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On Monday we talked about monitoring your marketing. Today we continue our series on "Marketing In The Moment" with a focus on measuring our marketing. Don't worry. I'm not going to get technical. In fact, I'm going to shockingly simple.

Does it drive business growth?

That's the only measurement that matters. Short-term. Intermediate-term. Long-term. It all matters.

The only thing that matters is business growth. Is your marketing fueling growth? If not, then it ain't working.

"But our marketing tells our story..." blah, blah, blah, blah.

We love to convince ourselves that our marketing is having this invisible positive impact that can't be measured. No it's not.

The only growth I know of that's invisible...until it IS visible is cancer.

If you've been pumping money into marketing year after year and the needle of business growth isn't doing anything more than creeping...then it's not working.

Time to get tough. Probably with yourself. Most of us are prone to think more highly of what we're doing than we should. We have strong beliefs in what we're doing. That's why we're entrepreneurs. Those beliefs serve us well. Mostly. But not always. Delusion comes easily when we desperately want to believe something will work. Or when we embrace the belief that it IS working even though there's little to no evidence.

True story. Bob's business has spent (a'hem, "invested) hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for the past decade. Growth has almost never exceeded a 3% increase in gross revenue. Profits have grown some years only because of cost cuts. Bob is convinced the marketing is necessary to maintain the current performance. Each year he's convinced of it. But he can't prove it.

Nothing in Bob's business indicates that the marketing is doing much more than making Bob feel like he's doing something. Until a struggle to become more profitable provokes Bob's wrath...now Bob wants to find out. Enter the 80/20 rule. Folks dig into the marketing to see which 20% is playing a vital role. They assume some of the marketing IS working to provide some growth.

In the process, the team takes a hard look at the things they believe are absolutely NOT working. Those things that aren't doing anything to push the business forward. They identify almost $200,000 worth of costs. That's right! COSTS. Not investment.

Fearful they begin to chip away at it rather than make one big clean cut. They inch the number down month by month over the course of 9 months. No measurable change. Nobody notices. But the bottom line notices! Bob notices. Suddenly Bob's business is much more profitable. A 5% bottom line is now 8%. Bob has long dreamed of a 10% bottom line but felt it was unachievable.

My point isn't to cut your marketing budget so you can make more money. That's not the recipe. The recipe is to STOP pouring money down the drain. The recipe is to figure out what's working to grow your business and what isn't.

Bob gets ill just thinking about that $200,000 that's been spent year after year. Said Bob,