Wasting money and time on marketing is just too easy, especially when you can’t quickly finetune your marketing strategies to get the results you really want because you’re not measuring those results!

The basic purpose of marketing is to get leads into your product or service funnel. In other words, it’s to create opportunities for you to offer your products and services to potential customers. So a good marketing process will at the very least send you lots of new leads, send you leads relatively inexpensively, and send you leads that do in fact want to become your customers.

So with these three basic marketing results in mind, consider starting with these three essential marketing measures:

MARKETING MEASURE 1: Number of New Leads

You have to know what the actual output of your marketing activities is.

All you’re doing here is counting the new leads that present themselves to you. It might be phone calls, emails or signups for your newsletters.

But be careful - to qualify as a lead, the person must knowingly supply their contact details to you.

MARKETING MEASURE 2: Cost Per New Lead

Marketing costs money, and you want to be sure you’re getting as much as you can for that money. So find out how much each lead is costing you, by adding all your marketing expenses - like advertising, yellow pages listings, list renting and so on - and dividing into this amount the number of new leads these methods delivered to you. When you get better with your data capture, you can even calculate this for each method of marketing, but you do need to have a way to identify which method each lead came via.

MARKETING MEASURE 3: Lead to Customer Conversion Rate

If your marketing efforts are finding you the right leads, then these leads will easily convert to customers. To calculate your lead conversion rate, the simplest way is to add up your total number of active customers and divide this by the total number of leads you currently have. It’s not a perfect measure, because it’s difficult to account for the fact that some leads will convert within a week of first contact, and other leads will take months. But tracking this proxy measure of lead conversion over time is still very revealing!

Sure, you can measure your marketing results in different ways, and in finer detail. But just get started measuring these basics on a regular basis - even as often as weekly, and you can build the sophistication later on.

Stacey Barr is a specialist in performance measurement, helping micro and small business owners to move their business results from where they are, to where they want them to be, using powerful, transformational measures. Learn more about Stacey at www.staceybarr.com.au

On Thursday April 23rd Stacey will be our Guest Expert for the Creating Online Success Inner Circle program. Stacey will be sharing with Inner Circle members, her top tips for how to dramatically reduce the time it takes to create real shifts in your business performance, without investing any more $$ or time than you currently are, and possible investing even less.

Join the Creating Online Success Inner Circle…. visit www.creatingonlinesuccess.com