Spring Cleaning Your Marketing: 7 Things to Dump Right Now

Spring is the time of year when people open the windows, drag things out from the back of the closet, and figure out what they’ve been holding onto for no good reason. Most small business owners could use a version of that for their marketing.

Because here’s what tends to happen: a business tries something, pays for it, doesn’t see great results, but never officially cancels it. Then they try something else, stack it on top of the first thing, and before long they’ve got four vendors, six monthly charges, and zero clarity about what any of it is actually doing for them.

If that sounds like your marketing right now, this is the right time to clean house. Here are seven things worth dumping — and why holding onto them is probably costing you more than you realize.

1. Spring Cleaning 101- Remove Vendors You Can’t Explain

Go through your credit card statements and your bank account and list every vendor you’re paying for marketing. Now ask yourself: for each one, can you clearly explain what they do, what it costs, and what you’re getting for that money?

If the answer is no — or if the answer is something vague like “I think they handle our SEO” or “they set that up a while ago and I’m not sure we’re still using it” — that’s a problem.

Every dollar you’re spending should be attached to a clear outcome you’re tracking. If you can’t articulate the outcome, the vendor needs to either justify their existence with real data or go.

2. The Vanity Metrics You’ve Been Celebrating

Impressions. Followers. Reach. Open rates. Engagement. These numbers feel good. They make reports look impressive. And for most small businesses, they have almost nothing to do with whether your revenue is growing.

Vanity metrics become a problem when they replace the metrics that actually matter: how many leads are you generating, what’s your cost per lead, how many of those leads are converting, and what is the actual revenue tied to your marketing activity?

This spring, dump the practice of measuring things that make you feel good and replace it with measuring things that tell you the truth. Your marketing should be able to answer one question clearly: is it making you money?

3. The Agency Relationship That’s All Reports and No Results

If you work with an agency or a digital/social only group and their primary deliverable every month is a PDF dashboard showing traffic and impressions — and you’ve never had a real conversation about your revenue goals, your sales cycle, or reengaging your best customers — they aren’t a marketing partner. They’re a pricey reporting service.

Partners that are genuinely invested in your success ask hard questions. They push back when something isn’t working. They have direct conversations about what’s producing revenue and what isn’t. They don’t hide behind a metrics dashboard.

If your current agency relationship feels transactional — they execute, you pay, nobody’s accountable for whether it works — it might be time to have a harder conversation about whether it’s worth continuing.

4. Campaigns Without a Clear Goal

Every marketing campaign should be able to answer three questions before it launches: Who is this for? What do we want them to do? How will we know if it worked?

If you have campaigns running right now that can’t answer all three of those questions — ads that are “just running,” social posts that are going up because it’s Tuesday, email blasts that go out because they always do — those campaigns are costing you money without any defined return.

Pause them. Rewrite the brief. Relaunch with a clear goal and a clear way to measure whether you hit it. Or cut them entirely and redirect the budget somewhere that has a defined purpose.

5. Your “Set It and Forget It” Website

Your website is the destination for almost every piece of marketing you run. Ads point to it. Social posts link to it. Your email signature sends people there. If it hasn’t been seriously reviewed in the last year, there’s a reasonable chance it’s leaking leads.

Things that commonly go wrong and get ignored: slow load times that kill conversions, contact forms that don’t actually deliver to anyone, messaging that no longer reflects how you talk about your business, calls to action that are buried or confusing, and pages that still say things that aren’t true anymore.

Add a website review to your spring cleaning list. Go through it as if you were a prospective customer visiting for the first time. Ask yourself honestly: is this making me want to reach out? If the answer is no, something needs to change.

6. Social Media Posting for the Sake of Posting

Somewhere along the way, a lot of businesses got the idea that they needed to post on every social media platform multiple times a week, regardless of whether they had anything worth saying. This is one of the more persistent myths in small business marketing.

Volume without strategy isn’t a content program. It’s noise, and you’re giving the social networks free content. Posting three times a week to fill a calendar — with generic tips, stock photos, and content that could apply to any business in any industry — does very little for your brand and even less for your revenue.

It’s better to post less and say something that actually matters to your specific audience. Quality over volume applies to social media more than almost any other channel.

7. Marketing That Isn’t Talking to Sales

This one is less about a tactic and more about a structural problem that quietly kills marketing programs from the inside.

If your marketing team and your sales team are operating in separate lanes — if marketing doesn’t know what the sales pipeline looks like, and sales doesn’t know what marketing is generating or targeting — then your entire program is operating at a fraction of its potential.

Marketing should know which customers have the highest lifetime value so it can find more of them. Sales should know what marketing is promising so it can close on that positioning. Leadership should be able to see both in one place and understand how they’re connected.

If that alignment doesn’t exist right now, fixing it is worth more than any individual campaign you could run this spring.

Where to Start If This All Feels Overwhelming

If you read through that list and found yourself nodding at more than two or three items, you’re not in bad shape — you just need a clear starting point.

Start with the audit. List every vendor, every active campaign, and every marketing dollar you’re spending. For each one, answer three questions: What is it supposed to do? Is it doing that? How do I know?

If you can’t answer all three for something, that’s your first item on the spring cleaning list.

And if you realize that you just need someone else take charge — someone who’s going to tell you the truth about what’s worth keeping and what isn’t — that’s exactly the kind of conversation we have every day as a Fractional Marketing Director.

Let’s Clean Up Your Marketing Together

Book a free consultation with the Wabash & Lake team. We’ll help you figure out what’s worth keeping, what needs to go, and what needs to get built. No pressure, no high-pressure pitch — just an honest conversation about how to make your marketing work harder for your business.

Get started at wabashandlakeconsulting.com or call us at (804) 519-9873.

About Wabash & Lake

Wabash & Lake Consulting is a Richmond, Virginia-based fractional marketing firm that serves as an embedded marketing department for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in 2016 by Joe Doran, the company was built as a direct response to the agency model that prioritizes internal profit over client results. Learn more at wabashandlakeconsulting.com.