It is one thing for marketers in the architectural, engineering and construction community to even bother measuring their initiatives. Few do. Without measuring abilities, of course, you cannot truly assess whether your marketing is effective. But there is a second stage — converting the initial data into meaningful indicators that tell you whether you are succeeding or failing.
This blog posting by?John Bonini:How to fix six failing marketing metrics your CEO actually cares about, is worth reading on two levels. For those of you who aren’t even bothering with measuring, it will show you the sort of data that you can use to assess your progress if you measure effectively. For marketers with a metrics system in place, the information here will help you to adapt your metrics to provide useful and actionable decision-making information.
Yeah, I know this stuff won’t work instantly, especially if you haven’t even started to gather the data on customer acquisition cost and lifetime customer value, among other metrics. And, yes, I realize in the business-to-business and business-to-government markets, especially for high-ticket AEC services, the sales lead time and process is quite long, while relatively small client sample sizes make the data perhaps invalid by any statistical measuring tool. (I mean, if you have five or six “good” customers, how can you really weigh all the factors here for ?effective metrics.)
Nevertheless, you can still think about these issues and possibly develop internal tools that tell you how effective your marketing really is for your business or practice.
