After a very snowy weekend, along with the “spring forward” time change, and now a nice thaw, I am ready for spring! Time to refresh.
Spring buds will peaking through gardens all over in just a few weeks. Gardeners everywhere will be taking stock of what made it through the winter. Just like gardens get spindly and overgrown, needing maintenance in the spring, marketing programs can also benefit from some spring cleaning.
Now is the time to look at your current sales and marketing materials, yank out what’s not working and trim back the overgrown.
Did these four elements of your program winter well? Or do your sales reps talk about your current marketing and branding materials like this:
- Our website has too many add ons, separate pages and cross links. Have pages been added to products when they should have been in services? Are their broken links? Is there a section that doesn’t work for what it was originally intended for? Quick fix: Talk to your marketing group about redirecting 3 or 4 of the worst offending links to trim back the overgrown link or page growth. Don’t try to do it all right now, just the obvious.
- Literature is almost right, except for this old phone number and the photo of this ex-employee… and the paragraph about that discontinued product. You don’t might not have it in the budget right now to incur printing costs, but your sales professionals need current materials on their laptop. You also need current literature available for quick one-off printing for potential customers. Quick fix: Ask your marketing firm to make the update and send it to you as a PDF for electronic distribution, copies for each sales rep and posting on the website.
- Even our newest press release is 6 months old, so our “what’s new” link doesn’t lead to anything very timely. Press release links under your “what’s new” button don’t have to be earth shaking, but new is generally defined as 6 months. No doubt you’ve launched a new product, added a key employee or made some change that you’re currently talking about with your clients, employees and vendors. Quick fix: Why not write 2-3 sentences about it and ask your marketing firm to post it under the “what’s new” link?
- Our PowerPoint sales presentation to prospective customers still features the old new product we launched 18 months ago. Take a minute to flip through your “Sales PowerPoint” that you use to meet with new prospects or cross sell current customers. Ask yourself, is there anything outdated that really should be eliminated? Quick fix: Print it out in b&w with 2 pages to a hand out. Select 5 of the most outdated photos/phrases or pages for improvement. Pick up any new photos, new projects, new services that should be added. Ask your marketing group to make the updates and send to the sales group.
Sometimes we think it has to be some BIG NEW PROJECT to make an impact. However just some minor trimming, weeding and spring cleaning may be just enough to get your marketing materials ready for a renewed sales effort!
Jumping into a new big project is time consuming. Buy yourself some time by taking stock of your current program and freshening up a few weak areas. You’ll add quicker returns to your spring sales efforts.
