I spend a lot of time in my yard these days. I know, it sounds like I’m in some kind of “suburban dad” phase but it’s actually because, last year, we completely renovated our backyard in Arlington, VA.  We removed the grass, installed planters (for both vegetables and annuals), put up a new fence and added a rock garden. The intention was to create something that would look good but be less maintenance.   

The truth is, the backyard still looks good in my opinion. But it’s hardly less maintenance.

Why? It’s the weeds.

It’s funny when we had grass in the backyard and an ugly shed, we never really looked at it or used it. I cut the grass every couple of weeks and occasionally trimmed some overgrowth but, for the most part, didn’t really maintain it. And it suffered. After we did the renovation and got things looking the way we wanted, we started inviting people over and using it more.  That translated into a greater urgency to keep the backyard looking good, which meant when a weed popped up, I had to pull it. And over time, the more the weeds invaded, the more I had to go out there and pull.    

It’s to the point where now I might go out and pull weeds twice a week.

The reason to bring that up is that it’s actually a pretty good metaphor for what you have to do when it comes to your marketing operations. After all, (just like my backyard), once you have the marketing system you want in place, you have to keep “pulling the weeds” in order to keep the system running well.  

The 6 ‘Weeds You Have to Pull’

When we work with small businesses on an ongoing basis, here are 6 of the most common “weeds” we have to keep fighting.

Weed No. 1 to Pull: Typos and Copy Mistakes

This may seem obvious. But typos or mistakes in your copy will most certainly hurt your marketing performance because they bring attention to your mistake, not the message you’re trying to convey. Many times consumers read into mistakes as a sign that you or your team may lack attention to detail, which can tarnish your reputation even if it’s not related to the products or services you provide. And look, we all make mistakes. That’s human. But if you do it often, it can be damaging.

• • How to address this systematically: One suggestion is to run all your copy through Grammarly, which can help you spot grammatical errors, typos and other issues. The other: Take advantage of AI such as ChatGPT, which tends to put out pristine copy, although the one thing to watch out for here is that the copy produced by a machine will often not say anything super substantive so you may need to edit it as well.

Weed No. 2 to Pull: Underperforming Ad Campaigns

Whether you work with an agency or you try to run ad campaigns on your own as a small business, one thing you need to constantly be on the alert for is underperformance. When you see it, just like our weed example, you have to pull it, so your return on ad spend (ROAS) remains strong. How do you spot an underperforming ad campaign? There are a few key indicators, though it can certainly vary based on industry benchmarks or other factors such as your own expectations:

• • A lack of leads or conversions
  • A poor conversion rate (compared to your industry)
  • Poor quality leads (which may indicate a need to improve your targeting)
  • A limited number of impressions or engagement (clicks)
  • No overall uptick in revenue over a longer period of time
  • Better performing campaigns in other areas (in which case, it may make sense to shift resources to those and away from the non-performing one)

• • How to address this systematically: For sure, it can often be a better decision to try to optimize your ads rather than simply scrapping them. But in some cases, it’s often the best path to simply use resources elsewhere until you have better fundamentals in place. One thing you can do is ask experts like us for an audit of your current campaigns. We’ll help you identify the effectiveness of all your ads, and make recommendations for areas of improvement where you can either pull the ads or optimize them.

Weed No. 3 to Pull: Removing Unengaged or Bad Emails That Clog Your Marketing Lists

As a small business, you might not pay attention to your email lists once you’ve acquired someone. But it’s actually really important. There are two parts to this that are worth noting:

• • Removing spam and;
  • Removing unengaged individuals.

Every two weeks, for example, I go in and try to clean out our email accounts and remove fake accounts/spammers. Despite our Captcha-based forms, we still get a few submitting phishing scams or fake inquiries (even through our captcha forms). Many of these come from Russia or other foreign areas. We clean them out because a.) Like many small businesses, we pay for additional subscribers over certain thresholds so cleaning these out keeps our costs lower, and; b.) This also helps to keep our email open rates decent on outgoing marketing communications as these fake accounts tend not to engage. Having solid email open rates is a key aspect of avoiding your email domain from being considered a spam provider, which means your deliverability will suffer.  

