Guest contributor Chad Bhalla of WebsiteBox says:

The most important number you need to pay attention to with regards to marketing is ROI (return on investment). The whole purpose of marketing is to spend some money to get more customers and more money in return. Good advertising always generates a profit.

Here are five steps to ensure that you maximize your marketing budget.

1) Set Goals and Define Your Budget

Make sure you are clear about what you want to achieve through your marketing efforts. You obviously want to get more clients, but how are you going to generate leads?

Perhaps you offer a monthly newsletter and your website has contact forms all over it. Then your goals become more clear. You want people to sign up for your newsletter and you want them to submit a contact form to you.

After setting your goal, you need to ask yourself how much is this goal worth to me? Let's say you would pay $10 per lead that comes in from a newsletter sign-up or contact form submission. Then you need to determine how many of these leads you need to generate a client.

For example, 150 leads generate one client that closes and turns into a commission. If you paid $10 per lead, then you would have spent $1,500 in generating leads through marketing, which turned into one client that generated a $3,000 commission. This means that your marketing efforts have led to a $1,500 profit. You need to set your marketing budget based on these calculations.