Keep Your Eye on the Ball
The first rule of marketing: Stay on it.
The market changes and you have to change with it. It’s easy to become complacent once you have established your company’s brand and have marketing collateral in place. Our advice is to schedule a spit-and-polish every three months; you’ll see a difference. Here’s what to look for as you clean up your messaging and collateral.
- Content. Is your web or print content outdated? Do you have a new product or service, or has your market shifted? It’s easier to edit frequently than to do a complete overhaul. Make frequent tweaks and updates to your website content, and scan your brochures, newsletters and email campaigns to replace stale information.
- Images. Images become dated very quickly, especially on the web. Fashion, hairstyles, computers and phones all age at a rapid pace, and consumers notice. Replace your stock photos with more current images, or with conceptual images which have a longer life.
- Print. Are you favoring digital and neglecting print? Print is trending again. Convert your web content to a newly designed brochure or postcard campaign. Make sure you have hi-res images required for print, and use a designer who has print design expertise and relationships with quality printing companies.
- Digital. Flip #3 on its head and ask yourself: Can my print content can be migrated to the website or an email campaign? If the content is timely, why not try a different medium?
- Social media. Reconfigure your web content for your social media accounts. Post snippets from your blog to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Reuse dynamic images from your website. Find common threads in our current culture that may have a tie-in to your company and services.
- SEO. The rules for being found on the web are ever-changing. Have you kept up? If not, your website is likely suffering in page rankings. You should have implemented an SSL certificate within the last couple of years, as well as posted a privacy policy and cookie disclaimer. Both of these were major changes in the way Google ranks websites. And recently, Google announced it will publish your site’s favicon in search results. Does your favicon qualify? Get on it!
- Trends. Don’t ignore major trends in design and marketing. How can your company benefit? It’s worth looking into what is becoming accepted instead of viewed as a one-off. Stay nimble and curious; your attitude will be reflected in your collateral.
