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25+ Spring Cleaning Marketing Ideas to Do Right Away · Talk Copy to Me | Content + Copywriting Podcast

• 0:00
  Erin Ollila: It is springtime in the northern hemisphere, which means it is brighter outside and it is getting warmer. If you don't know this about me, this is pretty much the moment that I live for all year round.
• 0:10
  Erin Ollila: Seasonal Affective Disorder is such a thing specifically in the Northeast where I live. Why?
• 0:19
  Erin Ollila: Because the wintertime is cold, it is snowy, it is gloomy. It is icy, it is slushy, and the list could go on. So having it actually be spring is just thrilling to me, so that we don't talk about the weather forever, which of course is any adults favorite pastime. We are going to jump right into this episode. Today. We are here to embrace this spring spirit. It's not just time for cleaning up our physical spaces. But it's also an awesome opportunity to look at our marketing efforts and start to make some decisions on whether what we're doing is working or not. So today we're going to spend some time talking about how to spring clean your marketing efforts. Let's jump in. Hey, friends, welcome to the Top copy Timmy podcast. Here, we empower small business owners to step into the spotlight with their marketing and messaging.
• 1:15
  Erin Ollila: I'm your host, Erin Ollila.
• 1:20
  Erin Ollila: Let's get started and talk coffee. All right, let's start this episode talking about websites. There is so much that you can do with your website when it comes to spring cleaning. If you remember from the episode that I launched, maybe in the end of December, I talked about how to make some website updates. And I mentioned that at the beginning of every year, there are a few key tasks that I do specifically with my website. However, at that time, I'm not doing a full audit and update until this time of year now is when I actually look at my website and do a complete and comprehensive review. The first thing that I do when I look at my website is to look at the copy. Now I'm not doing any updates to my copy at this point, it's really important to point that out because if you start looking at your messaging, and you determine that there are some adjustments you you want to make, you're immediately going to go into the brainstorming mode of how to make those adjustments. Don't do that it is a distraction. Simply take a note, you know, I literally go and review the page by page to see if the messaging is still correct. And if there's anything that needs to be adjusted or updated. And I take notes on those things that I find. So for example, if you have a services page, do you still offer those services? Have you added any on an about page? Have you gotten any maybe major awards or certifications in the past year that you should include? If you have a media page? Well, what's been happening? Have you kept it updated? Have you been featured in the press? Or maybe if you are doing speaking events? Are you adding them to your speaking page or an events page if you have it? So that's a real quick overview of how I review a copy and messaging on my site. And again, don't do the work here, friends just make the notes.
• 3:15
  Erin Ollila: Once that's done, I'm going to look at the more technical things. So for example, is my site speed. Okay? We all know that a slow website is the fastest way to lose visitors. I do check this throughout the year, I will say that, and I do have certain tools that helped me maintain a good site speed.
• 3:35
  Erin Ollila: But I always make sure that the tools that I'm using are the ones that I want to continue paying for. In that same token, I'm going to really reflect on the SEO efforts of the past year. What's changed? Are the keywords that I'm trying to rank for actually ranking. Have they lost position? Are they the right keywords, maybe they've gained possession. If there's anything that I should do to adjust my SEO strategy, or refresh the meta descriptions, the alt tags, the image titles, that will make it clear to the person who is clicking into my website as to what they'll get on the page. Once they come over, then I'm absolutely going to make sure I prioritize that during my spring cleaning.
• 4:20
  Erin Ollila: You're also going to want to make sure that your website is Mobley responsive. Does it have anything that looks funky when you see it on the size of your phone or a tablet say is the sizing off, just go page by page looking at your phone, clicking on the links, looking for size discrepancies and take notes.
• 4:39
  Erin Ollila: And then if you're obviously doing the website yourself, just make those adjustments later or just send them on over to your website designer or your website team so that they can make those adjustments for you. You're also going to want to do an accessibility review. We have talked about this a few times.
