Social media strategy fails when you optimise what is easy to track instead of the harder question of who you sell to. Hector Hughes, co-founder of Unplugged, ran growth at a tech startup that cut a 10-person marketing team and most of a 20-person sales team, and the numbers did not move.
“We got rid of a 10-person marketing team and most of the 20-person sales team, and nothing changed, the numbers didn’t change at all.” That is Hector Hughes describing the startup where he ran growth for a year, and I have rarely heard a more expensive piece of evidence against busy work.
Hector now co-runs Unplugged, which locks your phone in a box and sends you to a countryside cabin for three days. He joined me and Will Ockenden on Embracing Marketing Mistakes, and four lessons from his old career apply to anyone planning a social media strategy this quarter.
What does it mean when cutting the marketing team changes nothing?
It means most of the activity was never connected to the outcome. Hector looked back at his year running growth and was blunt: “I could have done none of it and probably nothing would have changed.”
His summary of the restructuring was just as harsh. Whatever the team had been doing, “it was just work for work’s sake”.
I call that the busy fools problem, and we say it on the show a lot. The uncomfortable part is that busy fools tend to have excellent calendars.
Lesson one: the trackable number is rarely the important one
Hector spent months on conversion rate optimisation, running website test after website test. He could point to a number at the end of every month and say it had moved. The result, in his words, was that they “built this absolute Frankenstein of a website, because it was quantifiable.”
His diagnosis is the best line in the episode: “We spend so much time focusing on the things we can track.” He also borrowed a saying that fits perfectly: “It’s better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.”
Lesson two: decide who you sell to before you test anything
The murky question Hector never answered was the one that mattered: “What do we even stand for as a company and who are we trying to sell to?” As he puts it, the company was “trying to be everything to everyone”, so anything downstream of that was pushing water up a hill.
That is where a proper social media strategy training session earns its place, because audience and positioning have to be settled before channels, calendars or split tests.
Unplugged was built the other way round. Hector wanted a product people would tell twenty friends about instead of two, so the marketing was baked into the idea. His advice for standing out is blunt: “the way to not compete is just to do something that you very authentically believe in”.
The mistake: Optimising conversion rates and posting schedules while nobody has agreed who the customer is.
Why it happens: Trackable tasks produce a monthly number you can show your boss, whereas positioning work produces an argument.
The fix: Write down who you sell to and what you stand for first, then measure only what tests that answer.
Lesson three: be careful with the stubbornness defence
Hector is sceptical of idea validation. Early on, someone told him to put up a landing page and test whether people wanted to lock away their phones. He refused, because the business he wanted to build was not the one a landing page would have confirmed.
He is honest about the risk. “That stubbornness can lead you to disaster, but also it can lead you to a much more unique outcome.” I would treat that as one founder’s gamble, not a rule. It works when you already know your customer, and you only know your customer after lesson two.
Lesson four: step away when a problem is hard
Hector says the urge when something is difficult is to busy yourself with work that feels like helping. His suggestion is the opposite: go for a walk. “Nothing is harder after a walk than beforehand.” He suggests an hour without your phone costs nothing and probably helps.
I took the advice slightly personally. I take my dog out in the woods most days, and I bring a podcast along, which rather defeats the point.
My view on this: tracking everything means tracking nothing
As I told Hector, the further up the business I have climbed, the more I look at financial charts and the less PR and marketing I do. Performance marketing is easy to chart. Brand work, such as an interview on this podcast that someone hears in three years’ time before booking us, is far harder to pin down. I asked him where the tracking URL is for that, and the honest answer is that there is not one.
My conclusion, said on the recording and still true: “Tracking everything results in tracking nothing as well.” Dashboards are a good servant and a bad boss.
He also made me look at my own habits. A virtual assistant logging in from the Philippines got my Facebook account flagged as hacked, so I lost it for a while. I run an agency built around Meta, and I barely missed the thing.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full episode with Hector Hughes on YouTube, find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, and see the cabins on the Unplugged website.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where marketing and PR leaders share the career mistakes that taught them the most.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
