It’s time to get rid of your brand garbage

Brand garbage refers to the accumulation of outdated, inconsistent, and irrelevant content across your digital presence.

Statistics show most people land on home pages to get their questions answered, not to be inspired.

That’s a great reason to review your website and digital profiles in a disciplined manner to dump the brand garbage and be helpful.

"Brand garbage" (and yes, I’m trying to coin a phrase here) refers to the accumulation of outdated, inconsistent, and irrelevant content across your digital presence. For the purposes of this post, I’m not talking about visual brand identity issues (colors, fonts, look).

Brand garbage encompasses several established branding issues, including brand inconsistency, outdated brand identity, poor user experience, and misaligned content strategy.

What does Brand Garbage look like?

Companies

• Outdated case studies that no longer reflect current offerings or market position.

• Old blog posts with potentially obsolete information.

• Redundant or conflicting brand messaging across different platforms.

• Inconsistent messaging for products or services.

• Product pages featuring discontinued items or old pricing.

• Outdated employee information and leadership profiles.

• Multiple versions of logos being used simultaneously.

• Marketing materials referencing obsolete industry statistics.

• Testimonials that might not hold up if a prospect called them.

• Social media accounts with inconsistent brand voice.

Individuals:

• Outdated professional headshots (or bad crop jobs).

• A banner that doesn’t align with your brand (or not even using it).

• A headline that could describe 53,000 other people (vanilla and banal).

• Previous career positions still featured prominently.

• Inconsistent personal brand statements.

• Old interviews or media appearances.

• Portfolio pieces that don't reflect current skills.

• Expired certifications listed as current.

• Mixed messaging about professional focus areas.

If you have a website, implement some combination of content audits, content governance, and consistent messaging strategies to address these issues.

Finding the brand garbage

Use these approaches:

• Analytics Tools

  • Check Google Analytics and Search Console for pages with declining traffic or low engagement.

  • Look for pages with high impressions but low click (an indication of outdated content).

  • Review content without clicks or traffic in the past 12 months.

• Manual Assessment

  • Content containing outdated statistics.

  • Pages with expired offers or discontinued services.

  • Former employee profiles or old company information

  • Time-sensitive content like past job listings.

ROT Analysis

Check your content for:

Redundant: Content that exists in multiple places

Outdated: Information that's stale or incorrect

Trivial: Content no longer essential to your audience or goals

For salvageable content, update statistics and facts with current information; add new insights or research findings; and refresh examples and case studies

Taking out the trash

After auditing, it’s time to start taking out the trash by:

• Categorizing content (Keep, Update, Consolidate, Delete).

• Creating 301 redirects for outdated pages.

• Dealing with 404 pages (broken links).

• Updating content needing minor changes.

• Remove irrelevant content.

• Use Google Search Console's Remove URLs tool for quick removal.

Reducing the risk of brand garbage in Sales 

Align your sales and marketing teams with a content management infrastructure that includes a central repository, standardized templates, clear customization guidelines, and a system for version control.

Make sure sales and marketing are talking to each other, create standardized presentation training, and look for ways to encourage adoption.  Establish usage metrics and remove outdated versions (or slides).

At MBNA, I led a team that created a sales template with extra slides organized by marketing sector. With 250 sales and account executives in multiple locations, we needed to give them some room to bring their personalities to the table, but we also wanted to make sure the information was consistent.

One way: We held periodic meetings where everyone threw their decks on a conference room table. Another strategy: Scenario-based negotiations training, where we identified gaps in how people talked about the company.

Start removing the worst-performing or seriously outdated pieces first and monitor the impact before continuing.