5 Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Digital Marketing Strategy

You've fertilized your lawn, cleaned out your shed and feel organized at home just in time for the warmer weather. But how many of you think about spring cleaning and reorganizing when it comes to your digital business strategy?

As PR and social media professionals, it's imperative to check in on your online campaigns and strategies a few times throughout the year to determine initial results and reactions, and make sure you're still on track for success. With the first quarter of the year behind us, spring can be the perfect time to review analytics and adjust or refresh strategies to guarantee they're squeaky clean.

To get started, carve a few hours aside and follow these simple steps:

Revisit and Renew Your Goals

Don't forget to go back and review the goals you set at the beginning of the year, and ask yourself whether any of these goals have changed since then. Using analytics tools take some time to review the first quarter performance of each of your social media channels and determine which ones drove the most traffic and conversions, which were underperforming, and pinpoint areas which need improvement. Facebook and Twitter have these sort of analytics built right in, and tools like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Moz, and Buffer, can help you fill in the gaps.

Set new goals for your team especially in content style and format, frequency of posts and tone of voice to meet your communications objectives, while also paying close attention to your target audience.

Clean Sweep Your Accounts

Privacy and data usage is a big problem these days. Although this tends to be more of a problem for consumers, still with recent upgrades to Facebook and others, hundreds of services may have access to your social accounts and company information, even if you inadvertently gave them permission.

Get rid of the cobwebs by doing a clean sweep of all your accounts, look for any applications you've authorized and specific data they use. Change the settings to make less information available, or remove them completely. Especially be mindful of apps that can tweet on your behalf. Clean up your social passwords to make sure they're secure and separate from other online outlets such as your website and blog.

Polish Up Your Social Profiles

Social media profiles are an extension of a company's brand, so make sure your corporate profile is a shining representation of that brand. To stay in line with the spring cleaning theme, go through your bios and about sections (or avatars) on ALL of your social channels and make sure you update with consistent messaging for a fresh polished look that's shiny and new.

Any social profiles that are incomplete can be perceived as lazy or spam, such as when posting on Twitter with the generic egg image, which will only deter your audience from engaging with your brand. While you're cleaning things up, look for sections to add new, fresh images, links to your additional social media networks, company blogs and any other materials that showcase your brand and spark conversation.

Don't Forget to Deep Clean!

An easy task that can make you feel organized and focused right away is cleaning up and deleting friends and followers that don't have a significant voice or following in your industry. It's typical to accumulate these people over time through the “add friend” or “follow” button, without giving much thought to who you're connecting with. However, research has shown that influencer engagement can trigger up to six times more traffic to your brand's website. So these are the people you want to focus on and engage with through relevant and compelling content. Targeting social media influencers will help boost your SEO, increase your brand's image as a leader in your space and impress new followers (potential customers) that matter.

Spring Shopping

Once you've updated your current profiles and swept away unwanted spam, followers and apps that have collected like dust bunnies, it's time to evaluate whether you want to invest in any new features, services or channels. For instance, LinkedIn's Showcase Pages are a great way for businesses to showcase their brands even further.

As always, you don't need to jump onto every social opportunity available in the market, rather select those outlets that make the most sense for your business or brand. It's better to be actively involved on a handful of channels than have multiple networks that have gone musty and flat.

Finally, ensure your audience is connecting with you and you're interacting with them. Monitor messages across social platforms to understand what resonates with your target audience and influencers, and be ready to give them more. Stay on top of new trends and think creatively about how to execute new campaigns that drive results.

If you're looking for an even more advanced deep clean, here are some tips to get all of the nitty gritty off of your profiles:

• Create Twitter Lists of users by groups and topics so you can more easily manage what your influencers are talking about and sharing in curated streams.
• Clean up comments on your social channels, but also maintain your company's transparency. Deleting negative comments from customers regarding your products or services is not advisable -- even if you feel like you've already addressed them. But ridding your Facebook page of random posts and spam only entails a quick review that will be beneficial long term.
• Make sure pins on all of your Pinterest boards are still valid, check links and delete pins that don't work or are no longer relevant to your business or brand.
• Maximize your social online presence with custom landing pages from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to capture email addresses for lead gen.
• Optimize your online content in social networks for the mobile user's consumption. Use video and shorter text that's easy to read and digest from a small screen.