In the previous blog in this series, we shared with you the first rule of marketing. The second rule is this: Find out what marketing works for your business and do more of it.

You’ve carefully planned your marketing – you know exactly who your ideal clients are and how to attract them. You’ve worked out what you can afford to do, who will do it and when. Your marketing is going really well and new business is coming in. But how much of your marketing is effective? Which activities are working best? If you don’t know, you’re committing Massive Marketing Mistake Number Nine and you won’t be able to follow the second rule of marketing.

Massive Marketing Mistake Number Nine – Not Measuring Your Marketing

A huge number of businesses don’t actually measure their marketing. They put time and effort in planning and carrying out their marketing and that’s as far as they go. Then, a year down the line, they realise that they haven’t got as much new business as they had hoped for, or they’ve spent more money than they had planned to, just to get enough new clients.

Successful businesses measure their marketing activity. They know what’s working, what isn’t working and how much it’s costing them. They’re able to adjust their marketing as they go along, to get even greater benefits. They understand the importance of measuring their marketing as it allows them to find out what marketing works and do more of it.

How do you avoid Massive Marketing Mistake Number Nine?

The way to avoid this Mistake is simple – measure your marketing! What should you measure? The answer is everything! Any marketing that you do needs to be measured. Start by measuring the number of enquiries you generate from each marketing activity and how much it costs for each enquiry. Go a stage further and measure the number of new clients generated from those enquiries. Some activities may generate many enquiries, but if they’re not the right sort of enquiries – not your ideal clients – you won’t get the conversion to clients that you want.

When you measure your marketing, you can make sound decisions about the best marketing to use for your business. You can stop doing what doesn’t work and do more of what does work. And that way, you’ll be able to build a strong, sustainable business.

That’s the end of this nine part series, in which we’ve looked at the Massive Marketing Mistakes that too many small businesses commit. If you need help with avoiding these mistakes on a regular basis, our Marketing Mentoring can help. There’s a special offer for any new clients who start working with us in May 2015 – click here for full details.