The world is full of entrepreneurs with revolutionary business ideas and great product inventions. Unfortunately, no matter how great these services or products are, without effective advertising, these companies are probably doomed to fail. And while these visionaries may have great ideas, they are often not the most savvy marketers. The reason may be they are too focused on the technical side of the product to understand how it really appeals to prospective customers or will fulfill customers' needs, or simply because their business marketing ideas are out of date.

Many managers think that relying on their own creative advertising strategy and using a little common sense is enough to build a successful business. However, "the numbers never lie." Instead of basically guessing what will be successful, which can result in wasting money on ineffective advertising campaigns, research and testing can ensure your business marketing success and that you achieve the best possible marketing ROI. Recent studies by best selling author and Internet advertising expert Tim Ferriss have proven that even focus groups and surveys do not accurately portray what products attract customers enough to make them spend their money. Ferriss' experiments with marketing metrics have shown that what is actually sought out by his followers is different from what they claimed were their interests.

Not every small business or entrepreneur can afford an expensive marketing consulting agency. However, even if you are determined to conduct your own business marketing in house, it is best to bounce your ideas off outside marketing consultants for their input and opinion. This preliminary testing can be done inexpensively by outsourcing marketing consulting, even if it is just for a review of your plan. Or you can make use of web marketing analytics and marketing metrics either by running small split tests or tracking competitors' marketing strategies.

Web marketing analytics can now provide a wide array of business marketing metrics. A range of free and low cost tools offer great insight into the channels where your business marketing is generating the most hits to your site, and you can then use the tools to determine any reasons why visitors to your site are not completing the transaction. For example, if you have an extremely long sales script that runs into thousands of words and clients are spending less than one minute on the page without acquiring your product, then clearly they are not getting the message and have not been drawn in by the introduction. Whereas if they have stayed on the page long enough to read the entire pitch, but they still did not close the deal, it suggests problems with pricing or credibility.

If you are still in doubt about the benefits of using suggestion-based marketing metrics vs. your own common sense and ideas, then try testing them side by side to see which pulls in more revenue....