How well is your marketing working?

Which parts of your marketing spend are returning value and what should you drop?

It’s not possible to measure everything in marketing, but you can still achieve great value by measuring what you can and using this as a basis for managing your marketing focus and expenditure.

Getting started

Set aside forty minutes to go through last year’s sales ledger. For each invoice that you raised, note down (or find out) where that business came from. If you have too many transactions to look at all of them, start with the largest and work through the top 80% (by value).

Once you’ve collected that data (a spreadsheet is a great place to record and analyse it) here are some really insightful questions to ask:

1. What proportion of our sales came from repeat business?
2. What were the top three sources of new business?
3. Are these where we are focusing our time and attention?

Making it easier for the future

To make this easier for next time, make a habit of recording the source of every sales enquiry. If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) system then make sure everyone is using it to track leads; but if not then a sales enquiry spreadsheet is easy to set-up and use.

As an experienced business owner, I’m sure you’ll have no shortage of ideas where to go next with this. But if you’d like to discuss some proven approaches, please get in touch.