• 4:58
  Erin Ollila: On the podcasts, and I will make sure to link to episodes that we did with Aaron Perkins about accessible websites, and with donburi Shin about global inclusivity, with websites in our show notes so that you can kind of get an idea about the importance of inclusivity. But you definitely want to prioritize this on your annual checklist. Another thing I want you to focus on is conversion and user experience. These two elements are quite honestly often left out when it comes to designing and writing copy for websites. But they are some of the most vital things that your website needs to actually be strategic. And because they're often forgotten about when it comes to websites, and you're doing your annual review, it can really help you understand like, Okay, well, maybe if I just update my calls to action, my conversion rate will increase, there's a good chance that could happen. I mean, I can't promise that, especially if your DIY angle website update, but looking at the tiny things like that, like buttons, for example, will make a significant difference in regard to user experience. I also want you to think about the traffic route of your website, are you actually encouraging the end user to click into a specific page or to take a specific action with the copy that you're putting on the site or the design elements? So for example, if you're a service based business, is there a very clear route from the homepage to the Services page? And I don't just mean a main menu navigation bar at the top of the page that they can click on. I mean, actually, are you introducing them to the idea that they should check out your services and giving them in a direct route, like a hyperlink or a button to click over to your services from your copy on your homepage? If not, we'll adjust that, obviously, or add that to your list of things that need to be adjusted. If you are, that's great, take it at an advanced level and ask yourself, Okay, well, how many clicks? does it actually take them to travel the route that I want them to take on my website? You know, are they going to the right places.
• 7:18
  Erin Ollila: Something else that's super important to consider it's kind of a mix of user experience, conversion, and copy all in one place, is the outline of the message on your page. This is something that I'm often adjusting when I do copy VIP days, or I'm editing DIY copy with my copy coaching clients.
• 7:40
  Erin Ollila: The key thing you want to consider when you're looking at the page in its entirety is, am I presenting the information in the correct outline that helps people make a conversion based decision? Regardless of the the decision you're asking them to make? Whether it's joining a newsletter, book, a discovery call by a product, you know, request service information? Are you giving them the information they need at the right time? Or are you just supplying them with like an endless supply of information, which frustrates that user journey, because they're getting information they don't need before they get information that they do need.
• 8:22
  Erin Ollila: Okay, I could stay here talking about this all day. We all know how passionate I am about websites. But we are going to stop here talking about spring cleaning websites in general, because I think that the tasks that I've given you in regard to reviewing your websites, is actually heavy tasks on their own rates. So we're going to move on, and we're going to talk about social media marketing, the easiest spring cleaning effort is just to update your profiles and your bios. To be honest, I definitely have not touched any of my BIOS or my profiles in probably at least the past whole year. I probably did this last year, because it's just a normal part of my process. But this is one of those easiest switches, right?
• 9:08
  Erin Ollila: This easiest action that you can take two, update and spring clean your social presence.
• 9:17
  Erin Ollila: Think about are you using the right words to describe yourself to the people who are reviewing your social media profiles? Who are you even talking to on social media? Oftentimes, I see business owners speaking to an audience that's not necessarily their ideal audience to purchase their products or their services. So consider who your audience is or who you want it to be. And then use that information to reflect back on how you introduce and how you present yourself to them.
• 9:50
  Erin Ollila: Especially if they're new to you, and they're not already in the world in your world.
• 9:54
  Erin Ollila: You're also going to want to review your content strategy. So why are you posting what You're posting, is it working? People are not getting the same amount of views on their social on their social post, they're not getting the same amount of engagement. And it's very frustrating. And I think what I'm seeing, again, this is just the outsider's perspective on a very small batch of individuals who I'm friends with, I pay attention to, or I talk to online. But what I see happen is instead of pivoting and making adjustments, it goes dark, right? So they're frustrated that they're not getting the views. And then they stop posting for a few weeks out of frustration. And what happens?
• 10:36
  Erin Ollila: Well, in turn, what happens, I can tell you, because I've done this myself many times. But what happens is, if you don't post for a little while the momentum is gone within that algorithm that you've trained. And obviously, this is not exactly how it works. But you kind of have to rebuild the momentum and teach the algorithm to share your content to the followers that you have, and to new people, if you've ghosted, your social profiles. So if you're in that situation right now, obviously, don't despair, there's really nothing you can do except to make the determination that you're going to put more effort into the content strategy, the posting the actual follow through of getting that content strategy onto social media in the future.
