Your Audience is Not Your Audience

Try this exercise with your marketing team.

Get everyone in a room and pull up your company’s 5 worst performing social posts (this works better if they are video posts).

Then, on a whiteboard (or someone taking notes), write down a list of all the reasons why each post may have underperformed, and ask for suggestions for how it could be improved.

You’ll hear comments such as:

“There’s no hook.”

“There’s no story.”

“It’s too salesy / self-serving / promotional.”

“It’s too long.”

“The pacing is off. It needs to get to the point quicker.”

“It’s unclear – what’s the point?”

“It’s off-brand.”

“Wrong hashtags / too many / too few hashtags.”

“Try a different time of day.”

Next, you can re-edit or re-shoot the post, addressing the feedback.

Then, as a team, revisit the new posts and compare how they performed with the previous version.

You can do this exercise in reverse and analyze your top performing posts, or even your competitor’s top performing posts.

What this will do is:

👉 Strengthen your team’s bond

👉 Gamify work

👉 People feel heard, and they may get a sense that they are part of something bigger than them

👉 It will strengthen everyone’s muscle for what good vs bad social content looks like

👉 You may get some really creative ideas from team members that you may otherwise not get.

You could do this by yourself, but it can be fun to do as a team rather than individually. Plus, there are some other benefits by doing it as a team.