Tips for spring cleaning your marketing strategy

As a full-service agency, we’re used to planning our construction marketing strategies ready to start with a bang in January – but with the first quarter at a close, and the new financial year starting for many businesses, early April is a great time to take a fresh look at your marketing strategy and adjust your plans for the rest of the year.

Here’s how we recommend giving your marketing a spring clean:

Decluttering your marketing plan

While it may seem counterintuitive for a marketing agency to advise you to undertake less marketing, sometimes less is more!

This especially applies if you’re focusing your efforts on the wrong channel or the wrong customer group. A leaner marketing plan that better serves your target market is definitely a better strategy than a scattergun ‘see what sticks’ approach to marketing. Or perhaps you wanted to start out with a broader target market, but now there’s a need to narrow it down to a particular customer group, which might mean segmenting your e-marketing lists or switching up your PPC target audiences.

As an example of where a channel may no longer be serving its purpose, we have advised several clients to reduce or cease posting on X (formerly Twitter), and are recommending undertaking a more strategic, SEO-driven social media strategy on alternative channels instead. This is in response to declining engagement on X for our B2B clients – that time is certainly better spent elsewhere.

Step back – then delve into detail

When devising our clients’ marketing strategies, we always start by considering their customers and what they need. Once we have a clear sense of the issues facing the customers, or other stakeholders, we can work backwards to create a strategy that puts them at the very heart of our clients’ marketing plans.

The start of the second quarter is a good time to apply this same principle: step back from your day-to-day activity and ask yourself whether your strategy is still centred on your customer. If not, you need to readjust.

Once you have determined this, you can comb through the detail of your marketing tactics and ensure that they are all serving this central, customer-focused strategy.

Don’t fix what isn’t broken

While change can be a good thing, don’t be tempted to fix what isn’t broken. Make sure that any adjustments you’re making aren’t knee-jerk reactions by tracking your marketing performance year-round and looking closely at what is not working – and what is working well.

Tracking your marketing strategy against KPIs set at the start of the year is a good start, and the end of each quarter is the ideal time to do this work. You can look at what is or is not providing a good return on your investment by ensuring you are looking at your business objectives (such as sales targets or customer feedback) as well as your marketing KPIs.

From there, it is not always the case that you need to remove something from the strategy – perhaps your fresh start looks like doing more of what really works. That could mean shifting towards digital channels rather than physical collateral, or undertaking more direct marketing to a robust customer database rather than solely social media.

How to get started with your ‘spring clean’:

1. Go back to your original marketing strategy and track your first quarter’s activity against the goals you set. What’s missing, and what are you doing too much of?
2. Re-read your first quarter marketing reports. At Harris we include a lot of detail in our client reports, including recommendations for the month or quarter ahead, so there should be plenty of data and opportunities to work through.
3. Look at what your competitors are doing – but don’t assume that they know your customer better than you do. They’re probably looking at your activity with envy too…
4. If needed, and if things are not going as well as you would like, consider running a customer insights programme. This research can be vitally important in getting under your customers’ skins and understanding exactly what they need from you.
5. Don’t assume everything needs to be ripped apart and started again. The chances are that your marketing strategy was robust when you and your marketing agency first devised it – so it is probably more in need of a little tidying rather than a whole new look. Be confident in your knowledge and trust your marketing agency to have your customer in mind, always.