You find out if you are being outperformed
Not against a national average — against campaigns that look like yours, run for companies that sell what you sell. That is the only comparison that means anything.
Programs
You have run your marketing for years and you still cannot answer one question: compared to companies like yours, is any of it working? Not "are we getting leads" — are we getting them at a price a comparable security company would consider normal.
Our peer benchmarking and network program exists to answer that. Your campaigns measured against comparable campaigns running across the country, and a monthly conference call where our dealers and integrators compare notes.
A security company that has only ever seen its own numbers has no way of knowing whether those numbers are good. That is not a failure of discipline. It is a missing comparison, and you cannot build it yourself.
Your cost per lead is whatever it came in at last month. Good, bad or embarrassing — you cannot say, because you have never been shown a comparable one. Every company your size is in the same position, which is why nobody talks about it.
The people who report the results are the people who ran the campaign. Even the honest ones have no particular reason to tell you the number is average. A report with nothing to measure against is a press release.
The averages you can find online blend every industry at once. A commercial access control project and a pizza coupon do not behave the same way, so an industry-wide figure tells you nothing about a security campaign.
Three steps, and the first one is a conversation rather than a contract.
Your monthly marketing number and what comes back for it. Nothing rehearsed, nothing prepared — the figures you already look at.
Campaigns running across the country for companies that sell what you sell. This is the part you cannot do for yourself, because you do not have anyone else's numbers.
Ahead, behind, or unremarkable. If the answer is that you are already doing well, we will tell you that too — and you will have learned something either way.
Four questions that go from unanswerable to answerable the moment you can see comparable campaigns.
Not against a national average — against campaigns that look like yours, run for companies that sell what you sell. That is the only comparison that means anything.
Spend is easy to defend when nobody can see the alternative. It gets harder to defend the moment you know what the same result costs somewhere else.
When you can see which channels are producing for comparable companies, moving budget stops being a hunch and starts being arithmetic.
Someone on the monthly call has already tried the thing you are about to try, and they will tell you how it went before you spend the money.
Two halves. The benchmark is the one you came for; the call is the one members stay for.
The benchmark
Your campaigns are compared against comparable campaigns running across the country — not a national all-industry average, and not your own numbers from last year. Comparable companies, selling what you sell, marketing in the same conditions you market in.
The network
Once a month, our dealers and integrators get on the same call and talk through what is working and what quietly stopped working. You hear it from the people running the campaigns, not from a case study written after the fact.
Four signs the answer is you.
There is a marketing number in your P&L and no way to tell whether it is a good one.
And you still cannot say for certain whether the change helped or just moved the invoice.
This is a conversation about real numbers, so it works best with the person who is allowed to see them.
The network is the point. If a room of security company owners comparing notes sounds useful, you are the audience.
What you will not get anywhere else
An agency with clients in twelve industries has nothing to compare you to, and an agency with competitors on its client list has every reason to keep them apart. We are a marketing agency dedicated to the security industry, which is the only reason a benchmark like this can exist — and we put everyone on the same call anyway.
That is the part you cannot buy elsewhere. Not the reporting. The room.
Have two things handy: what you spend on marketing each month, and what it currently produces. That is enough for a real conversation about where you sit.
You will know more after the conversation than you did before it, whether or not you join. The comparison is the point; the program is what happens once you want it every month.