With spring inevitably comes “Spring Cleaning”, a phrase often used at home but it also applies to business. Spring is a time to review and evaluate your businesses’ marketing efforts over the last year. Most small businesses in Northern Ontario can look at this time as a catch up and review, you may have just finished up Valentine’s season if you are retail, gearing down from Winter tourism and gearing up for summer activities and consultants are looking at RRSP and tax season approaching as far as marketing efforts are concerned.

As March 31 year-end approaches for many organizations, now is the perfect time to review your last year of operations and look at your ROI (Return on Investment) for your marketing and advertising. Did your marketing obtain the objectives that you set out? Did you meet your sales targets, did you increase market share and customer base? These are things you should be asking yourself and your agency before heading into another year with the same approach.

At VS Group, we believe it’s important to understand our approach and why the process is crucial to a business owner. As a marketing firm servicing small and medium sized business owners we rely solely on ROI, if you are successful we are successful. Every spring we have new clients come to us that may have been serviced by other firms or coordinating their own marketing. We audit their existing marketing practices and advise them with proper planning on the most effective ways to promote their business and get real returns.

It is easy to be impressed by an entertaining principal or quirky office only to later realize that the price for showmanship was their own companies’ ROI. We have seen many business owners fall into this trap, rarely to see any ROI.

If you feel your companies’ ROI is suffering look at these important Spring Cleaning Tips:

• Review your website – is the information current and accurate, is the look reflective of your current brand image, is it mobile friendly, is it selling your products or services or simply an online listing?
• Review your advertising strategy – with over 3500 ad impressions a day, your customers need to be intrigued by your ads, the fact that you have an ad is not enough anymore, are you advertising in the most effective media with the most effective message or are you simply advertising because that is what you did last year and the year before that?
• Review your online strategy as it relates to your marketing materials, your advertising, your website, do you use social media and how all of those communications tie in together.
• Look at where you are spending the bulk of your marketing dollars and then take a look at your target market, do the two match up or are there more effective alternatives for your money.

These are just a few of the basic things when doing a Spring Cleaning for your brand, we have saved clients tens of thousands of dollars a year and increased their ROI in some cases by more than 15% in direct sales by implementing these types of changes. You don’t have to invest more in most cases, you may just need to assess your placement.

If you are interested in marketing strategies with real results, do a little spring cleaning and take a look around at your organization’s communications, you will be surprised at what you are paying for.