Posting is worth your time if it brings in customers, and a month of counting will show you whether it does. Three counts, kept on one page for thirty days, answer the question better than any feeling about it.
Here are the three, how to keep each one without extra work, and how to read the page at the end of the month.
Count what posting brings back
The hours are easy to count. You know what an evening of captions costs you.
The question is not what posting costs you. It is what it brings back, and that part is easy to forget and hard to guess, so write it down. A florist who spends three hours a week on Instagram does not need to feel her way to an answer. She needs thirty days of three tallies.
Count one: where new customers found you
Ask every new customer the same question: where did you first see us? At the counter, in the checkout form, in the thank-you message. Tally the answers. This is also how you choose your second channel, so the tally does two jobs.
A ceramics studio adds the question to its checkout and, after a month, sees which answers lead: Instagram, a friend, the market stall, Google. Each "Instagram" is a customer your posts brought in.
Count two: the posts people mention by name
Some customers tell you which post brought them. "I saw the one with the blue vase." "Your video of the croissants." Write each one down, with the post it points to.
A bakery that hears about the same croissant video three times in a week knows which post is doing the selling. Those are the posts to make more of, and the list shows you what kind they are.
A post a customer mentions by name has already paid for its evening.
Count three: who orders again
Posting keeps you in view between orders, and repeat orders are where that shows. Of this month's orders, count how many came from someone who had bought before, looking back over your usual buying cycle.
The cycle is what makes the count fair. A coffee roaster looks back a month or two, because people run out of beans. A jeweller looks back a year or more, to the last birthday. A furniture maker looks back several years, because a good table lasts. Pick the stretch in which a happy customer would naturally buy again, and count inside it.
Inside Instagram, saves, shares and comments show who cared about a post. Repeat orders show who cared enough to come back.
Read the page at the end of the month
Put the three counts side by side. Next to the new customers who named Instagram, write down what it would have cost to reach them another way, such as the fee for a weekend market stall. You know that number. It is the cost the posts saved you.
If the counts are there, posting is worth your time: keep going, and make more of the posts people named. If they are thin, change what you post before you change whether you post. A candle label whose customers keep naming the same kind of post, the candle being lit at dusk, has its next month planned.
What CP3® does here
CP3® reads your website and Instagram, not your orders or your till, so the three counts are yours. What it changes is the other side of the sum: the hours. Branded Content drafts the month's posts, twenty on Professional, onto your calendar with a visual direction, a caption direction and a date. The evenings of captions become one sitting to approve, change or skip.