Spring Cleaning: A Marketer’s Checklist

Spring is in the air. The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and the sun is beaming. As the weather takes a turn for the better, the pollen is building up — and so is the dust on your marketing strategy. 

It’s high time to take a pause for a bit of tidying up. Enter springboard’s 2024 Spring Cleaning Checklist — a resource designed to help content and demand-gen marketers optimize their strategies, refresh their campaigns, and elevate their marketing.

Follow these steps to revamp, refresh, and revitalize your marketing to knock your 2024 goals out of the park. 

Content Marketing

Brand Voice and Aesthetic

• Review and update brand guidelines (as needed) for voice, tone, and messaging

  • Consider implementing approaches that reflect the current state of affairs

• Conduct a content audit to identify and fix inconsistencies in language

• Review and update brand guidelines for visual style, imagery, and design

  • Ensure your brand aesthetic is both modern and inclusive

• Conduct a content audit to refresh any imagery or visual examples that are outdated, feature broken links, or don’t align with your updated aesthetic 

• Provide training or refresher sessions for marketing team members on brand voice and visual style

• Implement tools or processes to maintain consistency across all marketing channels

Content Audit

• Take a complete inventory of existing assets

• Evaluate content performance metrics (see more below)

• Assess patterns in both top-performing content and areas for improvement

• Update or remove outdated or irrelevant content

• Develop or refresh your content calendar or plan for creating new, high-quality content

• Conduct a headline audit to determine top-performing approaches; fix under-performing approaches

• Assess and improve your content efficiency with big-rock thinking and smart atomization and repurposing tactics

• Ensure your content strategy is setup to speak to the current issues your various personas care about and addresses their pain points in a novel and impactful way 

Performance Audit

• Refresh your measurement framework to ensure it’s designed to convey direct ROI of your efforts and how they ladder into company-wide goals

• Schedule regular performance evaluations to analyze KPIs and goal progress on a consistent basis (monthly/quarterly/annually)

• Identify trends and patterns in data; be ready to discuss with team members at scheduled performance evaluations

• Assess the effectiveness of content messaging, formats, etc.

• Evaluate content engagement and conversion rates. Keep a watchful eye on misleading metrics. 

• Develop action plans to improve content performance

• Align action items with current marketing and sales goals

🩺 Related Reading: Health Check: 6 Questions to Guide You to Successful Content Marketing in 2024

Demand Gen Marketing 

Audience Targeting

• Refresh your various target personas and audience segments

• Work with your content team to ensure you have enough targeted content for each persona to cover all of your channels and planned demand-gen campaigns 

• Ensure you have a strong first-party data strategy in place

Data Cleanliness

• Review and update prospect databases

• Validate lead information

• Remove duplicate entries and outdated leads

• Optimize data storage and organization systems

• Evaluate attribution model tracking and effectiveness

Performance Audit

• Refresh your measurement framework to ensure it’s setup to convey ROI and ladders into company-wide goals

• Schedule regular performance evaluations to analyze KPIs and goal progress (monthly/quarterly/annually)

• Appraise campaign spends and their respective ROI; use insights to determine where to invest and divest for the rest of the year

• Assess lead quality

• Assess lead generation and conversion rates

  • Fix falling conversion rates

  • Lean into psychology to drive high conversion rates consistently 

• Identify areas for optimization with targeting, frequency, and content

• Develop action plans to improve demand-gen campaign performance

• Closely evaluate customer journeys to uncover and fix friction and failure points 

• Align action items with current marketing and sales goals

• Look for ways to strengthen your approach to preparing performance reports and demonstrating ROI on a regular basis

🗺️ Related Reading: 2024 Demand Gen Field Guide: Everything Marketers Need to Know