The Metrics of the Best Construction Blog Competition

Readers here should be well aware that the key elements of effective marketing include attracting valid potential client leads and then converting them into profitable sales.  So I built some lead gathering for my own business in the Best Construction Blog competition.    Voters could check two boxes in addition to their votes.  One offered the free Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter.  The second, with a qualifying reference, invited inquiries for a full-scale publicity/advertising feature in the Design and Construction Report.

We received 1,170 votes in the competition over the past two months.  Of these, 284 requested the free Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter (the current issue goes out this morning) and 26 asked for more information about advertising features.  I won’t communicate to the hundreds who voted but didn’t check one of the inquiry boxes.  (It is debatable whether a communication announcing the competition results is in order to all voters, but they didn’t explicitly give me permission to use their email address for ANY marketing, and so I won’t bother them.)

The 26 inquiries for the advertising feature “should” represent golden leads, but nothing is ever that certain.  I’m sure some just clicked the wrong button and others are not qualified.  Chase has suggested a really good offer which will make it possible for them to respond one way or another, without feeling any pressure.

I’ve  received permission to send the newsletter to the other 284 readers.  This could be the beginning of a worthy relationship, which is where it all is about.

I will keep track of the conversion process — seeing how many elect to do business with us in the next year and that will provide the quantitative measuring tool to suggest the direct business/marketing value of the competition.

This type of analytical measurement of course is easily co-ordinated because we have the hard data and records.  You can develop similar measuring strategies for your other marketing initiatives.  While hard sales results are not an essential goal of this competition, you certainly want to build in measuring systems for any marketing process where you are spending money, time and resources.  I’ll update you on the results each month.