From Inc. Magazine: Struggling to calculate return on a text campaign or Facebook investment? Just apply this single, simple equation.

When I was a consultant at McKinsey, we helped Fortune 500 companies optimize their marketing spend. With the help of statistics PhDs, we applied complex statistical models to customer data to identify small tweaks in marketing campaigns–to the tune of millions of dollars of incremental profits.

If you’re a small business owner, you don’t have the luxury of a PhD data scientist on your staff. Between opening and closing every day, managing inventory, and hiring and firing employees, you have a few hours every month to unearth insight from your spreadsheets and Quickbooks data. What should you be looking for? What insights can drive meaningful impact on your business?

Read more…