Ok so you are up and running with one or more marketing and advertising campaigns, business is flowing and you are feeling pretty good about yourself. Now ask yourself these questions, which marketing method is the most cost effective? Which method bring in customers and which is totally wasteful?

If you know the answers to these questions then give yourself a pat on the back, however if you are like most small businesses in Ireland then you probably haven’t a clue. You are subscribing to the spray and pray method of marketing, you know that if you fling enough mud then some of it will stick.

The problem with this way of trying to grow your business is that it is hugely wasteful in terms of time and money. What if you knew that the advert you took out in the paper each week actually wasn’t bringing you in any customers they we all in fact coming from your website? If you knew this information you could cancel the adverts and divert the money for this to enhancing the website further. Or what if you found out that a large percentage of your business came from your Golden Pages advert, then perhaps it would be worth considering in other Irish business directories.

So how do you go about finding out how effective a particular method of advertising is? The answer is that you need to implement a way to track and measure responses specific to each advert. In other words you need to be able to pinpoint exactly where each lead and in turn new client came from.

To do this isn’t actually that difficult you just need to incorporate some kind of unique direct response mechanism into your marketing. For example you may have one telephone number that you just use in your Golden Pages advert. Or you might run an advert in a paper that requires prospects to send back a coupon which you have a special tracking code on.

Once you start capturing this information it is possible to track exactly where each enquiry came from, you can then track exactly what process was used to convert that prospect to a customer.

Over time this will allow you to build up a very accurate picture of which is the most effective way to attract and convert customers. From this information it becomes very easy to then drop marketing methods which are not paying there way and ramp up the ones that are.