• 11:24
  Erin Ollila: Another thing you could do if you're looking to do some spring cleaning with your social media marketing is to update your followers and the people you're following. I do this every once in a while, it's probably been a couple of years since I've done this, but I will go through manually the follower, list the following list and just delete a whole bunch of people, whether it's that I'm viewing their content, and I don't want to whether it's that I don't get shown their content anymore. And I'm not really interested enough in trying to seek it out. Again, I just kind of use some of these key questions or things to consider when I'm reviewing. And I think that an adjustment of cleaning up your followers and following is kind of a good way to reset that social media platform algorithm. Because it really does adjust what the what the algorithm is going to show you in the future. And I've always been really pleased when I've done this, because it's like, after it's done, I'm always thinking like, wow, my feet is actually pretty nice again, or I'm getting information that I actually want to see. Another thing to consider is the tech tools that you're using for social media, like schedulers, for example, or if you're using something like many Chat, where you're encouraging people to comment on a word, and you will send them a link in DMS, I like to review the tech tools I'm using and say well is the price I'm paying what I want to be paying, am I using this enough to justify the price, or in an opposite way, maybe I should upgrade and get a higher plan because I'm usually utilizing it well, and I want to utilize it even better. A spring cleaning audit is a great time to just review all the tools that we're using and make sure we're financially making the best investments for our own business. And I don't do this, I will say but a tip for you, if you're looking to really Spring Clean your social media is to take a peek at your competitors and do a competitor analysis, especially if you have a lot of extra time for this task. So one, are you inspired by anything? Are there any insights that you glean from reviewing their content that you would love to take into your own marketing efforts? To a completely different perspective? Is Are you overwhelmed with competitors? I think this is a really important one for people to consider. If so, that's when you absolutely need to do an unfollow. I think it's a lot of times I think it's so easy to get into this ecosystem of people who do similar things as you do, or are within the same section of an industry and you're really all just consuming each other's content. So if you do a competitive analysis for social media, and recognize that you don't want to see these people anymore, it's a great time to unfollow and cleanse your feed.
• 14:13
  Erin Ollila: And this isn't something that you have to feel bad about either. If you listen to last week's episode where I talked with Matt, Maggie Patterson, about running an online business, you know, one of the things we talked about was just how the way that other people present themselves online can make us as an individual and as a business owner, feel bad about our own business when oftentimes they're not presenting a clear or completely truthful picture of what's happening in the business. So if you are triggered and or if you are uncomfortable, or if you are just overwhelmed by your competitors know that what you're doing is just something to help yourself. Focus on the more important things of business so that you're not paying attention to whatever What else is doing, and that's okay. And to round up this social media conversation, one thing I want to talk about is that you don't actually have to be on social media. I know I've given you tips on how to audit your social media, but you can actually completely skip social media if it's not for you. In fact, we had a really awesome episode with Hillary re on running a business completely off of social media. And I will put that in the show notes for you so that you can listen and make decisions on whether your time that you're spending on social media is valuable, and how you could potentially consider what to do if you decide to not use social media for your business. So maybe that's just something you review this year. And if you decide to spend less time on social, then you'll have less work to do next year. Or maybe you will just review it every year and make sure that you are spending the right amount of time doing social media, or not doing social media. Alright, let's move on. Because we talked about this for a little while we're going to talk about email marketing, there is so much potential with email marketing in your business. And if you're looking for a task to start doing this spring cleaning of your email marketing efforts, I highly recommend starting with your email subscriber list, it is one of the easiest things that you can do, by you know, cleaning your email list. And I know you've worked really hard on getting followers. You know, we've talked about this when Cheryl was on the podcast just a couple of weeks ago. And when Liz was on the podcast the week before that, with the amount of effort that you put into getting followers, it can feel really anxiety ridden or frustrating to lose them. But inactive subscribers are not helping you they are hurting you. So go through your list to determine if you have a cold subscriber list, and maybe do an email sequence to try to get them to either reengage or allow them to unfollow you on their own.
• 16:59
  Erin Ollila: Whoever is left at the end of that sequence, who hasn't taken an action should really be deleted or cleaned or culled from your mailing list, so that you can better serve the people who do want to be on your mailing list. You could also look at your email design, when you're doing some spring cleaning for your email marketing. I'm pretty sure that I've spent seven years just having like a standard normal text white background email, and that was fine. It served me well. But it maybe it was last year or a little bit more than a year ago, I implemented a design and I've kind of stuck with it. And now I kind of like it, it feels like I am actually producing a newsletter now. And not just sending out a few emails here and there. So again, no one is like emailing me to thank me for the design of my emails. But by adjusting the layout, I am now better able to present the right information to my email subscribers. So and it also makes it easier for me to do my job like writing. If I'm going to share a new podcast episode, let's say, I know based on the template that I have what I want to say, I want to introduce the podcast, I want to provide the links for people to go listen to the podcast on their own, or check out the show notes. And then at the end of the email, I'll just add a conclusion and be on my merry way. Before having that template set up, I would sit down to a blank screen every single time I send an email. So developing a layout or a theme for your emails is very helpful to actually getting your email marketing done on time, done consistently. And if you don't have one now maybe that's something that you do during your school, your spring cleaning efforts. Just like your website and your social media, I'm also going to suggest doing a review of what you're sending.
• 18:54
  Erin Ollila: So the content strategy behind your emails. Do you like the way that you communicate with your email followers? If you don't guess what, you don't have to communicate that way. So often, when I work with clients on larger copy projects, let's say a website rebrand. They'll say to me, Oh, I email every week, but it's just such a hard task.
