The week between Christmas and New Year’s is often the quietest week for manufacturers and publishers. Most sales reps are off, warehouses are doing physical inventories, and any retail partners are busy with returns. If you’re in the office, you’re likely killing time chit chatting or hanging out on LinkedIn.
However, this is a great week to knock off some key web-centric tasks that every manufacturer or publisher should do at year end. We’ve compiled our top list of ‘slack week’ clean-up items:
1. Check the ‘Street’ Price for Your Products: This is a perfect time to take a look at your true online pricing. We all know that MSRP and List are gamed to support our channels, but very few organizations truly take the time to learn their ‘street’ price. A great first step to do a price sweep of Amazon, the behemoth engine that B2B, B2C, and institutional buyers now rely upon for price reviews.
2. Review your Web Analytics: Google continues to make major updates to their analytics platform including adding new retargeting and socio-economic profiling this year. Now is the perfect time to review your configuration and see if you should plan any updates.
3. Update Your Online Visitor Profiles: Now is also a great time to revisit the behavior patterns of your online visitors. At a minimum you should have 4-5 different ‘profiles’ of the different visitors to your site, including defining a quality visitor and setting specific goals for each part of your site. Any manufacturer/publisher site has to be MORE than just ecommerce. You need to be measuring and tracking how well you support your sales team, offline channel, and partners.
4. Check on your Competitors: Every Company should keep a regular eye on primary competitors’ web presence, everything from their estimated traffic and paid search to their social presence and product listings. This should be updated quarterly and it’s a great way to keep a pulse on the different tactics your competitors try.
5. Clean up your Email / CRM: Email and CRM clean-up is always put at the bottom of everyone’s list. Yeoman’s Tina Saltmarsh created 4 must dos for every operations that can easily be completed in a week.
6. Update your Partner Product Feeds: Every manufacturer and publisher needs to take control over the quality of their data on their partner’s sites. How bad does it get? We recently did an audit and found 70% of items had incorrect data!
This is plenty of work to keep your team busy for the next few days and all of these tasks will help you prepare for your quarterly and year-end online activity review. Yeoman recommends quarterly and annual reviews down within 3 weeks of a close. Not ready for that either? Looks like you’ve got an easy New Year’s resolution….Contact us for help.
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