Source: CPA Practice Management Forum

For all the talk about marketing ROI, many marketing professionals say marketing investments should also be measured by other methods.

A large firm like Grant Thornton can measure the results of its brand awareness campaign by purchasing access to a research report on name awareness of the national firms.

Russ Molinar, director of marketing and practice development at Plante & Moran in Southfield, Michigan says measuring name recognition in the middle market is prohibitive. But, he says you can ask your clients how important name recognition was in selecting the firm. Molinar says name recognition is one of the most important determinants in accounting firm selection.

Results of some marketing initiatives are clearly measurable—e.g., seminars and trade shows. You can determine the number of appointments and proposals resulting from a seminar. You can determine how many people visited your trade show booth, how many appointments were made, and how many new clients came from them.

Plante & Moran set up a dedicated phone line to track calls from an advertising campaign. It also placed response cards in newsletters so readers could request information. After a year Molinar was able to calculate that revenues from leads generated by newsletters were three times the investment.

To measure the effectiveness of a public relations campaign, Rene Stranghoner, director of practice growth at Weaver and Tidwell in Fort Worth, Texas sets objectives for the campaign in terms of square inches of coverage. The cost of the campaign is compared to the cost of purchasing the same amount of advertising space in the targeted publications.

Web sites can yield a variety of information such as number of clicks on different parts of the site, average time spent, number of inquiries, and the revenues generated from the engagements resulting from those inquiries. Leisa Gill, marketing director at Lattimore Black Morgan & Cain in Brentwood, Tennessee says her firm tracks the number of people who read the firm’s newsletter and click on other parts of the Web site.

It is also important to compare total marketing costs to budget and to monitor total marketing costs as a percentage of revenue.

Marketing projects should have goals. To the extent those goals are measurable, you can calculate the return on the investment. Goals can be set incrementally, according to Jeff Pawlow, CEO at the Growth Partnership in St. Louis. You may expect the first year after launching an initiative will only produce meetings. In the second year you can measure how much new business came from those appointments.

While a marketing professional might be satisfied with a certain percentage increase in, say, name recognition, partners might be more cynical. For this reason, among others, tracking the sources of new business is crucial. Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing in Chesapeake, Virginia, points out that if you don’t track new business sources, you might generate business from a marketing initiative and not know about it.

An essential measurement activity is tracking how each new client comes in to the firm according to Diane Roundy, director of business development at Schenk Business Solutions in Appleton, Wisconsin. This information can be related to marketing events, such as seminars.

Although marketers measure results from their initiatives, they also recognize there is a larger perspective. New business will often come in because of multiple marketing initiatives.

From CPA Practice Management Forum, CCH Incorporated, 800-449-8114, May 2006, p.5.