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Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Promotional Vehicles

January 1998

Research Question: “Your marketing dollars and time are precious, so you’d like to build awareness of your firm with the highest-impact promotional vehicles. But you don’t know the ROI for specific promotional initiatives. What methods are your peers – and your counterparts in other professional services firms – using?”

Summary: A nationwide survey of nearly 1000 professional service firms addresses and assesses methods and techniques used to measure marketing effectiveness. Respondents include firms from accounting; law; consulting (healthcare, human resources, management, information technology and a variety of consulting specialties); and architecture and engineering. The results indicate that most measures are rudimentary and lack rigor. There is no consistency in methods used across firms or within industries. Membership in an association, publication or brochures and listing in professional service directories are the most used promotional vehicles by professional service firms.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Overall Findings
Finding I – Methods to measure effectiveness are generally rudimentary. Most approaches are informal, passive, non-analytic, limited in scope and internally focused.
Finding II – Customer satisfaction measurement is, in many cases, being combined with promotional effectiveness measurement. This practice, however, most likely compromises a true assessment of the promotional vehicle.
Finding III – No one quantitative or qualitative method is universally used.
Finding IV – There appears to be no universal understanding of an acceptable ROI (Return-on-Investment).
Finding V – Measurement, as a process, has not yet caught on as an integral piece of professional service firm promotional programs.
Finding VI – Use of – and rankings of the effectiveness of – promotional vehicles varies from one professional service industry to another.
Professional Service Industry Comparisons
Specific Professional Service Industry Findings
Conclusions and Commentary

Format: Ninety pages of charts, graphs, bullet points and commentary summarize the study’s findings and conclusions. Presented in black & white staple bound.