Winter is trickling away and the rays of spring have hit our corner of the globe. Lengthy park picnics are beckoning our names, sandals are reappearing after months of hiding at the back of the closet, and an overall sense of freshness permeates the air.

So, why not take the opportunity to dust off your digital marketing strategy and spring into a successful end to the year?

To help you along, we’ve prepared a comprehensive checklist to guide you towards getting your digital marketing sparkling like new.

Declutter your social media

A good start to your digital spring clean is by giving your social media campaigns a good-and-thorough tidy. Over time, channels such as Facebook and Instagram can get a little sloppy, especially if they are being handled by multiple people over different periods. For each social network your brand is active on, you should undertake the following:

• Comb through your followers and the accounts you follow, and cull any that are fake, irrelevant or inactive
• Get rid of any content that is too far distanced from your brand
• Delete any graphics or images that don’t match your brand’s visual style (this is a biggie on Instagram, where you reaaaaally want to establish an instantly-recognisable design)
• Respond to any comments (both positive AND negative) left by your followers

Throw out old keywords

Next step is evaluating your SEO campaign and disposing of anything that is no longer providing you value. If you’ve been sticking to the same keywords for years, it’s a good idea to check over your list and try to:

• Reassess your current phrases and work out if they’re still performing as you would like them to
• Ditch any keywords that are no longer relevant to your business – for instance, locations that you no longer service, or products you no longer offer
• Consider adding a keyword-based AdWords campaign to your strategy to boost your search results 

Give your website’s nooks and crannies a good scrub

Websites are highly complex structures full of many different crevices that can easily be neglected. As a result, there are plenty of opportunities for cobwebs to accumulate. We suggest tackling those forgotten fissures with a few steps:

• Ensure all links take your users to the relevant pages, and that any broken links are amended ASAP
• Consult your analytics and find out which pages aren’t performing as well as others
• Re-evaluate your headlines and call-to-actions. Are they generating results? Do they have a clear purpose?
• Delete any outdated information and consider giving your current content a bit of a refresh
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
• Check that your website is consistent and reflective of your brand’s identity

Freshen up your emails

It can be easy to hide behind automated emails when you have tonnes of other things to tend to, but the fact still stands that this is a core furnishing to your digital marketing strategy. Email marketing helps build and maintain positive customer relationships, and in order to make sure you are getting the most out of your business’s emails, we suggest trying the following:

• Make a comparison between the emails that are receiving the highest open rates and those with the lowest. What do the more successful ones have in common?
• Check that all your email links and contact information is up-to-date (you won’t believe how many businesses out there move offices or change phone numbers and forget to update their email signatures)

Buff-and-polish your branding

From time to time, it’s important to take a step back and take a good, hard look at how your branding is travelling. When was the last time you worked on it? If you’re scratching your head trying to backtrack more than a year ago, it’s a probably a good idea to do a few simple things to spruce up your style: 

• Make sure all branding materials – from your logo to your colours, taglines, letterheads and fonts – completely reflect your company’s identity. Tighten and tweak anything that needs fixing.
• Consider branching your brand into new avenues, such as investing in some fresh new merchandise to act as a marketing vehicle 

Just like your brick-and-mortar home, your digital marketing strategy needs a bit of lovin’ to get noticed. Shake out that dusty welcome mat and turn your marketing into a warm and inviting space bristling with satisfied visitors.