Tracking your marketing and advertising campaigns is incredibly crucial to their effectiveness. You need to track who and where every lead comes from, which leads ended up paying you and how much, how much money and time went into each marketing and advertising effort, which leads were better than others in non-monetary ways, how many referrals have come from each lead source and how frequently, and more.
Build a spreadsheet that organizes everything. Compare the return on investment (ROI) for each marketing effort. Analyze and compare which marketing efforts are the most successful and profitable. Focus your future dollars and energies on these. Cut anything that doesn’t seem to be providing high returns (though, don’t be too quick to cut out the leads groups and other long-term networking efforts).
With regard to your pay per click (PPC) ad word campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO), there are really cool applications, called analytics, that collect, organize, and measure more information than you ever dreamed possible. Do not run any ad word, banner, or other online marketing campaign without using an analytics program or service. If you’re tech-savvy, then give one of the free ones a go, such as Google Analytics. If not, then pay for a service to do this for you.
A good ad campaign with solid analytics (assuming you have a competitive company, sales person, product, service, and pricing, obviously) can literally have a monthly ROI % in the 1000s, and an exponential monthly growth factor. These are very powerful tools when used correctly. If you want dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of clients every month, then you seriously need to make web 2.0, ad words, SEO, a blog, and analytics a central part of your business model and marketing plan. These kinds of results are absolutely possible, but you need to do them right to have that kind of success.
