A very important point to keep in mind with any marketing is that you must test, test, and test again. A few hours spent ensuring that you are using correct messages can save months of useless promotion, and tons of marketing money.

An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on funds invested. Keep in mind that with any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know who your audience is and how to reach customers.

Here is the short explanation of what you should measure in marketing:

• Number of leads for the month – How many people contacted you?
• Value of leads for the month – How much sales can these leads generate, based on your sales conversion rate and average sales value
• Sales made for the month – How much sales did you get in a particular month?
• Number of new sales - How many sales came from new customers who had never bought from you before?
• Value of new sales - What was the value of these new sales?
• Number of outstanding opportunities – How many leads have not turned into sales yet and still look promising?
• Value of outstanding opportunities - What is the value of these outstanding leads?
• Referrals gained - How many referrals did you get in a particular month?
• Testimonials received - How many testimonials did you receive in a particular month?
• Number of sales calls per rep - How many sales calls did an average sales rep make?
• Number of sales calls made – What was the total number of sales calls made by all sales reps?
• Marketing expenditure for the month – How much did you spend on marketing in a particular month?
• Customer complaints – How many customer complaints did you receive in a particular month?

Do you know how effective is your your marketing? Which is the half of the marketing costs which you spend uselessly? How much of what you spend on marketing is actually effective?

How many sales a given campaign generates? Are the sales team happy with the quality of leads that marketing supplies?

If you don’t know answers to these questions, you don’t know how much revenue you are leaving on the table.

Therefore, you now probably need the following:

• An understanding of what actually worked and what was a waste of money
• A benchmark for success, showing you where you could have got value for money
• An idea of where to focus your future marketing budget to get results and what you should be looking at when creating your next marketing plan

If you want your marketing strategy to prove effective, at the end of the year we need to check whether you stuck with the plan and how well you did with the individual campaigns.

Here is a clear description of what you should measure:

• Campaign Start – When did the campaign start?
• Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
• Actual # Leads – How many leads did you actually get so far?
• Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
• Actual # Sales – How many sales did you actually get so far?
• Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
• Actual Sales Value – How much sales did the campaign generate so far?
• Expected Budget – What is your budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?
• Actual Budget – How much did you spend so far on the campaign?
• Return on Investment – How much sales did $1 of actual budget generate?

If you manage to measure these indicators regularly, you’ll be able to soon evaluate your marketing strategy, even by comparing the results on a monthly basis.