Tracking Your Marketing Results

OK, so you’ve decided on your target markets, invested your time, energy and money in your carefully chosen campaigns and the sales leads are coming in.

The most important thing to do now is to ask EVERY SINGLE ENQUIRER this question…

“How did you hear about us?” …and then record their answers carefully. Why?

Because unless you can categorically quantify the returns your marketing efforts are generating, you are probably wasting most of what you are spending.

Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean:

Annual Marketing Spend
Total Marketing Costs	£2600.00
Yellow Pages	£300.00
Local Newpaper Advertising	£360.00
Flyers and associated distribution costs	£750.00
Website and Google AdWords	£580.00
Breakfast Clubs	£360.00
Entertaining customers	£250.00

Now, unless you KNOW how much each one of these activities is generating in actual sales revenue, you cannot make an informed decision about which are the best sources for your business and therefore how to maximise your returns.

So for now,  let’s assume that you do know how much each one of these activities is generating as a percentage of your total sales revenue:

Percentage of Annual Marketing Spend
Yellow Pages	10%
Local Newpaper Advertising	12%
Flyers and associated distribution costs	30%
Website and Google AdWords	25%
Breakfast Clubs	5%
Entertaining customers	18%
Total	100%

So for these spending choices to produce maximum returns, the following would need to be true:

Annual Marketing Spend (to maximise returns)
Total Marketing Costs	£2600.00
Yellow Pages	£260.00
Local Newpaper Advertising	£312.00
Flyers and associated distribution costs	£780.00
Website and Google AdWords	£650.00
Breakfast Clubs	£130.00
Entertaining customers	£468.00

In this example clearly, it would make sense to increase the budget for entertaining customers and reduce the budget for attending breakfast clubs. It would also make sense to spend a little more on Google AdWords and a little less on both Yellow Pages and the local newspaper, but without knowing where the sales enquiries came from in the first place, you CANNOT know that.

If you do have that information and you use it each year to form the basis of your marketing strategy, you will be maximising your returns and making the most of the money you spend. If you don’t you are probably wasting most of your marketing budget, and it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, this fact is always true. 

Related posts:

1. Mind Control Marketing
2. FREE Strategy Cashmaps
3. Kaizen Club