🤦 Why did I waste $2,000 updating Analytive’s Twitter? 🤦

Over the past few months, we’ve brought on several new clients with Analytive.

Many of these companies work with (or have worked with) other agencies.

All of them have marketing efforts pushed in various directions throughout the digital sphere.

But as we onboard them and see what the marketing team is working on, there’s one question I ask the most.

This question is: why?

Why did you do things this way? What’s the advantage? Why are you using this channel?

Now that question can come across as accusatory, so we often ask a less pointed version of it: How has this impacted your business?

That’s a kinder, gentler way to ask that question, but the point is the same.

And I often find that many companies can’t answer that question well.

When I look internally at our own growth channels, I face the same questions. Why do we do what we do?

My goal is to have a good why for every strategy we execute.

Let me give you an example: For about a year, I paid a contractor to post 2-3 posts a week to our Twitter account.

I probably spent north of $2,000 on making that happen.

At the time, I was focused on growing business in other directions and just paid the bill every month.

This contractor committed to making the posts.

And we got a few followers.

But guess how much money we made from those efforts?

Zero.

It had no impact on the business. You could even say it had a negative impact on the business because we spent $2,000 on it we could’ve spent elsewhere.

Now I certainly believe that failing forward is a good thing.

And at the beginning, I had a why. I wanted to get clients on social.

But I quickly realized that the why wasn’t materializing.

When I realized there was no more why, we cut the expense, focused our efforts on other channels, and are larger and growing faster than we ever did before.

Now I look at every expense and ask “Why?”

If I don’t have an answer, we get rid of it.

Do we miss some opportunities? We *maybe* miss a couple.

But I also have resources to focus on new things. I only have this bandwidth because I’ve cut everything that can’t give me a good answer to why.

At the end of the day, we focus on what matters. Results. Effort. The process. The things that grow our business. The things that make the biggest difference for the clients.

If you don’t know why you’re doing something, it’s probably time for it to go.

It’s time to run lean.

P.S. Get more awesome content like this weekly by subscribing to our blog. We seek to provide massive value and respect you deeply. We won’t spam you.