Looking for Lemonade: Clean Out Your Marketing Attic

In this content series, we aim to help marketers and agrimarketers alike find opportunity in these trying times, without looking overly opportunistic (no hoarding of hand sanitizer here). As such, we’ll look at some of the common challenges (the Lemons) we are all collectively facing and highlight potential solutions/opportunities (the Lemonade).

The Lemon: You’ve Completed the Usual Housekeeping Items (i.e. Emails, Desktop Files, etc.)

The Lemonade: Focus On Brand and Digital Housekeeping Instead

For years, I’ve enjoyed working during the winter and summer holidays as it would inevitably provide ample time, free of the usual distractions of emails, calls, meetings, etc., to do some much-needed housekeeping. These efforts would typically focus on items such as catching up on older emails, cleaning up both my digital and physical workspaces and doing some writing (i.e. blogs, reports, proposals, etc.).

Now, in a time of self-isolation like never before, I’m guessing that many of you have taken some time during the last few weeks to dig into similar housekeeping tasks. And, furthermore, unlike the amount you can get done during the few days provided by winter holidays, you may find yourself coming very close to actually completing these tasks. So, instead of trying to find more of these menial tasks to fill your time, why not turn to some more impactful and less obvious brand and digital housekeeping instead.

It’s an undisputed fact that the world has more brands and digital properties than it needs. This is typically because it is much easier to create than it is to eliminate. As such, there is a very good chance that you, as a marketer/agrimarketer, have excess brands and digital properties in your portfolio that are taking up time, money and effort year after year. Furthermore, these brands and digital properties are competing with and distracting you and your customers away from the more valuable brands and digital assets that should be receiving your attention and investment.

While there are a number of ways to determine where and how you should purge, it is sometimes best (and easiest) to start with what we call the Parking Lot Exercise. Similar to the approach of cleaning out an attic by lugging all of its contents out into your front yard and determining which items to keep based on whether you would go through the effort to lug them back up to the attic, assume you have magically emptied your brand and digital assets into your company’s parking lot and now have the ability to bring back only those you believe are worth the effort. Inevitably, this exercise won’t give you all of the answers but will provide you with a pretty good idea of both your top keepers and losers, allowing you to focus your efforts on the next steps to come.