Did you hit all of your sales and marketing goals last year? If you weren’t particularly thrilled with the final numbers of 2015, making the most of the New Year should be a top priority for your business.

If you’re like most small business owners, you’ve invested in marketing programs that promise more than they can deliver. Luckily, with today’s technology, you can analyze your marketing investment and what it’s providing for your particular business. The key is having the right tracking tools and information in place to ensure that none of your efforts—or leads!—are falling through the cracks.

A Sophisticated Phone System:

Each of your marketing avenues should have its own phone number. This way, when you compare the numbers dialed by your customers versus the sales record at the end of the month, you can see where your leads are coming from. Better yet, if you loop your sales team into the mix, they can answer the phones already knowing what offers that the customer has seen.

Trackable URLs:

The same story holds true for online visitors – it can be hard to sort out where your website visitors are hearing about you! The only way to be certain of where customers are coming from is to create trackable URLs for your different marketing channels. Create a separate landing page for direct mail, newspapers, radio – all of your offline marketing channels. The good news is that this is really easy, with a sound plan and the right tools, like Spectrum’s comprehensive software dashboard.

Knowing Your Numbers

When you have the right tools in place, it’s time to break down the most important part of any business marketing campaign—your numbers!

So what should be included in a budget for “marketing,” anyway? Typically, your allotted spend for this category should include the marketing staff and their overhead as well as costs associated with printing, advertising, outsourced talent, e-mail sends, and other electronic expenses.

As a general rule of thumb, established companies (that have been around for 5+ years) should spend around 5% of their total revenue on marketing to maintain their current status. If growth and increased recognition for your company are goals for the upcoming year, upping your percentage of spend is essential; usually somewhere around 10%.

To figure out your own budget percentages, there are four key components that you’ll want to figure out before spending another dime on any sort of marketing. Once you have your company’s “answers” to these four questions, developing a plan for improvement, tracking and ROI become a whole lot easier.

1) What is your lead to appointment ratio?

2) What is your appointment to proposal ratio?

3) What is your proposal to close ratio?

4) What is your average project/job in dollars?

Not sure how to calculate each of these numbers? No problem! We break down the step-by-step guides to each one in our FREE e-book, “Growing Your Business By the Numbers.” Knowing your numbers and having all the right tools in place are essential for growing your business and meeting all of your marketing goals in 2016.