Whether a small business or a company with over 1000 employees, every business needs a marketing plan to stay on track with business goals and budgets while maximizing opportunities. In the past, the key to success was revisiting marketing plans annually, but today, modern marketers recommend reassessing more frequently.

In the AMA New Orleans hosted webinar, Spring Clean Your Marketing, three panelists, Malcolm Schwarzenbach (Partner / Director of Brand Strategy at Trumpet), Tristan Babin (Field Communications Advisor at Phillips 66), and Christine Briede (Executive Director at The Jefferson Foundation), shared their tips on keeping marketing plans up to date in an everchanging world.

Do Reconnaissance, Not Research. 

Do not limit yourself to preliminary research. While routine checks on your competitors and industry are encouraged, it is important to look beyond the numbers and gauge sentiment regularly, whether through social listening, focus groups, or surveys. While data informs a lot of decisions, understanding how your business is perceived allows you the opportunity to market more effectively.

Stay Nimble.

Despite the varying industries in which our panelists work, they all agree that being nimble is your best asset. Nothing goes as planned, as COVID taught them, so their advice is to be adaptable and move forward. 

Spring Cleaning Marketing Checklist

The beginning of Q2 and Spring is the perfect time to do a marketing clean-up if you haven’t already. Here’s where to start:

  1. Review data and consumer sentiment. Develop next steps and redefine objectives. 
  2. Go through website content and social media profiles to ensure information is up to date. 
  3. Scrub email lists, removing hard bounces and unsubscribes. 
  4. Examine social media efforts and plan the marketing calendar for the next quarter. 
  5. Perform photo cull. Organize usable images, and discard/archive images that are no longer relevant. 
  6. Monitor your online reputation across platforms, looking for reoccurring themes. 
  7. Review keywords and audience targeting, updating where necessary.
  8. For security purposes, review platform access and update passwords.