Every business wants more business. Even if they say "we have too much business" all they are really saying is once they have their current growth spurt figured out, they will want more business.

How do you get more business? Marketing.

The Point of Marketing

The whole point of marketing is getting more leads. If you have leads coming in, you hopefully have a process to convert them to customers. And if you don't, you should use serviceminder.io -- it's got processes to help you close more deals. But leads are always at the top of your funnel. If you want more business, invariably you need more leads.

You may get leads from a variety of sources including referrals from existing customers, family and friends, advertising, and lead-gen platforms (like Angie's List, Home Advisor and others). You may get leads from the internet, such as people searching and finding your website (don't have one? see the earlier reference to serviceminder.io -- we can help you there too) or from your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Some of those leads will be free and some of them will cost you money. Sometimes a lot of money.

What's A Lead Worth?

Ultimately a lead is worth however much money they give you. Some percentage of your leads will become customers and in the process, they're going to give you money. So your first metric is going to be how much and from where. serviceminder.io has a report called the Revenue By Lead Source -- it breaks down all of your leads, shows you how many converted into customers and how much revenue you generated for each channel and campaign. And very importantly -- what your revenue per lead is. This metric is important because you need to make sure this number is considerably higher than how much you're spending for that lead.

Determine Cost Per Lead

So now that you know your revenue per lead, it's time to figure out your cost per lead. Revenue per lead is easy especially since serviceminder.io already knows your revenue. As long as you properly code your leads to the right channel and campaign when they come in, you'll get the revenue reporting for free. No heavy lifting required.

But to figure out the cost, you are going to have to do a little data entry. You're going to want, at a minimum to track your budget. You may have some expenses that run annually, some that run quarterly and others that run monthly. serviceminder.io's new budget tracking tool lets you select the frequency for every campaign you create.

Ideally you'll track your actual expenses as well. This is most important for things like SEO where you're actual spend may vary as well as an lead purchasing you do -- where you pay a fee per lead you're given. Since that is driven by how many leads you get sent, that can definitely vary from month to month.

Once you've got this data (and if you've keyed it in to serviceminder.io) you'll be able to use the same Revenue by Lead Source report and how see both your actual and your budgeted cost per lead.

Getting More Business

And now to the point. You want more business. Take a look at all your channels and campaigns that are the most profitable -- where your revenue per lead is much higher than your cost per lead. By how much is different for every industry but the one thing that is consistent is that you want to make more per lead than you spend. These campaigns that yield the most revenue per lead are the ones you will want to focus on to get more business. Spend more on these and the math will take care of the rest.

While this can be a bit of an oversimplification, given the data, you'll be much better at budgeting your marketing dollars towards the campaigns that produce the best results if you use the data you have available. You still have to consider things like frequency of marketing impressions across channels, but at the end of the year, the math doesn't lie. As always, hunches are great when they're right, or if you don't have data to prove them wrong.