How to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy

You’ve probably cleaned out your house countless times, but have you ever thought about sprucing up your marketing strategy?

Spring cleaning is a great tradition. After spending months cooped up indoors, it’s a chance to refresh and refocus for the second half of the year. Why not apply that same energy to cleaning up your marketing strategy as well?

Step 1: Organize Your Efforts

If your team has been winging it, take this time to meet and document your marketing strategy as best as you can. Make a list of the different efforts you want to focus on this year, and fill in as much as possible. How are you reaching you social media goals? Content Marketing? Branding? Networking?

Creating editorial calendars and written strategies that document your plan keeps focus sharp long-term.

Step 2: Polish the Important Pieces  

It’s easy to neglect your platforms once they’re set up and rolling smoothly. Don’t make the mistake of accepting “functioning” as “succeeding.” Use this spring cleaning exercise as an excuse to do a self-audit of your platforms, content and brand

Start by pulling all of the data you can—analytics on everything you have. Take a look at them, one by one, and ask yourself questions such as:

Social Media

  • Which social media platforms are generating engagement? Is the engagement valuable (i.e. is it leading to conversions?)
  • Which aren’t? Is it because you don’t have an audience on the platform? Is it because your audience isn’t present on that platform?

Brand

  • A brand evolves over time. Is yours still speaking to your audience? Is it still representative of your company?

Content

  • Which topics resonate well with your audience? Is your content actually useful, or is it just a sales pitch?

By cleaning up and polishing these important aspects of your business, you reboot your entire company’s vision and focus.

Take Out the Trash

Are you wasting your energy on duds? Marketing in general takes a great deal of resources, and there’s no point investing resources into a void.

Now that you’ve audited and seen the analytics, you have a better idea of what’s working and what’s not.

To invest your resources wisely:

  • Be selectively social: Having a dead Instagram account linked to your company’s homepage weakens the company’s brand as a whole. If you haven’t posted in months, let it go.
  • Go through the mail: email marketing analytics make it easy to see which email addresses are responsive to your campaigns. If there certain email addresses that always bounce or end up undelivered, delete them. This will make your analytics more accurate and provide deeper insights.
  • Back up your brand: Content that no longer speaks to your brand or provides no value to your customer is the marketing equivalent of having shag carpet in your living room: it sets a bad (and wrong) impression. Let it go. 

Stock up on Essentials

Now that you’ve figured out your plan, dusted off and re-booted your strategies and optimized your efforts, it’s time to make the rest of the year go as smoothly as possible.

Having a generous backlog can ensure that there is always quality content coming out, without having to worry about falling behind during a busy week.

  • If you have a content calendar, try to work 2-4 weeks in advance. This keeps pieces timely, yet provides enough leeway to fall behind every now and then.
  • If you don’t have a content calendar, try to make one for the next quarter or the rest of the year. Keep in mind important company events, holidays and promotions.
  • Make an email marketing idea list. It’s hard to come up with new and engaging topics every week, so having a list of fallbacks and sure-winners helps streamline the process.
  • Stock up on visual content (such as pictures and videos) that you can easily pull from to post on Instagram, Facebook or blogs.

Do You to Spring Clean Your Marketing Strategy?

Try to remember how good it feels to sit in a nice, clean room and how glad you were that you finally got around to cleaning it.

This year, focus on achieving that same feeling for your marketing strategy:

  • Organizing your efforts: make your goals easy to find and easy to maintain
  • Clean up your presence: make sure your brand and its assets are helping and not hurting you
  • Invest resources wisely: don’t keep dragging along dead initiatives
  • Keep a backlog: Having content to pull helps streamline your strategy

Different Strokes for Different Folks: Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

How to Sell a Knife

I’ve always found Cutco’s business model fascinating. If I had to try and sell kitchen cutlery door to door, knives wouldn’t be my first choice (for various reasons). So say what you will about Cutco’s high school and college sales reps—they they know how to sell knives.

The fact that Cutco’s business model holds up at all is a testament to their targeted marketing. They know they’re a B2C knife company—they’re the only one I can think of—and so they market their knives differently than B2B knife brands like Shun or Zwilling that sell directly to stores.

Which brings us to the topic of this blog post.

Marketing to B2B vs. B2C

Marketing of all kinds has only one goal: sales.

The strategy used to achieve those sales, however, differs when marketing to other businesses versus directly to consumers. While B2B marketing is more relationship driven, B2C marketing is more product driven, and these factors need to be taken into consideration when creating a comprehensive framework and strategy.

Who are you talking to, again?

As we’ve talked about before, finding your ideal voice is crucial to business success. Your B2B voice should probably be mature, professional, and knowledgeable. When writing for businesses, you have to consider all of the people you need to sell your product to before reaching the decision-maker. This can include managers, directors and even the C-suite.

On the other hand, your B2C voice could be very colorful or conservative depending on who you’re targeting. After all, there are a lot more individual customers out there than there are businesses. Keep in mind that when writing for consumers, you’re typically only talking to one person—the decision-maker.

Are you speaking their language?

The right content types differ for B2B vs. B2C marketing strategies as well.

In B2B marketing, longer, more technical pieces fare better than the personable, pithy pieces that are staples of B2C writing.

In fact, according to research from the Content Marketing Institute, the most popular content marketing methods for B2C brands are:

  • Social media
  • Illustrations and photos
  • Newsletters
  • Videos
  • Blog posts

B2C tactics revolve around engaging and delighting the individual consumer. In contrast, another study from the same institute identified the most important B2B Marketing tactics as:

  • In-person events
  • Webinars/webcasts
  • Case studies
  • White papers
  • Videos

The B2B tactics revolve around creating relationships (e.g., through in-person events, such as conferences or trade shows) and developing an authoritative brand (through highly detailed thought leadership content, including white papers and videos).

Takeaway: the decision-makers at businesses make decisions based on logic, rationale, and budgets, while general consumers are more impulsive and make decisions based on their emotional state.

Are you ready to create your own strategy?

It’s not complicated to  figure out how to tailor your marketing strategy to meet your needs, even when considering B2B vs. B2C. When creating a strategy, consider:

  • Generalized vs. Tailored: B2C businesses can afford to talk to a large audience. Consumer purchase decisions are usually based off simple needs, while business purchase decisions are usually very specific, and need to fit the complex needs of an entire business.
  • Emotional vs. Logical: Decision makers at businesses are focused on budgets, benefits, and efficiency. Consumers are focused on happiness.
  • Engaging vs. Valuable: (Most) consumers don’t spend hours and hours trying to decide whether to buy from one company or another, but you’d be hard pressed to find a  business that doesn’t vet all its vendors. Businesses want to see that they’re buying from professionals that understand and care about their specific needs, while consumers want to know they’re buying from a brand that has the same values.