• 19:16
  Erin Ollila: It's so consuming. I have no momentum to do it. And I'll tell them like you don't have to email every week. Like you can set up whatever schedule works for you. Maybe you do want to stay with a weekly cadence, but you find a different content to talk about that you that gives you more momentum or excitement to sit down and write that email. Maybe it means you move move to a bi weekly or a monthly schedule. If you don't feel good about your email marketing, you're going to have a hesitation to do it. And you're it's likely that your subscribers are going to notice that hesitation and that you're not as invested as you could be.
• 19:53
  Erin Ollila: So that's one way to take a content strategy review of your email specifically. But speaking of strategy, I definitely want you to review any automations you have set up, or email sequences you may have set up.
• 20:12
  Erin Ollila: This is one of those very important things that I pay attention to within my own audit. There are many times where I will read in a sequence of my own, let's say, and be like, Oh, my gosh, I have a time sensitive piece of information in there. You know, like I mentioned the year 2022, it's 2024. Now, how did I not notice that before today, so just knowing that I'm going to be reviewing it at least once a year, makes me feel a lot more competent about inserting some time sensitive things, because I know that they will be reviewed.
• 20:46
  Erin Ollila: But it's also something that falls through the cracks. So definitely add that to your task list. And finally, if you are not getting the best open rates, if you are not getting the highest click through rates, maybe just do a quick analysis of what you're you're doing. So are you choosing the correct send times? Do you have and pasting subject lines? What little things can you improve to increase the attention that you get from the newsletter that you're putting so much work into? Okay, let's shift slightly and talk about a written content. I purposely separated written content away from website copy. Because the content that you're doing in writing for your business could be things like blog post, it could be case studies. And I think it's very important to look at it from a different lens. So first, how is it working? Are you proud of the content that you've created? Is there anything that just from reviewing it quickly, you can take some notes on for improvements, or quite the opposite, maybe you want to celebrate and continue doing some of these things, you definitely want to look at your older post. While you're doing this to see if you can refresh any existing content, it is so much easier to refresh well written content than it is to start from a blank page, you've already done the work. So this ties in really well to SEO, do your SEO analysis of the content that you've created, because you need to keep a fine tuning and SEO strategy. SEO is constantly evolving. And you want to make sure that the longtail keywords that you're using, and the SEO best practices that you are hopefully following are still really consistent with those changes to the SEO landscape.
• 22:35
  Erin Ollila: When you're done your SEO analysis, I want you to think about your publishing cadence.
• 22:43
  Erin Ollila: So a lot of the times what I see is that there isn't a cadence of posting, or at least there isn't a consistency. And I get it, it is hard to be consistent with written content, it takes a lot of work. I think that consistency and cadence is so helpful to get people to come back to your blog, just using blogging as an example. So that they continue to consume your content. So if you can't post every week, that's fine. Maybe you just use this time to make the decision to post every month. That's it, just 12 posts a year, and you'll be able to build a better research and writing period into the content creation phase. So that, you know, maybe writing is less overwhelming to you. If you know that there's only 12 versus 52 blog posts that you're writing.
• 23:32
  Erin Ollila: That's the vast difference. It's 40 articles, 40 posts that you don't have to do. So it, it's not so much that you have to publish in extreme amount of quantity for good SEO or good client nurturing. It's that you have to have quality. So I want you to focus on a sustainable quality for you. I mentioned this in my predictions episode, but I want to bring it up here again, because I would look at whether or not you've created any user generated content. Or if you're using user generated content that was shared with you, like testimonials and reviews or community stories. If not, is there a way that you can incorporate that into your content strategy? Again, maybe this content strategy is what you're including on your website, or within your emails or social media or however you use it. user generated content has really really good conversion rate, especially if people feel like they can trust the person who's created the content on their own. Now staying with written content as an example, if you do have user generated content that you're not actively using, review it to see can I turn this into a blog post or much better yet, can I turn this into a case study? So you write up a case study about the client project that you worked on and you include the A user generated content from that client within the case study, because that's going to be so much more impactful than just you using your own words to describe what the client experience was like. We're going to move on slightly because I want to talk about the tools that you're using when it comes to content. It again, this reminds me of what I said in social media, you should be reviewing any paid tools for the content that you create, like you're using, let's say, I'm specifically talking about written content. But I'm going to move over within this topic to talk about audio and visual content. Because I do know that I have a lot of tech tools I'm paying for to create content, a big example of this podcast, or for the YouTube channel that I'm starting, because I'm using some of this podcast content. And that's filmed and I'm pushing it to my YouTube channel. So there are a lot of tools that I use to make that happen. This year, I'm going to be looking at the tools that I'm paying for and making decisions on whether there are still the the tools that I need to do this, or do I need more, maybe, I think so often that we're when we talk about financial decisions with tech tools, we talk about lowering our prices. But sometimes it's really important to actually increase what you're doing with your tech tools, so that you can have better capabilities and make this process go faster, smoother and better.
