you achieve your goals. So before closing this blog today, take just one step – whatever it is: schedule a meeting to discuss the brand; block time on your calendar to review the annual marketing plan; or even coordinate a brainstorming meeting for a date in the future to evaluate new ideas.

If you need encouragement and assistance at any level, contact Chartwell Agency. We’d be honored to polish your marketing efforts.