Evaluating Campaigns Effectiveness

Evaluating Campaigns' Effectiveness

After you've sent out your marketing materials and paid for your ads, you need to track their success. "Success" means "leads to a contact," such as getting a phone call or e-mail inquiry.

The only way to really know which materials led to contacts is to ask people when they contact you how they heard about you. Sometimes, they'll reply to an e-mail you sent out (or one that was forwarded to them by someone on your list), so you'll know immediately what collateral they're responding to.

I recommend keeping a log of what people respond to. I periodically enter that data into a spreadsheet and can quickly see the effectiveness of each of my campaigns. On the CD that accompanies this book, I've included an Excel spreadsheet you can use to enter this data and see the results. Feel free to modify the spreadsheet; just be sure that you copy entire rows when you add specific campaigns, so the calculations are copied along with the visible fields.

If you're an experienced Excel user, you can create elaborate calculators to assess campaign effectiveness, such as tracking responses over time to see, for example, whether ads in the summer do better than those in the winter. Or you can simply keep logs in a text file or on a sheet of paper to figure out any seasonality to your marketing efforts. Using technology tools like Excel can be a great help, but don't spend so much time creating fancy calculators that you lose sight of the goal: getting a basic sense of what works and what does not.

A spreadsheet is a handy way to quickly calculate the effectiveness of various marketing efforts.

A final note on marketing effectiveness: Sometimes your marketing and advertising is not about getting specific responses. Instead, it's about keeping the potential client base aware of your existencewhat the folks on Madison Avenue call image advertising. There's no way to assess whether image advertising is worth the money unless you're willing to hire a firm to survey people in your target market to see if they know who you areand that's an expensive proposition that only larger brokerages can rationally consider.

I recommend doing periodic image advertisingsuch as sending postcards to your "farm" area or using local adsto keep your name visible. But limit these expenses to a specific percentage of your marketing budgetperhaps 25 to 40 percent, so your budget doesn't escalate out of control.

CD Resources: For assessing marketing campaigns' effectiveness, an Excel calculator.