​In any good manufacturing or software business, there will be rigorous quality assurance processes to make sure every product is up to standard. The quickest way to lose a customer is to fail to deliver on your promises. But if you measured every single thing, you'd never get your product out of the door. You couldn't test every keyboard that comes off the manufacturing line.

Instead you need to take meaningful measurements at regular intervals. You need to decide:

• When during the manufacturing process should you take samples to test?
• How often will you pull a sample from the line and test it?
• How will you effectively and efficiently test the sample to get useful results that will inform production and highlight any issues?
  

I believe this is why marketing often gets a bad reputation: marketers fail to measure their activities and demonstrate the results.

Just like you would check the quality of a product's components and subassemblies as well as the product as a whole, so too should you measure different elements of your marketing.

But marketing measurement doesn't have to be complex, especially if you know your way around an Excel spreadsheet.
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Here's how to do it.

In engineering, you'd probably prototype and test a product before investing in expensive tooling.

Likewise, in marketing you want to avoid wasting large sums of money on activities that don't pay off. When trying any new marketing activity, it's always best to start small and scale up.

In the book 'Lean Startup', Eric Ries talks about building a minimum viable product (MVP). Think of your marketing in the same way - start with a minimum viable marketing operation (which is your prototype) and then expand on it. If you need a piece of marketing to fill a gap, then start with something that works and fulfils your basic requirements and build on it later.

Your prototype marketing activity should be used to test three different things.

How long does it take to buy from you?
 
This sounds like an easy question. But, it actually has 3 different answers depending on what you want to do with the information.

You might be talking about elapsed time, accrued time or your welcome window. Here's the meaning of each time-period and when you should use it in your marketing strategy.