A few months ago, I sat down with a business owner who had been spending about $5,000 per month on digital marketing services with another agency. When I asked him how well it was working for him, he just shook his head.
He genuinely had no idea.
He knew his revenue. He knew his payroll. He knew what he was paying his marketing agency every month. But whether that marketing investment was actually producing results? He couldn’t tell me.
I’ve had some version of that conversation more times than I can count. Phil and I talk to business owners every week who are spending real money on marketing and have no way to evaluate whether it’s working. Not because they’re careless. Because nobody ever gave them a simple framework for what to pay attention to.
So here’s what I’d tell you if we were sitting across from each other right now. These are the 10 questions I wish every small business owner could answer about their marketing.
Think of them like a scorecard. If you can answer all 10, you’re in great shape. If several of them stump you, those blind spots are almost certainly costing you money.
1. Where did your last 10 leads come from?
If your answer is “referrals and probably Google,” that tells me something important: you don’t have great tracking in place. And without solid tracking, you can’t make smart decisions about where to invest your marketing budget.
The Growth Formula runs on Traffic, Conversion, and Customer Value. But none of those levers can be measured without a foundation of Tracking. It’s like playing 18 holes of golf without keeping score. You might feel like you played well, but you have no idea where you actually stand.
This is the first question because everything else builds on it.
2. What’s your cost to acquire a new customer?
This is one of the most valuable numbers in your business, and most small business owners have never calculated it.
The formula is straightforward: take what you spent on marketing last month, divide it by the number of new customers you brought in. That’s your cost per acquisition.
But here’s where most people stop. That blended number is a starting point, not the finish line. You need to know your cost per acquisition by channel. What does it cost you to acquire a customer through Google Ads? Through SEO? Through referrals? Through social media?
Those numbers will almost certainly be different. And until you break them apart, you can’t tell which channels are actually making you money and which ones are quietly draining your budget.
Now compare each channel’s cost per acquisition to how much a new customer is worth to you over their lifetime. If you’re spending $500 to acquire a customer worth $2,000, you could be in good shape. If you’re spending $800 to acquire a customer worth $600, you’re paying to lose money.
3. Which marketing channel produces your best results?
Once you have your cost per acquisition by channel, this question gets a lot easier to answer.
Not your favorite channel. Not the one you’ve been told you should be on. The one that consistently generates customers at a cost that makes financial sense.
And cost per acquisition alone isn’t the full picture. A channel that generates cheap leads but attracts low-value customers who churn quickly isn’t actually your best channel, even if the numbers look good at first glance. The scorecard that matters is cost per acquisition combined with customer lifetime value. Once you identify the channel that wins on both, make sure it’s getting enough investment to actually scale.
4. What percentage of your website visitors take action?
If your cost per acquisition is too high on a particular channel, the next question is why. Often the answer is right here: your website isn’t converting the traffic you’re already paying for.
Your conversion rate tells you whether your website is working as a lead generation tool or just collecting visits. And conversion rates vary a lot depending on the source. Organic or social traffic tends to convert at lower rates than focused traffic like Google Ads, which is why it matters to look at conversion by source, not just one overall number.
If your conversion rate is well below what you’d expect, you have a Conversion problem. More traffic won’t fix it. In fact, spending more on traffic while your conversion rate is broken is one of the most common ways small businesses waste marketing dollars.
5. What happens when a lead comes in?
Just the other day, I contacted two car service companies to get a quote to drive my family of 5 from West Hartford to JFK and back.
Only one of them responded.
I always find that surprising. I’m contacting businesses, offering to pay them money for the thing that they do, and they aren’t getting back to me to accept the money I want to pay them!
I’ve seen the same pattern with marketing clients. A business spends real money to generate a lead, and then nobody follows up. The lead goes cold, and they never know why.
The first standard is basic: respond to every inquiry, quickly. If someone fills out a form on your website, they should hear from you the same day. Hours, not days.
The second issue is what happens with leads who don’t buy right away. Most businesses handle the hot lead who’s ready to go. The money left on the table is the person who said “I’ll think about it” or filled out a form and went quiet. Studies consistently show that a significant percentage of sales happen after the fifth or sixth follow-up contact. Most people stop after two or three.
