The day of Saturn, Roman god of agriculture, a day for growing your business.

Perhaps it should be 'Strategic Saturday'. To continue the analogy with agriculture, success begins with planting the right kind of seeds in the right kind of soil. Today, how about analysing where your new customers and enquiries come from? We all have limited resources in terms of time and money to put into business promotion, so it is vital to make sure that the investment is put into the places that bring the best results.

Once you have that information you can compare the effectiveness of all your promotional channels. If you don't routinely ask new contacts where they found you, today may be a great time to adopt the habit.

The first thing is to list all the places where people may hear about your business it might look like this:

• Word of mouth
• Website enquiries
Exhibition or show attendance
• Vehicle signage
• Local newspaper
• Charity event sponsorship
Mailshot or leaflet drop
• Outgoing telesales campaign

Once you have a list, you can put them in order of the number of new sales that they have generated. How does that look? Are the results surprising? What do we do with the information?

Well, there are two ways of looking at everything as we mentioned on Thrilling Thursday this week. However, these two ways ars a little different. Promotional channels may take a surprisingly low place in the league table because the message that is being put there is not as effective as it might be. For example, are you still running the same advertisement in your local paper that you were two years ago? Has your website been updated this year? Are your leaflets visually attractive and powerfully worded?

Once you are happy that the message delivered via each medium is as good as it can be, then the under-performing media can be ignored in favour of investing more resources in the better performing media.

To take this one step further, the people that come to you via your website have a wide range of sources available to them from which they can come up with your address. This can modify our view of the first league table. For example, an enquiry may have come through your website because the address was noted from a newspaper advertisement, a business card passed on or seeing your signwritten vehicle somewhere. It is therefore important to analyse website visitor figures in their own right. This will help you get a truer understanding of your enquiry levels and can totally change the conclusions arrived at from the first analysis.

Does your website give you the information that you need to make those value calculations? If not, talk to the Village Websmith. To start accurately evaluating prospect and customer sources, call us on 0203 239 0350 or click in the header of any page to send an email.