Spring is here and it’s a time for flowers blooming, birds chirping, longer days, and… spring cleaning. As a business, spring should signal a time for you to take a deep dive into your company’s overall digital marketing efforts and your website success. Is your business’s online presence in need of a refresh? Spring is the time to refresh your online marketing efforts.
Tips to Refresh your Online Marketing Efforts
Complete a Website Review
Throughout the year people are continuously adding and changing things on their websites. This can lead to typos and mismatched information. Spring is a great time to complete a thorough review of your website. Go through every page and make sure that the information is correct and makes sense to you. Click on all the links to ensure they are still clickable. Over time, links can break or change, so it’s important to make sure that they are still working as intended.
A quality website is orderly, well-organized, easy to navigate, clear/concise, current in style and layout, functional and fast performing, branded, and motivates the visitor to do business with you. 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive. Does your website fall into this category?
Make sure that your website embodies your brand. As time goes on, brands shift and sometimes the website is forgotten about or does not speak in the same tone as the rest of your brand. Your brand is your business’s identity. Branding is one of your company’s most valuable assets and is one of the things that is easiest for you to control. Is your website still speaking as your brand?
Make Updates to your Website
Not only is spring a great time to review your website, it is a good time to replace old images and add new ones. This will refresh your online marketing, adds a new look and feel to your website, and can be exciting for and reengage visitors who you do business with often and who visit your website frequently. While it is suggested to change images on your website throughout the year, it is often forgotten.
Review conversion rates and the pages you are losing customer interest on. Take this information to rearrange or reword the page. If something isn’t working, try something new. As you are going through the website as a user, make note of the things that make you stop or catch your eye, and either change them (if it was in a negative way) or do more of them throughout your website (if it was in a positive way).
Business owners often forget to make website updates to contact information, employees, press articles, etc. as they change during the year. Take this time to make updates to all those things, should you need to. If you have your team highlighted on your website, having new head shots and photos can also refresh your website.
Review your Local Listings
To start, as we have mentioned before, you need to take ownership of your business listings. If you have not done so yet, you should do that now. Business listing management has become a key component to your local business not only being found, but being discovered by the right audience and telling the proper story. The foundation of successful local marketing is clean data and accurate listings. Brands lose a huge amount of local business every year due to inaccurate online listings.
Go through all the major search engines and search for your business. Is the information provided complete and accurate? If your business has moved or has a new phone number, the local listings could still be reflecting the old. A study of online business listings found that nearly half are missing crucial pieces of information. Missing or incorrect information will cause you to lose business.
Check your Social Media
Businesses are either very active with social media or extremely passive when it comes to their social. If you haven’t stayed up to date on your social media accounts you may have missed messages, comments, and general opportunities to connect to your customers and potential customers.
You should review your social media with the same fine-toothed comb as your website and local listings. Make sure all your information is complete and accurate, still reflects your brand, and make updates to images to give your social a new look and feel and create excitement. Updating your social media accounts is a key step to refresh your online marketing presence.
If you don’t have a social media strategy, there is no time like the present. As we have discussed before, there is an increasing need for brands to establish a 2-way conversation with consumers and to connect with them on matters that are most important to them. Genuine engagement and relationship-building are the key factors in creating a healthy customer experience and online presence.
Spring is the perfect time to clean up and refresh your online marketing efforts. You don’t have to do it alone. Water Bear Marketing will help you with all your advertising needs. While we won’t clean your house or business for you, we will help you spring clean your online marketing efforts and overall website performance.
We believe that in today’s world, there is no room for guessing with your advertising dollars. Contact us today for a free consultation and to “spring” ahead of the competition this spring.