It is critical that you understand how the different components of your marketing plan fit together, and this cannot be done without an effective mechanism for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing investments.
Step 1: Identify Marketing Investments: As a small business owner, you should take an inventory of all your expenses to ensure that marketing investments are categorized correctly. Some examples:
* Advertisements: mailers, e-mail blasts, magazines
* Printed signs/banners: sidewalk signs, vehicle signs
* Website costs: development, SEO
* Infrastructure: any system costs associated with delivering marketing initiatives
* Human Resources: your time and your staff’s time spent planning, developing, and delivering marketing initiatives
* Dues and subscriptions to trade or networking organizations: BNI, Chamber of Commerce
* Rebates: if you advertise a discount as part of a campaign, the discounted amount is a marketing investment
Step 2: Quantify your marketing investments:
Once you have your marketing investments identified, quantify them.
How much does each of these items cost you? Monthly/weekly/annually/one-time expenses?
Organize these in a spreadsheet. Once this is complete, you are ready to start linking for marketing mix to your sales processes. I will have more on this in my next post.