A good follow-up process covers both: an immediate response system for new inquiries, and a longer-term nurture track for leads who aren’t ready yet. That might be a CRM reminder, a structured call cadence, or an ongoing email newsletter that keeps you in front of people until they are ready. Whatever the system is, it should be documented, not improvised.
6. Do you own your ad accounts and data?
This one comes up constantly in conversations with business owners who have worked with agencies.
Your Google Ads account, your Google Analytics property, your Meta Business Manager, your call tracking data: do those accounts belong to you, or to your agency? If you ended the relationship tomorrow, would you be able to take your campaign history, your conversion data, and your audience lists with you?
You should always own your own accounts. Full stop. Some agencies set up campaigns under their own master accounts, which means if you leave, you start over from scratch. Years of data, gone.
At Main Street ROI, this is one of the things we’re most direct about with clients from day one: your accounts, your data, your campaigns. If we ever part ways, you take everything with you. That’s how it should work.
7. What’s your average customer lifetime value?
Customer Value is the third lever in The Growth Formula, and in our experience it’s the most underinvested one.
Most businesses focus almost exclusively on getting new customers, when there’s often a much easier path to more revenue sitting right in their existing customer base.
Your average customer lifetime value (LTV) is how much a customer is worth to you over the entire course of the relationship, including repeat purchases, upsells, referrals, and any recurring revenue. A pest control company that retains a customer for four years at $400 per year has a $1,600 LTV. A dentist whose patients come in twice a year for 10 years has a very different calculation than one who only sees patients once.
Knowing this number changes how you think about marketing investment. If your LTV is high, you can afford to spend more to acquire a new customer. And sometimes the fastest path to more revenue is getting more value from the customers you already have, not chasing more leads.
8. Can you explain what your marketing team is doing and why?
You don’t need to know how to run a Google Ads campaign. That’s not your job. But you should be able to describe in plain language what your marketing team is doing and how it connects to your business goals.
If your current agency sends you monthly reports full of impressions, clicks, and cost per click, but you can’t connect any of those numbers to actual leads and customers, something’s off. Either the reporting is designed to impress rather than inform, or you haven’t asked the right questions.
A good marketing advisor explains their work in terms you understand. “We reduced your cost per lead from $85 to $54 by pausing these underperforming keywords and redirecting the budget.” That’s the standard.
Transparency is how you catch problems early, make better investment decisions, and build a marketing program that actually gets smarter over time.
9. What’s your plan if your primary lead source dried up tomorrow?
This is a risk management question, and most business owners haven’t thought about it until the moment they need to.
If 80% of your leads come from referrals, what happens when your two biggest referral sources retire, move, or simply get busy? If most of your business comes from one Google Ads campaign, what happens if your account gets suspended, your budget gets cut, or a competitor drives up your cost per click to the point where your campaigns no longer make financial sense?
A well-run marketing program has more than one way to generate leads. Not necessarily 10 ways, because spreading your budget too thin creates its own problems. But two or three dependable channels that won’t all fail at the same time for the same reason.
Think of it the way you’d think about your investment portfolio. You wouldn’t put your entire retirement savings in one stock. The same logic applies to your lead generation. Diversify enough that one bad quarter in one channel doesn’t put your whole business at risk.
10. What are your marketing priorities for the next 90 days?
What are the one or two most important things you’re trying to accomplish in the next quarter? Generating more leads? Improving conversion on your website? Increasing how much your existing customers spend? Building a more reliable follow-up system?
The businesses that grow consistently aren’t the ones doing the most things. They’re the ones who identify the right lever to focus on, give it their full attention for 90 days, and measure the result. Then they adjust and go again.
Your Scorecard
Go back through those 10 questions. How many can you answer with confidence?
The ones you can’t answer could be the ones costing you the most money. Not knowing your cost per acquisition means you can’t make good decisions about budget. Not owning your accounts means you could lose years of campaign data if you switch agencies. Not having a follow-up system means leads you already paid for are walking out the door every month.
Remember the business owner I mentioned at the beginning? The one spending $5,000 a month and couldn’t tell me if it was working? We walked through these same questions together. Within an hour, he knew exactly where his blind spots were. Within 90 days, he could answer every one of them.
That’s not because he became a marketing expert. It’s because he finally had a scorecard.
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