How’s Your Marketing Hygiene?

The effort required to keep your marketing in top shape may not be exciting—yet it makes a huge difference to your success.

It’s like brushing your teeth: If you don’t do it regularly, the consequences are ugly.

The unheralded regular, day-in-and-day-out maintenance activities required for marketing can make or break the efficiency and effectiveness of every marketing effort.

Will talking about list management keep your nonmarketing colleagues on the edge of their seats? Hardly. Yet if you don’t do it, your marketing will pay the price. (And yep, they’re going to wonder about that.)

Here—at minimum—are the activities that need to happen on the regular to ensure that your marketing engine runs properly:

• List management: Your e-mail list is a huge marketing asset and it needs constant love and attention. Scrub for duplicates, fix and assess hard and soft bounces, organize and bucket your contacts based on profile and behavior, monitor depletions and growth and trends, and so forth.
• Website internal links: Internal links keep people moving within your site (and make search engines happy, as all links do). Make sure all links work—broken links frustrate users and search engines and reflect badly on your company. Further, link old content to new content—not just new to old. Doing so requires constant link maintenance.
• Website external links: Are any links that take people away from your site taking people to places that no longer exist? This is another huge hazard for user satisfaction, company image, and search engine optimization. Continually monitor and update external links—and add external links to existing content where none may have applied in the past.
• Google webmaster tools: Check Google’s webmaster tools—which we hope you’ve enabled them on your site!—for alerts and issues. Google is fantastic about nudging people when it comes to areas of opportunity within their digital properties. Address issues as they arise within Google’s webmaster tools to keep and improve your place in search results.
• Digital ad optimization: We sure hope you’re not doing digital advertising—social media, search, and retargeting ads—without ongoing monitoring, management, and optimization. Digital advertising is not a “set it and forget it” tactic unless you want to waste a bucket of cash. The only way to get results is to continually optimize your activity.
• Social media clean-up: It’s easy to get into the bad habit of posting updates on social media without occasionally poking into the back ends and settings of these sites to ensure all your information is still accurate, that user permissions and security settings are correct, that the pictures and postings live on the sites pass today’s muster, and that your team has addressed all queries, comments, notes, and reviews. Make a regular task of deep-diving into your pages and tightening nuts and bolts.
• Listings: All the places you’ve listed your business—Yelp, Google Places, Bing Places, Facebook pages, Foursquare, Apple Maps, and so on—need to be continually monitored, updated, added to, and corrected. Don’t just toss up a listing and leave it in perpetuity.

We can go on—and on—yet if you cover these basics, you’ll be better off than most of your competition. Yes, it takes significant, valuable time form key professionals on your team that you might want to allocate elsewhere.

Yet remember: The people who win every game put in the grunt work every day—the losers just don’t bother.

FrogDog performs this regular maintenance for all its strategy + implementation clients. Need help addressing what you should do to brush your marketing teeth before your entire ecosystem gets out of hand? Call FrogDog to schedule a free consultation today.

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