Businesses should constantly be reviewing the results of marketing efforts to adjust their “living” marketing plan document. In order to put together a winning plan, you should conduct a marketing review to see how your marketing plan is working. Insight into your results enables you to prune the dead wood, feed the marketing programs that are producing, and look to harvest a wealth of new business in the New Year.

Throughout the year you should have been tracking how you acquired new clients. The easiest question to ask when someone does call you is to find out how they heard about you. If you have not been doing that, plan to add that question to your prospect interviews. If you have a contact form on your web site, add some way to capture that same information. Understanding where people find your contact information is an important way to get a feel for how your marketing efforts are working. Even if you didn’t ask for this information this year, you can still determine how your programs are working through a bit of intuition and gut feel.

• Make a list of all the marketing activities that you used this year. Include both those you pay for and those you don’t. Combine all like activities together to measure the area as a whole verses an individual activity. For example, if you pay for different links on the Internet, add them together to determine how much you spent on Internet marketing. Do the same for word of mouth (networking), advertising, public relations, direct marketing, events and strategic alliances. You will then have your total marketing spend for the year.
• Also determine how many leads you got through these areas. Remember, not all marketing is demand generation. Some marketing activities are meant to build awarenss of your business. If you have a list
• Now determine how you acquired your new clients or customers. Did they come through your Web site? Did you get them through a referral? Did you make contact at a speaking opportunity or an outside event you attended?
• 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.

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.

So how successful was your marketing? Did you spend more in marketing than you made in revenue? Did one marketing area produce better results than others? Can you trim your marketing budget without hurting your revenue? If you spent money on advertising and you can not attribute any inbound activity from it, stop. If you get quality leads coming through your web site, look for other ways to gain visibility on the Internet.

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