If you are unable to associate leads and sales with specific marketing efforts that generate them you have no way of knowing what is working as an effective marketing mechanism and what is not.

The money you invest in marketing your company is precious. In order for you to maximize your marketing dollars you need to know results individual marketing efforts generate. When you know results of your marketing tactics you can make intelligent decisions about how to better allocate your marketing budget.

For instance, if you concurrently run a direct mail campaign, a search engine advertising campaign and weekly ads in industry periodicals without some method to discern results you will not know which effort generates lions share of any new business.

If you don’t know that your direct mail campaign yielded 90% of your revenue with a 2% response rate, you are powerless to make wise decision to reinvest in direct mail campaign and make changes to or drop entirely other campaigns. What’s more, if you can figure out how to double response rate of your mail campaign, you can nearly double revenue your marketing campaign without spending money on search engine marketing and periodical advertisements.

Measuring your marketing results will help you save money by allowing you to eliminate unproductive marketing tactics and at same time, will help you make more money by allowing you to reinvest in productive marketing tactics.

Do you have a method for measuring effect of your marketing?

Here are four tips for gathering information you need to make wise marketing investment decisions.

Some people see problems as opportunities. Understanding that getting through each opportunity puts them closer to next one. Kind of going through life with a stair step mentality. Excited to get to next round of new opportunities because they are seen as ‘steps’ along a pathway. They feel like bigger opportunity (problem) better because that means a bigger step taken. With this outlook they welcome big challenges. They push ahead boldly, as though it were a sporting event in which opportunities were opponent. The opportunity being thing that must be overcome or conquered in order to move up to higher levels of competition. Thereby bringing higher levels of enjoyment. Enjoying whole process way one might enjoy a weekend hobby or companionship of a loved one. These are kinds of people who charge out of bed in mornings because they see upcoming day as another opportunity to be great.

Conversely there are those who don’t ever want there to be any problems (opportunities). Believing that problems are to be avoided at all costs. In minds of these people problems are all bad. They see very occurrence of opportunity as a problem. They get caught up believing that it’s end of something rather than focusing on new beginning that lies before them once challenge is met. These are people who never confront either themselves or others. They just accept. "Whatever works for you." "If that’s what you want."

These people don’t realize it but they are victims. Accepting what comes instead of actively going to where they want to be. Sometimes they see themselves as peacekeepers. Which is not a bad thing to be but peacemaking would be an even higher aspiration.