Ask the Experts | Identifying the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns

Question: Do you think we would have success advertising with golf courses (score cards, tee markers, tents for events, etc.)? It seems relatively inexpensive. To put our company in perspective, we currently run ads through radio, direct mail and the internet.

Weldon Long; EGIA faculty member and New York Times Bestselling Author:

We routinely get a lot of questions about marketing on these calls and it’s good because marketing is important. We all say nothing happens until something gets sold but nothing gets sold until somebody generates a lead or an opportunity.

I would just say you have to measure it and find out. There’s just no telling, what might work in one market might not work in another. One of the things I’ve learned, probably more from my internet-type business than my HVAC business, is the value of testing.

One of the beautiful things about the internet marketing world is the ability to measure the cost of a lead. The analytics on the internet side give you the ability to know exactly what every type of lead is costing you. We’re talking pennies on the internet and probably hundreds on HVAC.

It’s really important to measure the cost of every lead because ultimately that’s going to determine whether it’s a good thing for your company or not. For example, in our HVAC company we did leverage technology as well as we could, this was 15 years ago. But we’re doing better now with InfusionSoft and we will continue with ServiceTitan or some other type of CRM operating system for the HVAC company.

We used to manage leads on a spreadsheet. When a call came in, our lead coordinator would ask how they heard about us. There were eight or ten different options on the spreadsheet and she would just put a mark in that particular section. Even though it wasn’t all that sophisticated, at the end of the month, I could all look at the spreadsheet and say, okay I got this many leads from direct mail and here’s how much I’m spending on direct mail this month, so I can do my cost per lead.

This one came from radio, here’s what we spend on radio. In this case, here’s what leads came from the golf course, here’s what we’re spending this much on the golf course. There is no way to know absolutely, it’s just a matter of trying it and seeing what happens. You kind of have to let the results answer the question for you.

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