Spring Cleaning Your Business in 5 Simple Steps

When was the last time you took a good, hard look at how your business operates?

Whether you've added new team members, expanded your product line, or shifted your target audience, a lot has probably changed (even from this time just a year ago).

Some changes are obvious, like a shift in employee culture or the launch of a new marketing campaign.

But the processes running them in the background? Broader shifts in buying behavior? Not so much...

That's why you take the concept of spring cleaning from home to your business.

What we mean by "spring cleaning":

The concept of spring cleaning is simple: out with the old, in with the new. 

Specifically, that means refreshing your approaches to marketing, customer engagement, and internal processes to better align with current trends and achieve your business goals.

The process involves:

• Evaluating your current approach in those departments
• Identifying what's working and what needs improvement
• Implementing changes to become more efficient, eliminate excessive costs, and make room for new ideas and strategies

5 steps to spring cleaning your business

The good news is, auditing your business processes and strategies isn't as overwhelming as it sounds.

Let's dive in.

1. Evaluate your mix of organic vs. paid marketing.

Newer businesses tend to invest in paid ads because they're easy to track, right next to the money, and deliver immediate results. While there's rarely a reason to axe them altogether, it's important to periodically reevaluate your mix of organic vs. paid marketing.

What are your CPL and CAC for each channel? Compare these costs to the return they generate, then clear out the strategies with a low yield and high cost.

With your leftover budget, invest in organic activities like social media, content marketing, and referral campaigns.

2. Look at your current methods of customer activation.

When it comes to organic marketing, your current customers play a critical role. Their advocacy helps you market to and close new customers. And their feedback guides your product roadmap.

But how much effort does nurturing and engaging with them require? A few signs you need to simplify the process:

• Case studies cost thousands to produce and take months to publish.
• You're exhausting the same three customers for referrals and references.
• Only a select few customers participate, and they require manual attention.

Deeto cleans up this mess by creating an ecosystem of customer feedback and advocacy. Customers onboard themselves, indicate their availability and contribution preferences, and your team can auto-pilot customer-generated content and feedback.

3. Assess your website interface and performance.

As you change your marketing and brand messaging, add new content to your site, and make updates to your products, ICP, and value prop, it's important to double-check whether your site reflects your current goals and strategy.

There are two main areas you’ll want to focus on: 

• Fine-tuning brand messaging. Do your website design and content address customers’ pain points and reasons to buy?
• AB testing to increase conversions. Small design changes, like updating a headline or changing the color of a CTA button, can have a big impact.

You probably don't need a massive overhaul, either. There are a few easy fixes you can make to up your conversions and improve your UX. 

Take social proof, for instance. Websites with testimonials receive 45% more traffic, and adding customer logos to your homepage can boost its conversion rate by up to 400%.

4. Closely examine your customer experience and buying experience.

Customers are simple. Whether they're making a purchase decision or are already a customer, they want three things: personalization, communication, and convenience.

You need to consider how your sales, marketing, and customer success operations contribute to or detract from that.

• For sales efficiency, eliminate unnecessary friction (e.g., approvals, multiple contacts) and make it easy for new customers to sign up and make changes to their accounts. Internally, give sales teams the tools they need to be successful (e.g., prospect-reference smart-matching for social proof and customer advocacy).
• Your marketing team should consider how effective their content is at buyer enablement. Do your web pages and articles give customers the information they need to evaluate your product? Are you providing timely and relevant content to customers at different stages of the buying journey?
• The CS team needs to look at how compelling their customer engagement strategy is. Participating in your advocacy program should be as guided and self-driven as posting an Instagram story. Engaged customers who want to test new products and features should be able to take part in that beta process without going through multiple channels just to receive an NDA.

5. Consider your tech stack.

Just like you'd periodically go through your personal subscriptions, you should review your technology stack. Most companies use dozens of SaaS apps, which fragment and bloat their internal processes.

Nowadays, more companies offer one-stop-shop platforms for your marketing, sales, or customer success activities. Opting for all-in-one tools means your team can manage multiple tasks without having to jump from place to place, and you can access all your data from the same dashboard.

Deeto cleans the messy middle of customer activation. Use it to manage advocacy, user-generated content, referral marketing, and feedback in one place. Request a demo to see how it works.