For the past decade I’ve tracked the source of every one of my new clients. I have a field for this information on my QuickBooks customer information and invoices, plus another field for the year in which each client first started doing business with me.

It’s a simple tracking system for a simple marketing program. With this data I can easily run reports to see what elements of my marketing efforts are working best, and how much of my business comes from on-going versus new clients. How do you track the results of your marketing programs?

Last year you created a detailed marketing plan, and this year you’ve been implementing it step-by-step. Terrific! So how are your marketing efforts working out? Which elements of your marketing campaign are producing the best results? Which ideas didn’t turn out to be as good as you had hoped?

Unless you have a tracking system in place, you have no idea. Which means that you could be sending a lot of money down the drain…especially if you use this year’s marketing plan as the starting point for next year’s efforts.

You’ve got to track results

If you rely on memory or “gut” to figure out where your business is coming from, you’re bound to get things wrong.

On the other hand, a good marketing program tracking system will give you the hard data you need to make informed decisions going forward.

Tracking results enables you to answer important questions

These include:

• How many responses did each ad (or email or whatever) garner?
• How many of these responses turned into sales? For service businesses, how many turned into requests for proposals, and how many of these proposals turned into sales?
• What was the ROI (return on investment) of each element of your marketing program?
• What was the average sale by lead source?
• How many of these new customers turned into repeat customers? How has this impacted the comparative ROI of each element of the program?
• And much more

Get in the habit of asking for and tracking the source of each client or request for information. The patterns that emerge from this data will help you focus your future marketing efforts on the most effective channels. If something isn’t working, you’ll know it. And if a particular strategy or set of strategies proves to be a winner, you’ll know that, too.

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT: JTANL

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