How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy?

Here are a few tips that might help you to measure, monitor and manage:

1 Analyse Your Sales &/or Fee Income.
Hopefully there is a strong growth trend evident! As always, it’s important that you measure, monitor and manage, but be careful about what you measure. Some firms have a longer sales cycle than others and to gain an accurate picture you might need to also measure the number of new leads being generated, or the number of appointments, or the number of invoiced hours achieved.

2 Ask Your Clients.
Check to find out where they heard of you and why they decided to do business with you. Most businesses never ask this question and miss out on gleaning valuable insights into how clients select a service provider. For example, if it was generated by a referral from an existing satisfied client it will be most important that you recognise and reward that source appropriately.

3 Does Your Advertising and/or Promotional Activity Produce Direct Responses?
It should, but be honest with yourself - if your answer is “I’m not sure” or, “I really don’t know” then clearly you’ve got some work to do. Here are some things you can do to improve response rates.

• Make sure you are advertising in the right media.
• Choose media to suit your selected audience. Be as specific as possible. And avoid rejecting options just because they don’t look “exciting”, such as trade journals and local papers that might have relatively small readership. Importantly, check with your audience to make sure they actually do read the publication.
• Use a strong headline that asks a pertinent question, or gives a solution-oriented statement. This should flow from your customer profile assessments.
• Include a clear call-to-action. Tell people what they should do. For example: Ring today for your free appointment; Ask for our free information sheet.
• Include multiple methods of contact. Phone, email, and web site are all important. Give prospects a choice of how to contact you.

4 Do Your Networking Activities Create New Opportunities For You?
One of the major principles of effective networking is to “give” rather than “sell”. That is, you should look to help others as you spread word about your services. But this softly, softly approach can make it hard to measure effectiveness and you need to make sure you track the source of incoming enquiries. Then see if any of your visible/tangible tactics can be credited with generating the enquiry. If not, then maybe you can safely say it was a referral generated by networking. This is made a lot easier if you’re a member of a lead-generating organisation.

5 Do Your Marketing Tactics Make it Easier to Sell Your Services?
To be effective your marketing activities and material should achieve the following:
• Attract qualified prospects (who have shown a specific interest in your services).
• Anticipate and diffuse potential questions/concerns from prospects. Again, properly assessing your customer profile will help to identify fears, frustrations and concerns in respect of which you can build solutions in anticipation.
• Be memorable and easy to use when personally selling to prospects. For example: material should be relevant; images/charts easy to understand; and be presented in a format that delivers “advantages for them” and which the prospect will want to keep and refer to when need arises.
• Focus on your client needs and your points of difference as part of your value proposition.

6 Check Your Sales Conversion Rate.
The suggested approach here is to look at your historical records and determine whether your conversion (or closure) rate has improved. “Selling” is an important part of the “marketing” function, so make sure you assess your success at closing the sale, rather than just focusing on generating new leads in the pipeline.

7 Does Your Plan have a Positive ROI?
Does your marketing plan bring in sufficient new/repeat business to justify the outlays? Rather than just looking at the “marketing budget” as one total, you really need to evaluate the cost effectiveness of each specific marketing segment and activity. Even if you think you’re getting a great ROI overall, maybe you can do even better by changing or eliminating tactics that mightn’t be quite so productive.