• 26:27
  Erin Ollila: Okay, since we've kind of shifted away from written content, let's just stay here for a second and talk about audio and video content that you're creating. Just like you did with your written content, you want to do an overall review to make sure that the content you're creating is what you want it to be. If you need to adjust your content strategy at all, now's a good time to think about that. What did you do that needs improvements? What did you do that was really well received that you want to continue on doing in the future. You also want to make a note at this time, though, if you have ideas for content that you think would be fun to try. Or if you're interested in doing something that you haven't done yet, take some time this year to test things out. When it comes to longer form, written content, video or audio content. Testing is one of the absolute smartest things that you can do. Small businesses tend to shy away as far as they can possibly get as possible from testing. But testing is so helpful. This is specifically why big brands have really highly performing content. It is because they are willing to take some risks with their content, and see what works for their individual marketing plans. Another thing to think about when it comes to content of all sorts is accessibility features. So make sure that you're following best practices. Just off the top of my head. Some things to consider are including subtitles or captions in your videos.
• 28:03
  Erin Ollila: Providing transcripts for any audio content that you have. A performance review is something I think would be really helpful.
• 28:11
  Erin Ollila: Like when I'm recording this podcast, right now, I'm sitting in my office, I'm staring at like the side of my computer screen. I'm not even looking at the camera section, I'm talking right into the microphone, and I am trying to finish recording this within the next two minutes, so that I am not late to pick up my child from school.
• 28:31
  Erin Ollila: I think we can all agree that that is not the best recording situation. I should have extra time built into this process that I'm doing. I should have maybe quality sound checks that I'm doing before I start recording. So review your most recent content and ask yourself, Where can I improve on my performance? It's really easy to skip this part because we're obviously judging ourselves. But check out some of the content that you've created and make some decisions on whether you're making the best choices. Maybe it's as simple as getting a new mic, like if your mics not working as well as you'd like it to maybe getting a ring light if you don't have the best lighting, which if I record, actually, I was just gonna say if I record after 4pm I have horrible lighting in my office.
• 29:19
  Erin Ollila: I'm sitting right in front of a window. So during the day, I have great lighting. But friends I forgot It's spring now. So I can actually record at four o'clock and not have to worry about it being pitch black outside. What a wonderful thing to bring up again, since I started talking about my love of spring of the beginning of this episode. That was a fun thing to figure out as I recorded this, but back to the point because there still is a point here.
• 29:42
  Erin Ollila: Look at the performance that you're giving and rate yourself.
• 29:45
  Erin Ollila: Take notes on how to improve. I know it's difficult, but working on your own individual performance. Whether that's how you write your your long form written content How you record your episodes how you look when you're doing a video for your YouTube channel. If you can be honest with yourself and provide quality feedback to yourself, you can improve and make it that much more engaging in the future. So that's it, friends, there you have it. It's a comprehensive guide to spring cleaning your marketing efforts.
• 30:22
  Erin Ollila: Whether you spend the most of your time optimizing your email campaigns, refreshing your written content, checking out and refining your social media presence, or updating your website, the time that you spend doing this will be better served in the long run, a thorough cleanup can really refresh the strategies that you've had. And you know, it's springtime. So it's time for new beginnings. I hope that you do take this opportunity to review, revise, and I am going to be really corny here and say rejuvenate the marketing that you've been doing. So that's it for this week. Friends, I will be back next week with a case study that I'm doing have a client that we just finished creating their website. What's really fun about this particular case study is the client I'm working with is a website designer. So I think it will be really interesting for you to tune in and hear how we both had to adjust our own processes in order to get this website and the messaging and the design as awesome as it is right now. As well as allowing you to hear what it's like to work with me. I've only done one other behind the scenes episode on this podcast. It is actually our highest performing episode.
• 31:35
  Erin Ollila: So I'm assuming you guys like to hear what it's like behind the scenes in my own business. But this is my first time doing a case study and an exploration of what it's like to work with me with a client. So I'm excited about it. I hope you're excited about it. And I hope you'll join me back here next week. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Top copy to me.
• 31:58
  Erin Ollila: If you enjoyed spending your time with me today. I would be so honored if you could subscribe to the show and leave a review. Want to continue the conversation. Head on over to Instagram and follow me at Erin Ollila. Until next time friends