A little over a month ago we decided that it would be an awesome idea to challenge ourselves to blog, post on social media, prospect, and read every day for 28 days…here is what happened.

Blog Posts:

20 out of 28 – 71%. This was the most difficult part of the challenge due to the time and creative investment required to get it done.

There are a few posts that made the roll due to simply needing to put something up, but it was a fun exercise on getting creative ideas on paper.

Social Media Posts:

21 out of 28 – 75%. This part of the challenge also took some planning and creative investment. We outperformed our blog posting efforts, but didn’t hit the goal here either.

Read and Discuss:

5 out of 28 – 18%. For this challenge, we chose to read Seth Godin’s “This is Marketing”. It’s a perfect book for short bites of information. That said, we performed pretty poorly here.

Prospecting:

15 out of 28 – 53%. As for the final element of our challenge, we actually performed about where I thought we would. Mostly because this isn’t a natural activity for the team.

The Stats:

Social Media:

• Reach +1013%
• Impressions +798%
• Engagement +1,332%
• Clicks +741%

Website Traffic:

• Visitors +120%
• Returning Visitors +300%
• Pageviews +200%

What’s the Verdict?

Honestly, challenge aside, I’m pretty proud of what we achieved. I would venture to guess that 90% of ALL businesses or websites won’t post 20 times this year. I’m also proud that we wrote everything ourselves…Most agencies can’t claim that either.

The stats are hard to argue with…I would say that kind of activity is almost all the marketing you would ever need. I would also argue that it would be incredibly hard to sustain not only the post frequency but also the post quality.

If I’m disappointed in any part of it, I wish we would have been more committed to the book and sharing what we learned from it. It is a really, really good book, and every time I read it, I learn something new. One of the best quotes is, “Stop making average stuff for average people.”

From a prospecting standpoint…that was a really tough part of the challenge because it can be so unrewarding, especially to non-salesy people. It probably would have been worse if someone would have answered their attempts to connect. However, I think it’s good for everyone to have a perspective on the jobs that other people have to do. I believe it can help teams work better together with a strong sense of empathy.

What Did We Learn?

Well, we kinda jumped into the deep end on this one. We had a plan but certainly didn’t think through all the angles. We didn’t account for the unexpected…new team members, client growth, Dopey’s indigestion, sickness, onboarding, travel, etc. In hindsight, maybe having some contingencies and maybe planning a little farther out would have been helpful.

We learned a lot about content. It doesn’t always have to be serious and be life-changing. Quite the opposite, some of the short and fun stuff actually performed the best. We also learned that we have a pretty damn good team of writers and creative minds. I believe that writing about what is on your mind is good for the brand because after all, the team is the brand.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The stats are hard to ignore. If you looked at those alone it might tempt one to commit to daily posting, but I’m not certain that would be healthy. I am certain this won’t be the last time we put ourselves to the test, and I am also certain that March isn’t going to be the month we do it. I think we need to lick our wounds a little before we head back out into the fray.

As our team and our talents grow, I want us to come up with a collective challenge that we can all enjoy and benefit from. I want us to push our boundaries, but in a fun and inclusive fashion. At the end of the day, I’m really glad we did this. Even though we didn’t 100% hit any of our goals, I’m incredibly proud of the team and I think the Atomic 28 Hard was 100% a success.

One more thing…in case you were wondering, it is not an accident that this is being posted on March 1st (as opposed to Feb 28th, as originally planned). We felt it was only appropriate to miss one last deadline.