Why I love marketing metrics

If you’ve worked with me, you know I love marketing metrics. We can learn so much from consistent tracking, a little math, clear data visualization, and some critical analysis.

Marketing metrics can be the best tool for objectively diagnosing your firm’s marketing health and indicating a way forward to meet your firm's short term and long term goals.

If you’re not winning the work you want, it’s often difficult to pinpoint what has gone wrong among all the moving pieces of a marketing effort—and even harder to determine how to fix it. You draw conclusions based on your day-to-day experiences and your understanding of results. However, without analysis of real data, those ideas are speculative and subjective. Data analysis can confirm your ideas as well as elucidate others that you may not have considered.

Let's take a look at an example. I recently worked with a medium-sized architecture firm with three distinct practice areas, each led by partners with different skills sets. They had made an effort to restructure the office in order to enable collaboration among each practice area's staff, but the partners themselves didn't often collaborate.

When I looked at their pursuit data at the end of the year, this is what I found:

While the number of projects they pursued and won as collaborations between practice areas was a small percentage of the overall (8%), the value of those projects was enormous---nearly 40% of the total fees won for the year. While the partners intuitively knew collaboration was a good idea, the data proved it to be a clear way forward to more successful, profitable projects. This is just one lesson learned from one firm's unique situation---what could you learn from analysis of your office's data?

I’ve always felt strongly about the importance of regularly monitoring marketing metrics. Now that I’m an independent consultant, I bring the added benefit of an outside perspective—along with a wealth of experience marketing from the trenches of New York’s leading design firms.

Summer's a great time to recalibrate; let’s talk about how I can help you bring more clarity to your marketing efforts.