Do you know if your marketing efforts are paying off? More importantly, do you know which marketing campaigns and channels are profitable and which are losing money?

Marketing is one of the toughest areas to calculate return on investment, and one of the reasons is because customers may have had contact with your company in multiple ways before they make a purchase. Other reasons such as a lack of systems are more easily solved and can give you valuable information that you can make smart decisions with.

One main goal of marketing is to acquire leads that will hopefully turn into buying customers and even repeat customers. To start measuring your marketing efforts, we need to find out where those leads are coming from and measure which ones became your customers. That means we need to develop a system that tracks a customer from lead source to sale.

The hard part is that some of this needs to be done outside the accounting system.  The good news is that there are many tools and analytics available to help in this process.

One of the first things to do if you don’t already have it set up is to record the lead when they enter your sales process. Enter basic information about them in your CRM (customer relationship management system), and be sure to ask them how they found out about you.  This will help you track the lead back to the campaign or channel that they came in on. Once they’ve made a purchase, you can connect the lead to the customer record and track revenue by marketing source.

If your leads come in digitally, there are many automated tags you can set up to track where they originated, whether it was from the web site, a particular web page, a social media account or a link from an email you sent.

An important statistic for businesses is cost per lead, how much it costs to generate one lead for your business. The cost will vary by channel or marketing source. For example, someone coming from your website will cost less than someone coming from social media in most cases.

Once you know how many leads to generate to make a sale, you can start calculating what your marketing budget should look like.  More importantly, you’ll be able to forecast your revenue more accurately, too.

While numbers are probably the last thing you think about when you’re doing your marketing, they can be very effective for your bottom line.  There are many metrics beyond cost per lead that would be valuable to measure as well.  Here are just a few of them:

• Number of leads (in total or per channel)
• Number of press mentions
• Number of direct mail pieces sent out
• Number of email subscribers
• Number of social media connections per platform
• Number of posts sent, number of shares, number of comments
• Total web visitors, new and returning
• Google rankings for keywords
• Number of customer reviews per site, ratio of positive to negative reviews

And as always, if you want help developing these processes and metrics, please reach out.

Many people in their retirement years have regrets about not saving more during their earning years, but you don’t have to be one of them. All you need to do is be realistic and proactive about saving. It’s all about paying your future self.

Circumstances can arise that can erode savings you hoped would be there for retirement. Some of those events include not being able to work due to poor health or a bad job market, unanticipated hospital bills, a divorce, overestimating Social Security benefits, bad investments, procrastination, and simply not realizing how much you need to live on.

The good news is you can prevent future regrets by making a strong savings plan now. As a small business owner, you may not have a retirement plan, so it’s essential that you create one for yourself. You earn an income today. Put some of that income toward paying your future self, and pay that “bill” first, every month or with each paycheck.

To be proactive and build as much savings as possible, take these steps:

1. Increase your financial skills by learning how to fund your retirement.
2. Take care to manage your investment risk and be realistic about investment returns.
3. In good markets, purchase rather than rent or lease so you are building an asset.
4. Put as much aside as you can, and live beneath your means.
5. If you have periods when work is slow, live frugally until your income is back to normal.
6. Optimize your business profits and apply some of them to your savings plan.
7. Minimize taxes where possible so you can keep more of what you make.
8. Make everything work twice as hard for you:
   1. Get credit cards with loyalty programs.
   2. Sign up for frequent customer programs to earn points.
   3. Make sure your bank is giving you the best deal on interest.
9. Sell unused belongings on eBay and put the money into savings.
10. Cancel subscriptions and memberships and move the saved money into savings.
11. Periodically reach out to vendors to get a better deal on the expenses you incur. This could be for phone plans, utilities, and any other routine expense. Put the difference saved into savings.
12. Select cars and trucks with good gas mileage and also high resale value. Consider that using Lyft or Uber may be cheaper than maintaining a car, depending on how much you drive. Put the difference in savings.

There are hundreds more ways to save more. These will get you started in the right direction for 2019.