Rinse and Repeat: Tracking Marketing Costs

Keeping costs under control is the name of the game right now.  No matter how busy you are right now, you need to keep marketing to keep new business in the pipeline. 

But, do you know what you’re spending in marketing and do you know what is working?  Like the shampoo bottle reads, are you simply rinsing and repeating day after day?  Perhaps you’ve taken to repeating the same marketing campaigns and are lucky enough to be getting the same results. 

It’s imperative that you track and measure every marketing effort you put forth.  Put a dollar amount on everything you do in your attempt to find more buyers and sellers.  Yes, you will be keeping track of a lot of data, but how else are you going to be able to measure your return on investment–and do more of what is working best for you?

Spending an hour a day on Twitter or Facebook or another social media site?  Just as you’d count the design, printing and mailing/postage costs for a postal mailing, you need to determine what other marketing methods are costing you as well.  Count each hour as a cost and figure out what you’re getting in return as new buyers and sellers. 

If you’re advertising in the newspaper and paying for the ad design and ad space, you need to calculate the same for ads you’re producing for craigslist or other free ad sites as well.  Time and energy are costing you something and if, when your business gets increasingly busy, will you be able to invest the same amount of “free time” creating “free” ads in the same way? 

Keep track of your costs by type of marketing, time spent, customers returned.  Review this regularly (in  whatever time period works best for you to identify trends and feel you can make adjustments) and do more of what is working (investing more money into that activity) and do less, slow down or drop the marketing that isn’t producing for you.

The only way to market smart is to track, measure and analyze.  Let us know what you’ve discovered when analyzing your marketing.