Turn Your Marketing Off and On Again!
There are few phrases in modern life more irritatingly effective than:
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Your phone freezes, restart it! An app refuses to open, restart it! Your emails stop arriving, restart it! Your screen has been displaying a mysterious spinning circle for ten minutes while you quietly reconsider every life choice that led you here… restart it! Annoyingly, it often works.
And at Island Solutions, we think marketing can be surprisingly similar. Sometimes your marketing isn’t fundamentally broken, but it doesn’t need throwing away, replacing with the latest fashionable platform or handing over entirely to an AI chatbot while everyone goes to the pub. Sometimes it simply needs a reboot, and for businesses in the Sale and Rent Back sector for example, knowing when to restart, refresh and rethink your marketing can make all the difference.
Is Your Marketing Starting to Freeze?
Phones rarely go from working perfectly to completely useless overnight. They get sluggish first, and apps take longer to load. The battery mysteriously disappears by lunchtime, and things don’t quite work like they used to. Marketing campaigns behave similarly, perhaps your Google Ads are still producing enquiries, but fewer than six months ago. Your Facebook adverts are running, but people have seen the same creative so many times they could probably recite it from memory. Website traffic looks respectable, but enquiries aren’t following.
That’s the marketing equivalent of tapping your phone screen repeatedly and hoping it’ll eventually cooperate. Before spending more money, look at what your data is telling you like:
- Which channels generate genuine SARB enquiries?
- Which adverts attract attention but no action?
- Where are people leaving your website?
- Are your costs per lead creeping upwards?
A reboot starts by finding the problem, not simply pressing more buttons.
Clear the Marketing Cache
Your phone accumulates clutter, and so does your marketing! Old landing pages, forgotten campaigns, outdated adverts, duplicate audiences, and blog posts written for search terms nobody uses anymore. Every so often, have a clear-out, especially those social accounts last updated when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister.
For SARB businesses, start with the customer journey. Imagine you’re a homeowner discovering Sale and Rent Back for the first time. Does your website clearly explain what the service is, who it might be suitable for and the important considerations involved? Or do visitors need a map, compass and legal dictionary? Regulated marketing doesn’t have to be complicated marketing, simply review your pages, adverts, emails and social content. Remove unnecessary jargon, update outdated information and make the next step obvious, the objective isn’t to make everything shorter, but it’s to make everything clearer.
Don't Factory Reset Everything
This bit matters, when your phone misbehaves, you don’t immediately wipe every photograph, contact and app from existence. Yet businesses occasionally do exactly that with marketing.
“Leads are down. NEW WEBSITE!”
Steady on, before rebuilding everything, establish what’s already working. Perhaps your website ranks well organically, or maybe a particular SARB guide consistently generates enquiries. Perhaps paid search performs brilliantly while social advertising needs attention. Keep the good bits, a marketing reboot should be controlled: refresh tired creative, improve weak landing pages, adjust budgets, revisit keywords and test new messaging. Change one thing at a time where possible, then measure what happened.
Otherwise, you’ve changed the website, adverts, targeting, landing pages and call-to-action simultaneously and have absolutely no idea which change actually worked. Congratulations, you’ve successfully rebooted the marketing and deleted the evidence.
Install the Updates You've Been Ignoring
We’ve all pressed “Remind Me Later” on a software update. For approximately 6 months, marketing updates get ignored too! Customer behaviour changes, search evolves, and advertising platforms change their rules. Competitors improve their websites, and new regulations and guidance affect how businesses communicate.
SARB marketing needs particularly regular attention because trust, clarity and customer understanding are crucial. Your content should answer the questions people are asking today, not the questions they were asking when the website launched. Look at search data, advertising performance, enquiries and customer conversations:
- What confuses people?
- What stops them proceeding?
- What do they repeatedly ask your team?
Those questions are marketing opportunities. Turn them into FAQs, blogs, videos, social posts and clearer website copy. Sometimes your customers are effectively writing your content strategy for you, so you just need to listen.
And Then... Actually Restart It
The most important part of a reboot is doing something! Marketing strategies shouldn’t become sacred documents that nobody is allowed to touch because somebody spent three months creating them in 2023, so we should:
- Set regular review points
- Look at performance.
- Keep what works & fix what doesn’t.
- Test something new.
- Then repeat!
For SARB businesses, this creates a marketing strategy that evolves alongside customers rather than constantly playing catch-up. And remember, more marketing isn’t automatically better marketing. Sometimes reallocating budget from an underperforming campaign into something already producing quality enquiries is far more effective than increasing overall spend. That’s not giving up, that’s optimisation!
Switch it off, switch it on again, and see what happens!
Sometimes, marketing can feel sluggish, don’t assume you need to start again. You might simply need a reboot! Check the data, clear out the clutter, and refresh tired campaigns. Update your content, simplify the customer journey, and importantly don’t throw away the parts that are already doing their job.
At Island Solutions, we believe marketing should constantly learn, adapt and improve. Because sometimes the smartest marketing strategy isn’t reinventing everything, it’s simply recognising what’s stopped working, fixing it and pressing restart.
And if that fails, then we’re calling IT! If you’d like help building resilient, compliant, and sensible marketing strategies, fill in our contact form and start a conversation.