Talk about a tough thing to measure. We face the same challenge when we talk about leadership ROI. But today let’s stick with marketing. Now, don’t expect me to talk to you about it. I am a leadership guy but my friend David Stone is THE guy when it comes to marketing and business development in the built environment. Here is an article he just posted. Thought you would like it. After all, nothing happens, and no one gets to lead until somebody sells something!

CEO’s and CFO’s are asking hard questions of their marketing teams on the spending of scarce dollars to win new work. And so they should! As much as the marketers might squirm under the spotlight, the questions are legitimate and need to be asked. If spending can’t be justified with a clear return it should be cut off.

That said, marketing ROI (return on investment) is traditionally hard to measure since it’s very difficult to assign clear results to any particular undertaking. That new client may have first heard of your firm from an award you won, then learned more about you through your direct mail program, been impressed as one of your team members spoke at a conference, then made the final decision when your well-written proposal was competitively priced. While each of these initiatives contributed to the win, it’s impossible to allocate the exact amounts that resulted in the win.

Nonetheless there are very clear guidelines that will help you get the most from your marketing dollars and there are useful ways to measure your return.

Instead of thinking about marketing as one non-stop endeavor, the ‘win work’ effort should be viewed as a series of four consecutive steps that ultimately lead to a new client and a fifth step that will ensure they stick around in a long-term relationship:

1. Strategic and marketing planning (note from Wally, there is other planning too, like HR etc)
2. Brand building
3. Responding to RFPs
4. Negotiating
5. Customer Service

While your ultimate goal is a client with signed contracts, not each of these steps will produce that result. So your return on
a brand-building effort, for example, shouldn’t be measured by the number of new projects you sign in a year. Each step has its own clear goals and your measurements should focus on how well you achieved that goal.

You can see more from David at his website, www.stoneandcompany.net. His article above is part of a series so I will keep you informed as more come out.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 2:08 am and is filed under Excellence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.