Marketing your OF through social media - a beginner’s guide to analytics
I’ve gotten so many requests on how to start being more data-focused, so I’m beginning a multi-series post for beginners on analytics! Today we’ll start with social media/marketing. Next week I’ll into the optimizing analytics on your OF profile ❤️
This post is going to cover:
Beginner steps towards being data driven so that you get closer to your revenue goals each month
What exact things you should be evaluating at the end of each month
What action items to pursue if things perform well OR badly
Data is important for ALL companies, including OF
In my day job, I’ve been working in the startup space for an entire decade: I grew from a little intern to CMO, have driven tens of millions in revenue for companies & clients in so many different spaces. I say all that not to brag but to emphasize: the things that work to drive revenue in sfw companies are the same things that work on OF too.
The absolute most important thing when it comes to revenue growth is being data driven. Seriously. Every single day, when we’re scheduling posts, answering chats, or selling things, we are collecting data. And many of us aren’t utilizing the data nearly enough. We have it, but we aren’t learning from it. Hopefully, this post helps 💕
Priority #1: Marketing
I’ve noticed that a lot of people make the mistake of trying to figure out how to improve other things before figuring out their marketing. I wouldn’t do that. When you start improving your metrics, it makes the most sense to start with whatever has the absolute highest impact on revenue.
For most of us, it’s going to be marketing. Why? Because more people seeing your marketing and better marketing = more people seeing your OF page. If you have terrible marketing, it doesn’t matter how great your services are because so few people will see them. You can have the best videos in the world, but if your marketing is bad, nobody will see them. If nobody sees them, nobody can buy them.
“Focus on marketing” is a broad command though. What I mean by that is: when you are marketing, actually write down how things are going each week/month and use that data to guide your decisions. Stop making marketing decisions based on what feels right, start basing decisions on what the data is suggesting.
More specifically, what I mean is:
High level question you should be asking yourself: Are my marketing efforts / social media efforts growing each month? Metric of success: Track social media on a weekly/monthly basis, pick a % growth you want to see and see if your performance reaches that goal. Anywhere from 5%-20% monthly growth is great.
Specific metrics are up to you, but consider tracking:
Tracking link clicks (very important!)
Views / likes / upvotes (up to you which ones you go with)
Each month, you should be able to answer the following sets of questions:
Answer these:
Which one of my social media platforms drives the most traffic to OF? (measured as “clicks” under tracking links)
Which one of my social media platforms drives the most revenue in new subscribers? (measured as “subscriptions” under tracking links, multiplied by your subscription price)
Which one of my social media platforms converts the best? (measured as “subscriptions” divided by “clicks” under tracking links)
Action items: Whichever platform is converting the best, see if you can double down on it and get that platform to have more impressions, so that you can benefit from the better conversion rate.
Answer these:
Did any of my social media efforts perform strangely higher than everything else? (For example, normally Reddit posts get 100 upvotes, but one random post got 400)
Action items: If something is a positive outlier, do everything in your power to see if you can replicate it. Do the same concept, dress the same, use the same narrative. Do whatever you can to see if that success can be replicated.
What to do if your social media isn’t performing well
[ 1 ] First, make sure you’re looking at correct data when you deem something “not performing well”. For example, if Reddit has the highest conversion rate for OF subscribers BUT it drives the smallest amount of traffic, does that mean it’s not doing well? I would say no. You might think it’s not doing well because it has a low number of clicks, but the high conversion rate suggests that Reddit converts quite well, if you can just figure out how to get more impressions.
[ 2 ] Second, try to replicate your past successes. I know, I just wrote this a few paragraphs above but this point is really important: if you have ever seen ANY success, you know you have it in you to create content that the world likes. It’s happened before, you can do it again. Try to replicate your top 5-10 pieces of content to see if you can recreate that success.
[ 3 ] Study others in your niche. Don’t just randomly post stuff willy nilly that you think will perform well. Go look at stuff that is CURRENTLY performing well in the world: look at TikTok girlies that have the metrics you want to have, sort by “top of this month” on Reddit communities you frequent, subscribe SWers that look similar to you on Instagram. Do the research to see what is actually working, and learn from them. Last week I wrote a case study about how I personally think one creator grew to 200k subs by copying another creator - learning from others is a smart marketing choice.
[ 4 ] Track your data. It’s not enough to just observe your data without actually putting it into an excel sheet. You really need to plug it into a sheet and calculate the % change. If you don’t do this, you might think that something is performing badly when it’s not. Here’s a perfect example:
A few days ago, I was looking at the OF conversion rate and OF clicks from different social media platforms. This week performed a bit worse than last week. If you looked at just the revenue, it would seem like OF is converting badly. It seemed like maybe we need a lower sale price or maybe the photos need to be updated.
But then, when I looked at the OF conversion rate - it was actually significantly higher than last week’s conversion rate. When I looked at Twitter’s conversion rate, that one was higher too. Reddit was higher too. Well, that doesn’t make sense - how can all of these conversion rates be higher if revenue is lower? Then, I realized there was only ONE metric that hadn’t grown from the previous week: it was OF clicks from Linktree (aka Tiktok/Instagram). If I hadn’t seen that, I might have assumed that it was something about the OF page (like the price) that was causing an issue. But because the OF conversion rate is higher than last week, I knew the OF page wasn’t the issue. Linktree clicks were.
All that to say - you need the big picture to make the right decisions. Track your data. Have it handy in an excel sheet so that you can see the big picture.