For unengaged individuals, why remove them from marketing communications? These are, after all, technically not spam, they have simply not engaged. But if you think about it, these individuals also not opened emails or clicked on anything you’ve sent, so why make your open rates suffer. That doesn’t mean you remove them completely from your list or those individuals can’t get a one-on-one sales follow-up, you just remove them from the broader marketing communications to boost your open rates.

• • How to address this systematically: First with spammers, we suggest adding some sort of verification on your forms (Captcha, etc.), especially if they are set up correctly to feed directly into your email marketing automation program. While that might not stop everything, it can certainly help. You can also try to add a few more qualifying questions to your forms (and make them required) to help you boost lead quality if that’s an issue. With unengaged emails, most email marketing automation platforms have suppression lists that you can create based on different criteria. Creating a suppression list of those who haven’t engaged with your emails in, say, the last 12 months, is not an unreasonable thing to set up and apply.

Weed No. 4 to Pull: Eliminate Off-Brand Colors and Fonts

We talk about colors and fonts quite a bit because they are a huge part of how a company projects its brand in the marketplace. Too often we see small businesses that don’t stick to their dominant brand color or use fonts that can vary wildly. When this happens, what that business is really doing is diluting their brand presence and making it less identifiable. Better to stick to a single, defined color palette and, if possible, use one font consistently[1], in headlines, copy – but also across all marketing materials, including the website, email, social media graphics and more.   

• • How to address this systematically: For both colors and fonts, one thing that we often say that helps is to create a brand guidelines document, which defines the color palette, logo usage, fonts and even keywords or other language around the brand. Once you do this, you’ll basically establish the rules around how your brand is consistently projected, which will be key to avoid any dilution in the marketplace.

Weed No. 5 to Pull: Stop Using Images with Large File Sizes on Your Website

With the great resolution available today in digital, sometimes we go into small business websites and see images uploaded on pages that are greater than 1 or 2 MB. Or, alternatively, with some of the page builders available, we’ll notice large images packed into an image defined for smaller dimensions. Both can cause big problems. Mainly, those images take a long time to load on the page. Slow page loading is bad for SEO and also a poor customer experience.

As a general rule, images used on websites should be compressed to less than 100kb in size, if possible. This will ensure optimal loading.

• • How to address this systematically: If you use a lot of images on your site and don’t want to go through the process of individually compressing all of them, you can look to plugins to help you with this. For example, if you have WordPress, we’ve used both Smush and Imagify, which can help you get existing image file sizes down to a reasonable level as well as compress any new images you upload.  

No. 6 Weed to Pull: Clear Up the Chokepoints in Your Funnel

One thing that we recommend all businesses do is take a look at the full buyer journey. When you really analyze it, are there areas where potential customers/buyers are getting hung up in the process? If so, can you identify the cause? This analysis and the resulting actions you take might be one of the most important “weeds” you can pull that can open up your business to a lot more revenue and growth. For example, let’s say you have a B2B business. Here are just a few of chokepoints that we might see on a regular basis:

• • Landing pages that don’t have a contact phone number or a working form
  • Form submissions that don’t alert the business owner or kick off a process
  • Email automation that isn’t set up to help convert leads
  • Lack of direct sales follow up
  • A process to follow up with dormant or older leads

On the B2C side, say, e-commerce, you might see the following:

• • Product pages that aren’t optimized for SEO
  • Lack of related/suggested products to add to the average order value
  • A complicated cart/checkout process
  • Unnecessary fields to fill in
  • No abandoned cart automated emails set up
  • No confirmation emails or automated setup to ask for reviews

• • How to address this systematically: Those are just a few of the many issues you might find in any given buyer journey. One thing you can do is ask us for a marketing funnel audit. We’ll walk through your current funnel and identify what chokepoints might exist and make recommendations for improvement.

Conclusion

Like any yard, it’s going to be difficult to keep your marketing looking absolutely pristine all of the time but if you focus on these regularly, you’ll be able to maintain a high-level of your operations and most importantly, continue to impress your customers. If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.     

[1] We often will debate designers on this point who might argue for a headline font and a text font, but we often say, look at Apple. The company uses one font (SF Pro) and perhaps is the strongest brand in the world.