Spring is the time to refresh and renew – even your small business marketing!

With warmer temperatures and longer daylight hours on the way, spring is a time to refresh and renew. This applies equally to home projects, wardrobe changes and re-assessing your small business marketing. It’s easy to just let things lie or “hibernate” during the winter months with a functional website and a few social media posts. But come spring, it’s time to take a fresh look at how your marketing is really functioning. Is your website optimized for ever-growing mobile traffic? Are you consistently engaging your followers on social media? Are you driving traffic to your website? If not, you are turning away potential customers. Follow our 6 tips to re-engage, refresh and renew your prospects:

1. Refresh your email template from a multi-column look to cleaner, single column design. If you created your email template a year or two ago, you were probably not concerned with it being mobile-friendly. Today, mobile email will account for up to 70% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and email type. eMailmonday– “the Ultimate mobile email stats” (2015). Make sure your emails are optimized to be viewed on a mobile device by choosing a single-column template and make sure any buttons or links are “thumb-friendly,” meaning large enough and spaced out from other text so as to be easily clicked by a thumb.

2. Just as your email needs to be mobile-friendly, your website needs to be built with a responsive design. Your site should be optimized so it looks just as good viewed on a large desktop screen as on a tiny Apple Watch. Responsive design is the new norm in web design so now is the time to move to a responsive web platform. According to Google, “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” (Read more here.) So get yourself a responsive, mobile friendly website or you’ll end up sending all your mobile prospect to your competitors.

3. Does your Facebook page have cobwebs? Time to engage your customers. Make sure you have a strategy in place to post regular updates on your social media pages. In this digital age, prospects expect to see recent and relevant activity on social media and are quick to unfollow those pages that are not kept up-to-date.

4.  Declutter and refresh your website. Do you have outdated content or non-functional links on your website? Those could be costing you business. Take the time to “clean house” and make sure your links and contact information are up-to-date. Delete older content and refresh with current news, updates and photos. If you are in e-commerce, it’s a good time to take inventory and delete slow or non-selling products. What a great excuse for a “Spring Cleaning” sale!

5. Time to refresh your logo? If your logo looks like it was created in the Dark Ages before Photoshop, it could probably stand a refresh. Even the most well-known brands tweak their logos every once in a while to convey a new modern feel. Even if you don’t have a huge budget, there are many affordable design services available today to help.

6. Analyze your metrics and re-assess your strategies. It is essential to use website monitoring tools, such as Google Analytics, to know where your traffic is coming from. If your organic traffic is slowing down, you may want to revisit your SEO strategies. Adding new content to your website (see #4) is imperative to keep you relevant and ranking high in organic search results. Now may also be a good time to invest in some paid search or digital advertising to boost traffic to your site and increase your pool of potential new customers.