5 Ways to Give Your Brand and a New Year Spruce Up!

No one feels their best in January. It’s a long and dreary month full of reflection from the previous year. But, reflection is good.

Reflection = Improvement.

Even if your brand did brilliantly last year, there’s always room for improvement. We think everyone can benefit from a New Year spruce up, and if that’s something you’re interested in then read on for 5 awesome ways to get sprucing!

Spruce Up Your Existing Content!

As we mentioned above, January is a time for reflection. So, why not reflect on your content from 2014?

1. Did It Work?

Did all of your content work as well as you thought it would? Or are you unsure? An easy way to find out is to look at the social shares and links each piece of your content received. A quick comparison will make it clear exactly what your customers want from your content, and you can move forward from there!

2. Expand Your Horizons

If last year you only posted blog articles and a few ebooks, then why not improve on that this year? Spruce up the kinds of contents you display, maybe start a newsletter. Or, get visual by posting infographics and videos.

Spruce Up Your Social Media

Social media is so huge that these days it may be the first place a new customer, or client, spots you. So you’ll want to be looking your best!

1. Delete Neglected Accounts

If there’s a social media site that you no longer use, just bite the bullet and delete it. Better customers don’t find it at all, than find it with a six year old profile photo and incorrect contact details.

2. Stop Selling, Start Sharing

Social media is where people share things with their friends. If you don’t abide by this etiquette, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb!

Start asking questions, find out more about your followers, and let them find out more about you, and more about the personality behind your brand.

3. Branch Out

As well as the typical social media sites, why not start visiting forums that are specific to your industry? For example, if you sell skincare products it would do wonders for your image if you began answering people’s questions on skincare forums. Giving your expert advise away for free is sometimes the best way to gain a loyal customer.

Spruce Up Your Visuals

Don’t feel like if you spruce up your visuals you’ll need to do a full re-brand. As long as you keep the general colour scheme, logo, and font the same, almost everything else about your brand can be spruced up regularly.

1. Freshen Up

By changing simple things such as your website header, social images, maybe even your staff photos on your ‘About Us’ page, you can keep your brand looking fresh with minimal effort. It’s not uncommon for brands to spruce up like this on a monthly, or even weekly, basis.

2. Get a Video

If you already have a video, get another one! Video marketing has absolutely exploded in the past few years, and video consumption is growing all the time, with 4 billion videos being watched on YouTube every day. In fact, a third of ALL online activity is spent watching videos, and consumers are 73% more likely to make a purchase after watching a video. Need we go on?!

Spruce Up Your SEO

You may think your SEO is as good as it’s going to get, but what are you basing that information on? It’s difficult to know if you are doing all you can to optimize your search results without doing some basic tests first.

1. Refresh Your Keywords

Try Googling some keywords that you would expect your customers to search for. How high up did you appear in the search results? If you were the first organic result then great! If not, you might want to take a look at all of your previous content. Go as far back as you can and begin sprucing up keywords. SEO was very different five years ago, compared with today, and you might have been using techniques that are no longer very popular **cough** keyword stuffing **cough**.

2. Clean Out All Of Your Skeletons

Whilst you’re sorting out your keywords you might as well fix broken links and redirects too. If you’ve deleted a page, or moved it but left the old link floating around then people will click on it now and again, and when they do, and they see that error message, your brand looks bad.

Spruce Up Your Blog!

Let me begin by saying if you don’t have a blog then you should definitely be panicking. Blogs are absolutely essential for increasing brand awareness and drawing customers to your site.

If you already have a blog then congratulations! But, I’m afraid it’s not time to sit back and relax just yet, there’s more cleaning to be done.

1. Add Structure

If your blog doesn’t have structure already then you should think about implementing one. This will let your users (and also Search Engines) know when you’re going to be posting, and this should increase your views. Maybe even add this info to your About page — e.g. ‘New Blog Every Thursday!’

2. Add To Your Blog

After adding structure, you may also want to commit to posting more often than you do at the minute (a great New Year’s Resolution!). Studies have found that companies that blog 20 or more times in a month see the most return in traffic and leads. It’s also a good idea to let customers know what they’re getting, for example, ‘Moisturising Monday’ and/or ‘Treat your skin Thursday’.

3. Giveaways

Everyone loves a freebie! Set up a giveaway post on your blog and see how well it performs. If your traffic considerably increases then maybe this is something you should incorporate into your blogging regularly.

Final Thoughts

So, that should be enough to keep you busy until the end of January! We know that cleaning up is no-ones favourite job, but it really will make a difference. Did we miss anything on our list?

Let us know in the comments box :)

5 Ways to Give Your Brand and a New Year Spruce Up!