Format: Teardown

A month of social posts out of one case study

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Nobody runs out of things to post because their business is boring. They run out because they are treating every post as a new idea. One finished piece of work — a project you completed, a problem you solved — contains a month of material if you take it apart properly.

Start with the finished thing

You need the write-up first: the situation, what you did, what changed. Write that once, properly. Everything below is editing, not writing, which is why this works and “post more often” does not.

Week one: the result

Lead with whatever changed, stated plainly. If you have a number, the number is the post. If you do not, the change is still the post — “they could not do X, now they can” works fine. One clear claim, no build-up.

Week two: the before and after

Visual, and the easiest post to make. A screenshot of the old and new, two photographs, a chart. People will stop for a comparison when they will scroll past a claim. Say what specifically to look at, or the viewer decides for themselves and misses the point.

Week three: the decision

The one that earns respect rather than likes. Pick a genuine judgement call from the project — something you chose not to do, a tradeoff, something that did not work first time — and explain the reasoning. This is the post that makes people think you know what you are doing, because only someone who has done the work has this to say.

Week four: the client’s words

Their quote, unedited, attributed. Trim for length if you must but never rewrite it — a testimonial in your voice reads as invented, because it is. If you do not have one, ask. The best moment is right after handover, while they are still pleased.

Why this holds up

Four posts, one piece of source material, and none of them repeat each other because each takes a different angle: outcome, evidence, thinking, endorsement. Finish a project a month and you have a permanent content calendar that is entirely made of true things.

Your ads are working and your ROAS still looks bad

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Return on ad spend is a useful number that is wrong more often than people realise. Before cutting a campaign that reports badly, it is worth knowing which of these you are looking at, because three of the four are measurement problems rather than performance problems.

1. The attribution window is shorter than your sales cycle

If it takes a customer three weeks to decide and your platform attributes over seven days, the sales are real and the credit goes missing. This hits considered purchases hardest — anything expensive, anything B2B. Compare the window against how long your customers actually take, which your own records will tell you.

2. You are counting revenue, not margin

A 4x return on a product with a 20% margin loses money. A 2x return on something with 70% margin is excellent. Platforms report revenue because that is what they can see. Until you feed margin into the decision, you are optimising toward whichever products are cheapest to sell rather than most profitable.

3. Every channel is claiming the same sale

Add up the conversions each platform reports and compare it against orders in your actual system. If the platform total is higher — and it usually is — several channels are claiming the same customer. The fix is not picking a winner, it is trusting your own order data as the source of truth and treating platform numbers as directional.

4. It genuinely is bad

Sometimes it is. The tell is consistency: poor return across every product, audience and placement, holding steady over time. A real performance problem is broad and stable. A measurement problem is patchy, and looks different depending on where you stand.

The check worth doing first

Pick a month. Take total revenue from your own system, and total ad spend from the platforms. Divide. That blended number is cruder than any dashboard and much harder to fool. If it looks healthy while individual campaigns look terrible, you have a measurement problem, and you were about to cut something that works.

The five things we fix on almost every site we inherit

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Most of what we take on is not a blank page. It is a site somebody else built, usually working fine, usually leaking somewhere. The same problems turn up again and again, and most of them are not hard to fix once you know to look.

1. Images shipped at full camera resolution

The single most common cause of a slow site. A hero image straight from a phone can be several megabytes, scaled down in the browser so it looks fine while costing every visitor the full download. Correctly sized images, modern formats, and lazy loading below the fold routinely cut page weight by more than half. It is the cheapest performance work there is.

2. No one has looked at it on a phone recently

Not “is it responsive” — it usually is. The question is whether anyone has actually used it on a phone since launch. Tap targets too close together, a sticky header eating a third of the screen, a form where the keyboard covers the submit button. These are use problems, not layout problems, and they only show up if you hold the thing in your hand.

3. The contact form goes nowhere

We find this more often than anyone would like. The form submits, the visitor sees a thank-you message, and the notification lands in a spam folder or an inbox nobody reads. Test it monthly, and send submissions somewhere with a paper trail rather than a single person’s email.

4. Page titles that all say the same thing

Every page titled with the company name, or worse, “Home”. The title tag is what a search result shows and what a browser tab says. Writing a distinct, descriptive title for each page is an afternoon of work that pays back indefinitely.

5. Nobody can edit it

This is the expensive one, and the only one that is not quick. Content hardcoded into templates, so changing a phone number means editing a file. Every trivial update becomes a support request, so updates stop happening and the site goes stale. Fixing it properly means restructuring how content is stored, which is real work — but it is the difference between a site you own and a site you rent from whoever built it.

If you want a rough sense of where your own site stands, work down that list in order. The first four are an afternoon each.