One great aspect that comes with the changing of the seasons to spring is there is more daylight – giving one the impression there is more time in the day. While you know that isn’t true, in our busy and chaotic lives, anytime you can feel that you have extra time can be energizing. Perhaps that is why many use spring to clean.
Just as many may use spring as their excuse to clean, it is always a good idea to periodically reevaluate the tools, technologies, and practices to market your business. See what is working and what is not. Doing so enables you to take advantage of newer methodologies and technologies that can prove to be more effective. With the proliferation of new tools available, there are plenty of budget-friendly as well as efficient means to gathering and distributing content, capturing and measuring leads, running email campaigns and measuring ROI.
“Take a risk and keep testing, because what works today won’t work tomorrow, but what worked yesterday may work again.”-- Amrita Sahasrabudhe
With Google changing their algorithm for mobile search, now is the time to ensure your website and content will not only display correctly but that your site is usable via mobile. Make sure your fonts are large enough to view whatever the mobile screen size, your buttons are not too close together and links are easy to click. Your content should load quickly – plan for slower Internet connection speeds like G3, as Google will penalize you for slow load speed.
In addition to reevaluating the tools you are using, it’s also a great time to consider what other media you can integrate into your current marketing plan that would benefit your business. For instance, 57% of marketers are now using video. Video is a great way to demonstrate the use of your product, provide trainings, or tie your product into a historic or pop-culture event. While it is difficult and really not necessary to have a presence on every social site available, if your target audience is now spending time on Twitter and you aren’t active, now may be the time to establish your presence. On the other hand, if your efforts on a social site are not producing results, it may be time to refocus your energy elsewhere.
Take a fresh look at your content. When creating new content, are you taking advantage of the multitude of ways to present that content? A video can be transcribed and turned into a blog. A blog can be broken into a number of tweets and posts. Stills from the video can be posted on Instagram. You can even turn the content into an offer to attract and gain more leads. With the effort it takes to create new content, leverage that content to reach and engage.
And finally, measurement. What aren’t you actively measuring that you should be? Many evaluate the numbers of visitors and new leads from the latest campaign. What about correlation? At what point are visitors converting into leads, how about leads converting into customers? Having a deeper understanding as to the conversion point can help your marketing and sales teams be more successful in reaching out to a prospect at just the right point in the buyer’s journey.
“It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” -- Jeff Eisenberg
Just as you plan the development of your content with strategies, tactics, and distribution, it is also important to periodically reevaluate the tools, technologies, and practices to market your business. See what new automation tools are available, learn about the latest algorithm updates from Google, discover new technologies to incorporate into your content marketing plans, evaluation the effectiveness of your content distribution efforts and make sure you are getting the meaningful information from your data. Incorporate an evaluation into your marketing plan and consider this one way to continually improve your marketing operations, which improves your content marketing effectiveness and improves your overall business.