Why is marketing return on investment (ROI) so difficult to measure? The truth is that many companies don’t prioritize the right metrics. It’s not enough to only track web traffic or social media followers—if that audience doesn’t convert, you’re wasting time and resources.

Here’s how you can get the most out of your small business marketing budget.

How to Market a Small Business on a Budget

You don’t need to spend much on your marketing to see results. Free or low-cost tools like Canva, Mailchimp, Ubersuggest, and platform-specific social media analytics can significantly maximize your small business advertising budget. The key is creating quality content for the channels your potential future customers use most.

To start, though, you need to optimize your website. It doesn’t matter how great your marketing is—if your site loads too slowly or isn’t compatible with mobile devices, people will click away. It’s a good idea to click through all of the stages of your checkout process to ensure no errors or pages with unclear language.

Next, you can focus on content marketing. For best results, you should build your strategy across multiple platforms, including SEO-friendly website content, blog posts, email newsletters, Google ads, and social media posts. All of these can be leveraged without a sizeable small business marketing budget.

Once your strategy is in place, it’s time to ensure it works. Here are 5 metrics to track to provide the best marketing ROI for small businesses.

1. Cost per click: The most basic purpose of your marketing is to interest potential future customers enough that they’ll want to learn more. If they’re not clicking through to your website, there’s a problem. However, not every click has to become a sale immediately, as most people must encounter a brand seven times before committing to a purchase.
2. Cost per sale: Measuring only the cost per click is insufficient; we eventually want to see a boost in sales. You can calculate your cost per sale by dividing the overall marketing spend by your campaign’s total sales.
3. Conversion rate: What percentage of your leads convert? This number can indicate where you might lose people in your sales funnel and how to win them back.
4. Customer lifetime value: To properly assess your marketing ROI, you need to know how much value a customer will bring throughout their time with you. A few new customers with a high lifetime value might be better than many new customers who don’t stick around.
5. Shares: You can see how many people have shared your social media posts or forwarded your email newsletters in your analytics. Although it’s not feasible for every post to “go viral,” you can focus on creating shareable content such as how-tos or resources that provide value in your industry.

If you’re tracking the right metrics, you’ll soon see it’s not the size of the small business marketing budget that matters—it’s what you do with it. You should analyze your marketing data regularly and tweak your strategy for the best results.

Want to learn more about gaining new customers while lowering your small business’s advertising costs? As a business coach, I’ve written many articles about how to make the most of your small business marketing. Click here to sign up for my newsletter to deliver weekly business articles to your email.

Coach Dave