Brian Gallagher has written a worthy article, Marketing Trends Impacting Construction, where he reviews 10 general marketing evolutions that are influencing marketing best practices.
I’ve covered several of his points in other blog posts, but will look at some of them in greater detail in the weeks ahead. His summary touches on the key issue to consider in evaluating when and how to follow (or buck) the trends:
All of the above tactics tie into one of the most touted terms in the business world: ROI. Increasingly, marketers?like other business professionals?are focusing on tracking the return on their investments. Factoring marketing into a firm?s overall ROI tracking can help guide strategies and improve results. By quantifying the achievement of specific goals and targets, ROI helps ensure that campaigns are effective?because what can be measured can be managed.
Frankly, measuring ROI for AEC marketing is harder in my opinion than for consumer products or services with relatively high order volume, in part because our sample sizes are generally too small for meaningful statistical analysis. (If you need a sample size of 1,000 — or if you want to be conservative and say 500 — will you really be able to build that many many schools or hospitals to get to the level of meaningful stats?)
Nevertheless, you can certainly measure key points along the way and at least know whether you are throwing your money away or getting closer to your goals.
