Over days, weeks, months and years, your marketing can become quite the beast, full of a mix of mediums, initiatives, set and forgets and those parts you’re afraid to get rid of but not really sure what they are doing for you.

If you are feeling this way, sometimes a good old reset can do the trick and force you to make some decisions about what to keep and what to through out of your marketing mix.

To begin this review start by listing in a spreadsheet all of the activity you do, where you do it and how much it costs.

Example:

After you have completed your list, then add an additional column in that is titled ‘Outcomes’.

This is often the more difficult part of the task as it can be tricky to identify what hard outcomes you received.

Begin with the easier of them. If you do Facebook advertising you will be able see metrics around how many leads that sent you to your website. Take it a step further and ascertain how many converted.

If you engage in a networking group, evaluate what leads if any have come out of that group, what the value of those leads were, if there were indeed active referrers, and whether you are also able to deliver outcomes to others in the group.

Do this for each line by line item you have. You’ll soon realise what’s working and what’s not. It is also important to remember that while you may not always get hard ‘results’ from an activity, brand awareness, local profiling, giving back to a community and other more passive elements can be deemed ‘outcomes’. With this in mind allocate a portion of your marketing budget to these ‘branding’ elements and be comfortable with the outcomes that fall within this portion.

I have a previous blog post on how to manage your marketing budget, so check that one out for more details. I recommend keeping this spreadsheet as a rolling document and review items bi-annually. Don’t ever delete any items from them if you cease doing that activity, it all helps to created context when you are presented with a similar option in the future.