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00:00  How I’m monitoring the impact of my new marketing strategy on the business.

Hello, hello, everyone, I hope you are well today. Thank you for joining me, give me a hashtag replay if you are tuning in on the replay. So today I want to speak about and give you a little bit of an insight into what I am doing in our business at this point in time when it comes to our...we're tweaking some of our marketing strategy. And I want to share with you how I am monitoring whether those are going to work or not.

So on Monday, we started, we started implementing a new strategy on Twitter. And as part of that, of course, I need to understand the impact of what this new strategies is in the business. So I have committed to implementing this new strategy for at least 90 days. And what I have done is I have taken a starting snapshot..

00:59  Tracking the data over the last six months to compare which worked between the new and the previous strategy.

So I have said, Okay, what is our follower count? What is our engagement rate? What are the number, you know, over the last six months? How many leads have we had from this platform? So that I can understand when we put the new strategy in place, whether it's working. So in 90 days time, I'm going to be measuring over then, I'm going to measure measuring it weekly, but I will be able to then look in 90 days time and say, "Okay, these are the stats now versus the stats 90 days ago, therefore has this new strategy worked?" Which by the way, this new strategy is more time intensive than our previous strategy.

I need to know if it works, because I need to understand if this is something worth putting the time into, or if we just go back to the old strategy, because it was just easier, and there's no impact at all, or even a negative impact on the business. But I can't determine if this strategy is going to work or has worked, if this new strategy has worked in 90 days time, I can't determine that if I don't know my starting point and I don't monitor the progress over the next 90 days. So that is what exactly what we are doing. I have set up a sheet to track the data so that I can understand what is working and what is not working..

02:30  Where is the business now on LinkedIn and in other social media platforms?

And I'm doing the same on LinkedIn as well. We're going to change up the LinkedIn strategy at some point this week too. And we'll do exactly the same thing. Where is the business now on LinkedIn? When we look at both my personal profile and the business profile, what does that look like? And what is it look like over the next 90 days week on week?

Can we see an impact on our website traffic on the number of leads that we have in on the clients that we're getting from these social media platforms? or again, should we just sack off a change in strategy altogether? Because either A, the previous one performed better, or B, even if they performed the same, the previous one took less time and therefore was a better return on investment for our time put in. Because we need to look at that too. If we change strategy, and the strategy takes more time, but it gives us the same results.

Well, then actually, we're at a loss on that because we put in more time and therefore our return is actually less when it comes to looking at our return on our time. Which is really important when you're considering your social media strategy. Because for most of us, the vast majority of input into our social media strategy is in terms of time, you might have some money, you might have somebody doing a bit of writing for you, you might have somebody producing some graphics, or or you know, chopping up videos or something like that.

So you may have some money invested as well. But for most of us, as a small business owner, our social media strategy, a lot of our time is going to be what we're looking at when we come to looking at a return on that for our business.

04:12  Why you need to know where you are in your business.

So I need to know where I am now, what my website traffic from those platforms are, what my number of leads that we get from that platform each month. I need to know things like our engagement rate on those platforms.

I need to know less about the number of followers, although it does impact because it impacts engagement. But we don't want to get hooked up on vanity metrics. Because let's imagine that in 90 days time, let's say I've got 50% more Twitter followers, but I've had no impact on my website, no impact on the leads, and it's taking me more time then it's still a negative, because that is a vanity metrics at the end of the day if it has no impact on anything else. So you need to watch out for that. That you're not gonna get caught up in monitoring vanity metrics when it comes to this kind of thing.

05:04  Is your strategy on the platforms you are on, performing in the way that you want it to?

So is your strategy on the platforms you are on performing in the way that you want it to, for the time, energy and potentially money that you put into it, assessing that and understanding that, at this point in time is important. Understanding if you're in the right places, saying the right things to the right people. If your strategy on a platform isn't doesn't seem to be yielding you the results you require, then you have a decision to make. Do you change strategy, try something else for 90 days and see if that has an impact.

Or do you in fact, come off the platform altogether and focus your time energy somewhere on potentially money in a different direction. You can do either, but understanding the data behind the decision is really important or making a decision off the data rather; rather than making a gut decision without understanding any repercussions or impact you might have in other areas of your business.

So that's what we're doing just now, we are altering our Twitter and LinkedIn strategy to see if there is a different result that we can get from those platforms - a better result than we are potentially getting just now, have a go and do the same yourself.

I highly recommend it. Spend some time understanding the data now, and evaluating what you want to do with each platform and the strategy you want to put in place over the next 90 days, if that is different from the one you're using just now. That is all I have for you for today. 

I hope that this has been useful for you in giving you both an insight into some of the stuff that we do here in my business, but also in understanding what might be useful for your business going forward as well.

Thank you for joining me and tuning in today. As always, I know your time is incredibly precious. So thank you for spending some of it with me. And I will see you all soon. Take care. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you got lots of value from this episode.

Now if you're struggling with any accounting things for your business, I'd love to help make sure you reach out to me at podcast@annetteandco.co.uk, and let me know how I can help. Of course remember to subscribe to this podcast as well. Thanks again.