Does your online marketing need a spring clean?

• Stuart Russell (FindNetworkingEvents.com)
• Thursday 21 March 2013

1. What’s your plan?

Have a plan of what you want to achieve over the coming months and set some measurable goals. Do you want more visitors to your site? More subscribers to your mailing list? More online sales? Write down what your targets are and when you want to achieve them by.

2. Do you have a system in place to manage your contacts?

It is worthwhile using a proper CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to manage your contacts. Spreadsheets and an email system are fine but a dedicated CRM will help you manage your sales process far better. You need a system in place that will automatically remind to you take action and help avoid missed opportunities! There are a growing number of excellent low cost online CRM systems out there, we currently use onePageCRM.

3. Are you wasting too much time on social media?

Are you using Twitter productively? Concentrate on building a following of people who are likely to be interested in what you do, use tools such as Hootsuite to help you with this. Avoid too much self-promotion, tweet useful articles and try to interact with people you follow or follow you.

Make sure you are connected to your contacts on LinkedIn and regularly update your status to let them know what you are up to.

Join a few LinkedIn groups and initiate discussions on topics that encourage other people to get involved. Avoid spamming groups with links to your own blog. My experience running LinkedIn groups has shown that this tactic rarely get any discussion going and annoys other members!

4. Have you sent an email newsletter lately?

Email Newsletters are still a great way to keep in touch with your customers and raise awareness of your business. Focus on building your mailing list at every opportunity with quality, targeted contacts who have opted in to receive information from you. Make sure you have a prominently positioned newsletter signup box on your site.

How often you send a newsletter will be dependant on the type of business you are running. It should look professional and the content relevant and interesting to your audience. If you find you are getting a large number of unsubscribes then this is an indicator that your content isn’t engaging enough.

5. When did you last update your website?

How fresh is the content on your website? Is it still exactly the same as when you created it 3 years ago? If your goal is to attract more visitors who stay on your site for longer then you need to update your site more frequently. The easiest way to do this by adding a blog or regular articles. If you don’t have enough time to write content yourself then include guest bloggers on your site who can provide interesting relevant content.

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