Jay Conrad Levinson is the father of Guerilla Marketing. This approach says you don’t have to spend a fortune in marketing if you are prepared to invest time, energy, imagination and information. You need to experiment and find the combination that works for you.

So, look at your company and ask, do you experiment enough — or do you just pass on a health budget to your advertising agency and spend it through the same old media channels. For everything you do you should be asking “Can we get a better result next time?”

This is particularly the case online. Ann Holland says A-B testing of alternate copy, layout and design can often increase sales results by 40 percent. Imagine how many companies are spending heavily on advertising only to lose people at a sub-optimal website.

Testing relies of information, of course. Social media is providing many new opportunities in this space. Jodee Rich from People Browsr explains how Twitter can be used to measure consumer sentiment — it’s really a live research tool, that’s perhaps more accurate than traditional research.

Two final thoughts — are you measuring your marketing team on the right metrics? As Jay Conrad Levinson says you really need to be measuring the ratio of profit to marketing spend and getting your marketing team to drive that ratio down. Secondly, would you get better results if you added a role in your marketing team responsible for testing everything — then reduced your marketing budget by the cost of that salary? I’m sure in most cases you would.

First published on CBS News