Maximizing Your Marketing Spend

Tracking, analyzing and revising your marketing spend strategy can be a tricky process. It’s easy to see how much you’re spending, but it can be hard to see what you’re getting for all that cash. If you can develop a system for tracking your spend and boosting your results, getting that marketing budget will be a lot easier next year. Enter marketing automation.

Track costs on a per-campaign basis. Create an individual campaign for each of your marketing efforts. For example, a trip to a trade show may be one campaign and an email sponsorship may be another. Then, for each campaign, enter the associated cost in your marketing automation solution.

Tag your leads. Now that you know what you’re spending, find out which campaigns are driving the most leads. You can associate your leads with a campaign by tagging your landing pages with the campaign. Each new visitor that converts on the page will carry the associated campaign as the point of origin. Leads that are collected offline, such as at a trade show, can be tagged when they are imported into your database.

Collect the right metrics. Once your campaign data is entered and your leads are tagged, you can start tracking your metrics. To determine the effectiveness of your campaigns, you’ll want to look at a few different numbers:

• Number of new leads per campaign
• Number of qualified leads (usually leads you pass on to sales) per campaign
• Number of opportunities per campaign, or the opportunity value of those leads

Since your prospects are tagged with the appropriate campaign, you can easily create reports that help you produce the above metrics. Your marketing automation system will come with reporting capabilities and can also sync with your CRM for seamless opportunity tracking. Once you know which campaigns are performing the best, use that data to adjust your spend and reduce wasteful spending.