Track marketing ROI to see what works and what doesn’t
If you want to determine how much money in your budget should be earmarked for advertising and marketing, then you will need to see which of your marketing initiatives (i.e. print, TV, radio, digital, etc.) generate positive ROI.

“For small businesses that don’t have money to play with, it is better to minimize risk and focus first on measurable marketing activities like online advertising, SEO, and email marketing,” advises Ricky Shockley, an independent marketing consultant who works with small businesses and launched his own agency, Shockley Marketing this past October. “These things are all very easy to measure in terms of ROI.”

To illustrate his point, Shockley offers this example: “One of my clients, a cosmetic dermatology practice, was previously spending a couple of thousand dollars per month for a local marketer to handle their paid Google Ads. This is an activity that makes it very easy to measure ROI, but they weren’t doing so. After we did some investigating, we realized that the total revenue they were generating each month was about half of what they were spending. We then switched over to organic SEO as a marketing tactic. This reduced costs from $2,000 per month to $700 per month. We also added a prominent call-to-action to the company website in order for us to capture valuable lead information. The practice now sees about a 250-percent ROI every month.”

Continue at https://smallbusinessonlinecommunity.bankofamerica.com/community/running-your-business/sales-marketing/blog/2013/01/10/is-your-ad-spending-too-high-or-too-low-how-to-figure-out-an-appropriate-admarketing-budget-based-on-your-small-business-s-revenue-and-industry