Business Spring Cleaning Checklist
Spring is just around the corner and it’s time to do some cleaning - yes, in your business too.
Spring is the best time to clean out the clutter and get organized, not no — not just in your personal life, but in your business as well. While it's important to keep the front end of your business polished and customer-facing, it's equally important to give attention to the back end. In this blog, we'll outline a spring cleaning checklist to keep your business in tip-top shape for the rest of the year.
WORKFLOW & SYSTEMS
Starting off strong with workflows and systems, which are the first things we want to identify and look at. This can include identifying areas that are causing bottlenecks or inefficiencies and finding ways to streamline or automate these processes. Here are the workflows you want to look at:
Sales workflows, which involve identifying potential customers, building relationships with them, and ultimately closing deals. Our top tip for this one is to go through your sales workflow yourself (or have your team members, coaches, friends, and family do it for a more objective opinion) and check for gaps, areas of improvement, efficiency, speed as well as readability & clarity. Be as objective as possible.
Marketing workflows, which aim to attract and retain customers through advertising, content creation, and other promotional efforts. Look at your entire 360 marketing strategy, beyond social media.
Customer Service workflows, which are focused on providing excellent support to customers, addressing their concerns, and ensuring they have a positive experience with the company. Top tip: send out an email to previous customers who were in touch with customer service, and ask them to rate your service out of 5.
Operations workflows, which encompass the day-to-day tasks involved in running a business, such as managing inventory, logistics, etc.
Finance workflows, which are responsible for managing the company's finances, including budgeting, accounting, and financial reporting. Have a meeting with your accountant and look at your numbers!
WEBSITE
To spring-clean your website, here’s a list of things to do…
Go through each page and make sure that all information is up-to-date and relevant
Check that all the links are working and that there are no broken images or videos.
Make sure that the website is easy to navigate and that visitors can find what they are looking for quickly!
You should also review the website's design and layout to ensure that it is visually appealing and consistent with your brand image.
Get feedback from customers or team members to see if there are any areas that could be improved or if there is anything missing that should be added to the website.
Review your website analytics and your traffic from Q1 of 2023, as opposed to last quarter.
If you ever need website help, we highly recommend Danielle from Finding Design UK!
BRANDING & PHOTOS
It's so important to keep your branding and photography fresh and up-to-date. Regularly reviewing and updating your branding and photography (if needed) is a great way to refresh your business and keep it relevant. We recommend reviewing your branding every 6 months to a year. We don’t recommend changing it that often — only reviewing it! You might find that it doesn’t need changing, or that you need an entire brand refresh, or that you just need a few tweaks. It’s also important to stay consistent & cohesive in your brand identity, as that builds trust between you and your customers as well as creates a lasting impression. If you need support in branding, we highly recommend Özge, from Your Virgo Season!
Your photography also plays a key role in establishing your brand identity and can have a significant impact on how your business is perceived. Up-to-date and high-quality photography can make your products or services more appealing and help attract new customers. How often you have new photography done will depend on the type of business you have as well as its size. For service-based businesses, we recommend having photography done every 6 months or so. For product-based businesses, you might need professional photography every 3-6 months. If you want to book professional photography, we highly recommend Emma! You will probably want to book UGC (user-generated content)-style more often, approximately every month or so. We offer this as a service for brands that just want content, as our 1-Off Content Creation service, which you can read more about on our Services page.
SOCIAL STRATEGY & UPDATES
Our favourite topic! Updating your social media strategy is crucial to staying relevant and maintaining engagement with your audience. Avoiding this task can risk your social media falling behind, lacking engagement, and being “outdated”. Here is a list of things we recommend evaluating:
Stay up to date on social media algorithm updates - which you can do by subscribing to our newsletter, in which we share all social media news of the week, every Monday
Stay up to date on the newest social media features (which you can also do by subscribing to our newsletter) and explore how you can use these in your content
Stay up to date on the latest trends and explore how you can be bold & forward-thinking in your industry by implementing these into your content
Research what your competitors have been posting in the last 3 months. How is it different from your content? What are their strengths & weaknesses in comparison to your brand? According to your findings, where can you update your strategy (content pillars, etc)?
Check your analytics from the past 3 months, for your organic & paid efforts. Which areas need more improvement (i.e. Reach, Engagement, etc.)? According to your findings, what will your action plan be to improve them?
These are a couple of things to start thinking about, and if you don’t know where to start and you already know that your socials aren’t performing to your standard, our 1-Off Strategy Curation Service is for you, which you can read more about on our Services page.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Regularly reviewing and updating your website and social media channels is crucial to ensure that your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is effective. To achieve this, it is important to conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases that your target audience is searching for. Incorporating these keywords into your website content and social media posts is essential to boost your overall visibility and therefore, attract more traffic to your website. Here are a couple of things you can start with:
Use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find relevant keywords and phrases.
Analyze your competitors' websites and social media profiles to see what keywords they are using.
Incorporate long-tail keywords - these are longer, more specific phrases that are less competitive than shorter, more general keywords.
Test your chosen keywords by incorporating them into your website and social media content, and monitor their performance over time to see if they are driving traffic and engagement.
Read our previous blog post, linked here, and watch the video we created for this blog on how to find keywords on the app!
TEAM
Review your team’s overall performance to make sure everyone is clear and working towards the same goals. We also recommend reviewing your team’s overall satisfaction and mental health. Check-in with them, see how they feel they’re performing, and if there are any changes you need to make in your back-end processes to facilitate them. You can do this by scheduling a team meeting to review goals and catch up (which you should be doing regularly), as well as 1:1’s with your team.
