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How to Stop Wasting Money on Your Marketing

Guest post by: Stephanie Ward

Article Overview: What would it be worth to you to know the most cost effective way to attract clients? The great news is that it doesn’t cost a thing and it’s easy to figure out.

How to Stop Wasting Money on Your Marketing

What would it be worth to you to know the most cost effective way to attract clients? The great news is that it doesn’t cost a thing and it’s easy to figure out. It’s all about measuring the return on your marketing investment.

Measuring your marketing strategies may not seem glamorous, but the information it provides is invaluable to the growth of your business. Measuring is the only way to know what is working, and just as important what is not working.

Think about it, once you know what your most effective marketing strategies are, you will attract more clients and save money at the same time. You’ll know which marketing activities to drop and which ones to do more of.

In addition to doing more of what works, you can also look at ways to expand and refine your best marketing strategies.

The truth is, measuring your marketing strategies isn’t hard to do. Simply compare the amount of time and money you are investing on each strategy to the amount of business each strategy is bringing in.

To measure your marketing, you need to know how every client finds out about your business. If you haven’t been tracking this, don’t worry. It’s never too late to begin. Start today and ask, or create a way to know, how each of your clients finds you.

It’s easiest to measure your marketing strategies in an automated way (for example using Excel). But, you can always use a pencil and paper if you need to. To get started, create a list of all of your past and current clients.

Put the list of clients on the left side of the spreadsheet one on each row from top to bottom. Then create columns across the top of the spreadsheet for each marketing strategy you use (left to right). You might have columns for: referrals, speaking, advertising, etc.

Then go down the list and for each client put a mark (the number ‘1’) in the marketing strategy column that represents how the person found you.

Stay with me, we’re almost there. Now calculate the percentage of clients that each marketing strategy produced. Simply divide the total in each marketing strategy column by the total number of clients. Then you will know which of your marketing strategies is most effective.

Another critical piece of information to calculate is how much you’re investing to attract each client per each marketing strategy. To figure this out simply total all of the costs involved in each marketing strategy and then divide that by the total number of clients you gained with each strategy.

When you take the time to measure, you will know which marketing strategies bring you new clients and which ones don’t. You will also know which marketing strategies bring you the highest return on your investment.

You might even discover that your most effective marketing strategy requires the least amount of money? Aren’t you curious to know? Measuring your marketing pays off. So why not start measuring so you can stop wasting money on things that don’t work and find out what is working and do more of it!

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Article Tags: amount of time, best marketing, effective marketing, great news, marketing strategies, marketing strategy, number 1, pencil and paper, referrals, spreadsheet, start today, strategy column, time and money, truth



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