One of the most frequent measurements of success in A/E/C business development and marketing is your firm’s win rate. This is generally measured by taking the number of wins and divided by the total number of proposals. For further discussion about win rates, click here. But, what if your firm doesn’t submit many proposals throughout the year? Your work can mostly be negotiated work, repeat work, or on-call/IDIQ type contracts. Beyond meeting sales goals, how can you start quantifying marketing’s success?

Chances are, if you are not working most of your time on competitive proposals, then you are focused on other marketing activities. What are those marketing strategies you are currently implementing or should be implementing? Can you turn those activities into quantifiable measurements, so you can track performance and success? Below are some examples to get you started.

Quantifying Marketing’s Success

Some ideas to quantify your marketing strategies are below. Can you turn these into a success measure?

Information Organization

Information is key to positioning and differentiating your firm. Not only information about what your firm does but information about clients, projects, and competitors. How this is organized and made easily available to those who need when they need it is critical today. Look at how your information is currently stored and accessed. Can it be improved? Success can be measured by implementing an information structure/organization.

Resumes and Projects Information

Like above, having up to date and easily available project history and employee experience is vital to a successful marketing department. How many projects sheets and/or resumes did your team create or update? You can set a goal for a regular frequency of creating new and updating existing. Then measure against that goal.

New Brochures and Qualification Packages

Did your firm add a new service or market sector? Did you update outdated marketing materials? These materials convey your firm’s story that differentiates it in the marketplace. You can quantify both the volume of new materials created as well as any other impact they may have caused such as return emails, follow-up meetings scheduled, etc.

Conference/Event Follow Up

How many conferences and events does your firm attend throughout the year? You probably spend a lot of time and resources attending these events. Then, when everyone gets back to the office, oftentimes the follow-up gets lost. How can marketing help turn the follow-up phase a success? What would that phase even look like? It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect a contract directly from a conference, but what should we expect? You could measure the number of leads collected, the number of leads entered into your CRM/database, number of follow-up emails, phones, and even number of meetings scheduled from the conference. These can all be tracked and measured. At the very least you can compare conference to conference and year-over-year to help you evaluate the return on your investment.

Website Traffic

Your marketing team is responsible for updating and maintaining your firm’s website. I would go beyond just reporting general traffic. This doesn’t really mean anything. You have to make it relative. Do you want to grow the traffic? If so, by what percentage of growth and how are you going to attract more visitors to your site. You can then measure and report month to month or quarter to quarter.

Do you want your visitors to do something on your website? Examples can be watching a video, providing an email address in exchange for a case study download, or applying for an open position. If that is your goal, how are you making it easy for them to do those actions? You then can track and report on those actions.

The best thing is when you start tracking, you start to see results (good or bad) and then adjust your strategies. We could an entire series on website traffic and digital marketing strategies. This is just some VERY basic ideas to get you started. See Julie’s article here to read more about measuring your website analytics.

How Else Can You Measure Success?

Too many of us just do this work and forget about the value these type of activities bring to our firm. Think about the last 3-5 assignments/tasks you worked on. How can you quantify the volume or effect?

Let me know if any of these ideas spawn any of your own. I would love to hear what you come up with!

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