Whoo-hoo! Seven down and two to go in our year end marketing review so we’re ready to hit the ground running! Hope you’ve found these useful so far!

Do you regularly review the results of your marketing efforts? Is your marketing plan a living document that ebbs and flows with what is happening in your business? As a small business owner, you should try to stay aware of how your marketing is working throughout the year so you can make adjustments as the need requires.

How Did You Find Me?

Throughout the year, you should track how you acquired new clients. The easiest question to ask when someone calls you is to find out how they heard about you. If you have not been doing that, add “track marketing activities” to your goals for this year!Make it a habit to ask – you will be glad you did. If you have a contact form on your web site, add some way to capture that same information. Knowing how people found you is an important way to get a feel for how your marketing efforts are working.

Simple way to review your activities

Even if you didn’t ask for how your clients found you this year, you can still determine how your programs are working through a bit of intuition and gut feel. I know most of my clients are through referrals or through online activities. To get a better idea of where you want to put more effort and where you should abandon your efforts and use your resources more effectively, we can do a simple analysis.

Start with a list

List all the marketing activities that you used this year, including those you pay for and those you don’t. Your time is as important as money, maybe even more, so even if you don’t spend money on an activity, if it isn’t producing, you may want to use your time more effectively on something that may work better.

Count your leads

Determine how many leads you got and where they came from. Did they come through your Web site form? Did you get them through a referral? Did you make contact at a speaking opportunity or an outside event you attended?

Count your new clients

How many of your leads turned into new clients? Record all prospects and how they find you even if they don’t become a client. Getting a lead and not converting it into a client can tell you where you may need to adjust your marketing, pricing, packaging or messages to align with your ideal client. An activity that gets a lot of leads but few, if any, turn into clients needs a serious assessment before investing in that activity again. The key is to determine which activity generates quality leads that turn into paying clients.

What did it cost?

Now compare how much you spent for each marketing area with how much revenue you can attribute to it and you will quickly know if there is a return on your investment. If the marketing activity costs time, not money, put your time investment down. Try to place each new client with some marketing activity unless you personally cold call and got the client from a direct sales activity. If the client came to you, assume it came through some marketing activity.

Where should I invest?

Now that you have this information, you can measure which marketing activities produced better results than others, enabling you to continue those that work and reassign the resource (money or time) to new activities that may produce better results. You might be able to trim your marketing budget without hurting your revenue, spend some more time blogging and building relationships on social networks or finally invest in search engine marketing or pay-per-click to drive visitors to your Web site.

Take time now to understand where you should invest your marketing resources next year. You can make intelligent decisions about how to market your business if you understand where your revenue comes from.

How successful was your marketing?

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Marketing Activities – What Worked? is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.