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How do you know if your marketing is working?

That is one of the fundamental questions professional services marketers ask themselves—and is asked even more often by their management. The only way to know is to measure your marketing results, and that has proven notoriously difficult in the field of professional services.

One reason behind this difficulty is the absence of immediate results in many aspects of service marketing. In this context, marketing is usually a long-term effort, so you may not know the results of a marketing strategy for several months or more. Say you publish a bylined article in a professional journal, and no one calls to learn more about your services. From a short-term perspective you might consider the article a marketing failure, but it doesn't necessarily mean the tactic is ineffective in the long term. Often a firm will receive an inquiry months after an article appears, especially given the shelf life of content on the Internet.

Some marketing tactics appear more straightforward to measure than others. For example, you launch a direct mail campaign (yes, direct mail can still be effective), and after the first mailing you receive three phone calls from qualified prospects. You now have a concrete measurement of three leads. But does that mean this approach is working?

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