Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:30 pm

If you have read other pages on our website you may read our page about the difference between marketing and advertising. Hopefully that article made sense to you. After all, one of the greatest benefits of marketing is the ability to measure your efforts, for a business owner, this is a valuable ability and one that I am hoping that you are making use of, unlike so many business people that I’ve spoken too.

You see, when you measure your marketing efforts… and then take the time to make the appropriate changes to your marketing strategy, you are going to see the results in the increased number of sales.

So how can you measure your marketing efforts? Well, good tracking and measuring is going to take a combination of Internet know-how using tools such as Google Analytics and good old fashioned marketing systems. But, between the two, you can easily track and measure:

• Lead sources – what part of your advertising is generating your leads?
• Email open rates – our posting about effective email subjects may give you hints and there are several ways of monitoring the rates at which your emails are being opened.
• Email opt-in rates – How many people are signing up to get emails from you?
• Email links – How many people are clicking on links in your emails to find out more?
• Promotion responses – If you send out marketing mailshots or attend exhibitions etc what kind of responses are you getting?
• And, of course your resulting sales!

By measuring responses you will be able to SEE what is working, meaning that your marketing will become more specific, targeted, and successful. Even with a great marketing campaign, there is always room for improvement. Measuring your results gives you the chance to keep getting better, and bring in more and more sales.

Without measurement… marketing campaigns are nothing more than a shot in the dark! With the ability to measure, track, and tweak, you can become a marketing powerhouse and start adding more money to your bank account!

So finally, don’t be liike an accountant that I spoke to recently – they were saying that they were not getting any leads from their website – I pointed out the number of views of their contact details that they had had in the past 30 days and asked how many phone calls from prospects they had had that said that they had found them on the web. I was amazed to find that they didn’t even know the number of phone calls from prospects that they had received. The simple answer, as I am sure you know by now – measure your marketing by asking people people how they found you, put a box on the initial contact form filled in by your sales staff / receptionist or your customer questionaire and make sure it’s filled in where-ever you can.