Whether it’s the fact that at the time of writing it’s the first day of spring, or the fact that the Tidying Up with Marie Kondo craze is sweeping the nation, getting organized is top of mind. Just as a house collects clutter over time, most organizations collect digital clutter as well. For business owners and digital marketers alike, there are plenty of opportunities to de-clutter and organize to make for a much more efficient year ahead.
Website
In an ideal world, your website is constantly being updated as your organization, products and/or services change. Unfortunately, it’s more common that a site lags behind or is haphazardly updated. Here are a few tips to stay up-to-date:
- Review all major product and service pages to ensure the content accurately reflects the product or service offering. Look for opportunities to add new case studies, testimonials, and value propositions.
- Review main imagery to ensure it’s up-to-date. Lose any stock imagery that looks like stock imagery. Be sure to identify any outdated photography that may contain employees that are no longer with the organization, products that have changed, or branding that has since been updated.
- Check for speed. Speed is more important than ever, and the more you add to your site, the slower it’s likely to go. Give your site a quick check using Google PageSpeed Insights to see where you’re at, and do your best to address large issues.
Blog
It’s been a long-running misconception that adding more and more content to a blog can only lead to more and more traffic. There’s in fact more research lately that indicates paring down the content on your blog can actually increase traffic in the long run. Consider using the following rules:
- Keep – Keep evergreen content and content that is still accurate and relevant.
- Update – Update content that still relates to your business but may have outdated facts or figures. Updating with new information can have powerful results for search engine optimization.
- Combine – If you have two very similar pieces of content that are competing for keywords and search attention, it may be a good idea to combine both posts for a more focused approach. (Don’t forget to implement the correct 301 redirects!)
- Delete – Delete content that is no longer relevant to your business. Some easy examples include new employee announcements for employees that are no longer with the organization and announcements of products or services that are no longer being offered.
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Analytics
Whether you have a robust tracking strategy in place or you’re just getting started, there are almost always a few cleanup and organization opportunities to work through.
- Goals/Conversions – Are your goals or conversion points still accurate? Are they still tracking correctly? If you’ve added new conversion points to your site, make sure they’re being tracked.
- Filters – Over time, any site can start to collect clutter in the form of SPAM or bot traffic. It’s good to take a look at where your traffic is coming from to ensure it’s all valid.
- Channel Groupings – As the landscape of traffic driven to your site changes, you should ensure your Channel Groupings are up-to-date. Some common things to look at are to make sure social traffic is being divided into paid vs. organic social, make sure all newer search engines (like DuckDuckGo) are being classified as Organic, and ensuring you’re not having any issues with cross-domain tracking.
No analytics, reporting or tracking strategy in place? Let us know, it’s one of our specialties.
CRM
Ideally, all of your customer data is stored somewhere. Whether that’s in a series of folders with spreadsheets (if so, contact us, we need to have a heart-to-heart), or it’s a well-structured Contact Management System (CMS/CRM), this is one of the places that collects the most clutter.
Keeping customer data accurate and up-to-date is a challenging task but can also be one of the most important. Whether your customer-facing employees reach out to verify contact information or use a third-party data source to verify existing customer data, staying on top of this on a regular basis is much easier than dealing with a messy database every couple of years.
Email Marketing
This one pairs well with your CRM data. The better your customer data is, the higher your deliverability and engagement rates will be. The reality is every list goes through a natural “list churn.” Employees leave companies, people unsubscribe, domain names change; for all of these reasons and more, the average email list can churn by as much as half each year. Here are some things you can do:
- Send re-engagement campaigns – Identify your subscribers that haven’t engaged (opened or clicked) in your email recently (anywhere from 3-12 months), and send them an email inviting them to opt back in. Share the value of your email(s) or provide them with a valuable offer. For those that don’t opt back in, unsubscribe them. You’ll lose a number of subscribers, but the reality is they were already ‘lost’.
- Test different cadences – Maybe the frequency at which you’re sending emails is too much for some subscribers. Or conversely, maybe you’re not sending frequently enough to keep them engaged. Testing different sending frequencies can help you retain more subscribers over time.
Whoa - too deep on email marketing? No problem, get in touch with our email marketing experts to guide you in the right direction.
Paid Digital Advertising
If you’re running ongoing digital advertising campaigns, it’s important to ensure that they’re being monitored and managed on an ongoing basis. The less attention they receive, the more likely they’re getting stale and underperforming. Here are some things to review:
- Ad Copy/Creative – Review all of your ad copy and creative to identify your top performers. Drop your low performers and build new ads based on your findings.
- Negative Keywords – If you’re running search ads, make sure you’re continuously adding negative keywords to guard against keywords or phrases that aren’t driving the right traffic.
- Bid Adjustments – In each platform, you should have an idea of whether your PPC bids are working effectively or not. If you’re able to bid slightly lower and still drive quality traffic, you might get more bang for your buck. If there are certain audiences, devices, time zones, etc. that are performing better in search, you can add bid adjustments to favor those higher performing segments.
Social Media
Social media may be the platform that gets the most ongoing attention, assuming you’re posting on a regular basis. In addition to reviewing your goals for each channel, there’s some additional fine-tuning you can do to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward.
- Review branding – Each network will have several branding opportunities, including banner/header graphics, avatars, and room for a description and links. Make sure these are up-to-date and compelling.
- Take advantage of unique features – Depending on the network, there may be new or unique features that you can take advantage of. For example, LinkedIn allows you to add a Careers page and Showcase Pages. Facebook allows you to add and integrate a number of pages and apps – everything from information to contests.
“Tidying orders and relaxes the mind”
Said best by Marie Kondo herself, the act of tidying and organizing your organization’s digital assets at least once a year can create incredible operational efficiencies. Wait too long and you’ll be faced with a pile of digital clutter that is too mountainous to overcome.
And don’t forget, if you’re overwhelmed with where to start and ready to transform your digital marketing efforts, let us know!
