It’s not easy being an A/E/C marketer.
When the backlog shrinks, marketing is often asked to cut back on campaigns, staffing or both. But you know that this is exactly the time to ramp up marketing and generate new leads or relationships.
Market research site Gitnux found that over half of A/E/C firms harness data-driven strategies to refine and expand their marketing efforts; the other half leaves analytics largely untapped.
We know it’s not easy. Your sales cycles are long. Project wins are hard to pinpoint to one specific effort. Marketing’s role in project wins can appear indirect. How do you show marketing ROI to build up the pipeline?
Show them the data.
Here are some ways to collect, analyze and point to the ROI of marketing consistently. No matter what the pipeline is doing, promote marketing’s value to firm growth.
Inbound Leads Generated/Estimate Requests
Through your CRM and marketing touchpoints, how many new relationships or conversations happened based on website queries, emails or event attendance? If your work comes mainly from government bids, this may not be a good measure. But…based on marketing’s brand awareness efforts, you could track estimate requests or selection rates among new project partners.
Improved Pursuit Process
Has marketing created processes, templates and/or asset libraries that shorten the time partners, principals or leads work on proposals?
Track the time (hourly rate) it takes for these leaders along with marketing to assemble a proposal now. Build the assets that streamline this process and then measure changes in overall staff time required.
Example: If you could save 10 hours of staff time per pursuit at $150/hr of averaged out time, that equals $1,500/pursuit. Multiply that by 20 pursuits = $30,000/year in saved time.
ROI Storytelling
You probably can’t point to new clients generated by marketing alone.
After all, it’s a team effort! But you can tell a story that relates to marketing ROI.
Let’s imagine. A firm wants to increase work in a certain industry or practice. Marketing launches a direct mail campaign that earns 3,000 views on the website, four inquiries and yes, one new client. The client is a $10M project added to the backlog. The campaign cost $5,000 plus marketing time, and that is huge relative ROI!
Tracking marketing ROI takes time and collaboration with the rest of the project team. If you can align brand awareness to new relationships, that’s a win. If you can improve the pursuit process, that’s a win. If you can point to a campaign that greatly influenced a new project, that’s a win.
Need help with a better mousetrap for your pursuit? Let us know! We consult and build design templates and customized content for proposals. To get started, see our webinar with SMPS.
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