AEC Groundbreaking Growth
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AEC Groundbreaking Growth
Ep. 29: The Future of AEC Marketing: AI, Integration & Growth
What does the future hold for AEC marketing? In this episode of AEC Groundbreaking Growth, we connect with our own strategic growth advisory leaders: Emily Lawrence, Jen Knox, Barbi Styles, and Scott Butcher. With their deep working knowledge of AEC marketing and business development, they explore the evolving landscape and the crucial elements for future success.
Discover how AI and automation are transforming the role of the marketer, freeing up teams to focus on demand generation and inbound leads. We delve into why integrating marketing and business development is more vital than ever to achieve strategic growth, and the new skill sets AEC professionals will need to thrive. Learn about anticipating future shifts, leveraging technology effectively, and making bold strategic decisions to accelerate your firm's growth in a rapidly evolving market.
Ready to gain a future-forward perspective on AEC marketing and learn how to make bold moves for growth?
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[00:00:25] Emily Lawrence: Hi everyone, and welcome back to AEC Groundbreaking Growth, the podcast where we talk with leaders and change makers who are shaping the future of the AEC industry.
[00:00:34] Jen Knox: And today is a little bit unique. Emily is actually sitting on the guest and expert side of things. We have with us Emily Lawrence, you know her, our host, Barbi Styles, and Scott Butcher, all from our strategic growth advisory team.
And they have a deep knowledge of all things AEC marketing, business development. Today we're really gonna focus on the future of AEC marketing. What are the trends? How are we leveraging technology, and really how is it gonna transform, transform our futures as AEC leaders, business developers, and marketers?
So Scott would love to really jump right into things and start with a big picture view. How would you describe the current state of AEC marketing? And what the major forces are shaping the future.
[00:01:24] Scott Butcher: Sure, sure. Well, it's definitely in the state of flux.
[00:01:26] Jen Knox: Yeah.
[00:01:27] Scott Butcher: And, I think there are a number of drivers of that.
And, I'll tell you just by way of little background, we're seeing so much from. The client side, whether we're helping in strategic planning or business development, a marketing strategy, seeing what they're going through and then you look at this, you know, collectively across all our clients, across the country and beyond.
And we absolutely are dealing with the disruptions that occurred during COVID. Positive and negative disruptions. Which I think is informing the way we go to market with our marketing programs layered over top of the increasing trend for technology. And, you know, I would've said that two or three years ago, and now you factor in large language models and the integration of AI and all sorts of marketing automation tools that have come online the past couple years. Layered on top of that, the changing decision-making process at companies, as well as the actual them. When you have millennials in decision-making roles, who grew up as digital natives, and you have some of us old school Gen Xers that learned the digital technologies somewhere along the way.
This was happening pre-COVID. It has certainly accelerated the past five years. And you know, a data point we sometimes share in our training programs and webinars is that, you know, 85% of millennials in business-to-business roles are in making decisions and almost half of them won't meet in person with potential vendors, consultants, suppliers, and that really pivots the pressure onto marketing programs to open the door, generate inbound opportunities. And so that's certainly been a pretty, significant change. And then the final thing, I'll just say kind of big picture, the role of the marketer is evolving to me it's evolving to the positive.
And that is too much, too often in our industry, the "marketer" is the proposal preparer.
[00:03:27] Jen Knox: Yeah.
[00:03:28] Scott Butcher: And they don't actually get to do real marketing. Right? The proposal is the final or the second-to-last stage of the business development process. Maybe presentation and negotiation for the contract would be the final stage.
And so as we integrate proposal automation, artificial intelligence, into that process, it's freeing up the marketers to do what they were trained to do, what they were hired to do: understand the market, generate demand, create inbound opportunities, enable the sales or business development function.
And that's actually an exciting time for marketing, is the way I'm viewing it.
[00:04:04] Jen Knox: Yeah. And, I know that is just a topic that every client almost speaks to is, their marketing staff and viewing them, really, as proposal generators, proposal coordinators, et cetera. Yeah. And we always encourage them to shift that perspective.
And Barbi, I wonder, as you have been consulting with clients and, even your recent,experience in industry, how do you really see those marketing priorities shifting post pandemic?
[00:04:32] Barbara Stiles: Um, well, I think some of them are shifting and then some of them aren't.
[00:04:35] Jen Knox: Yeah.
[00:04:35] Barbara Stiles: Of course the whole industry shifted during the pandemic when people started working from home.
And now five years later, there's still a lot of that hybrid work or people working remotely. But then there is also a lot of pressure right now from firms. They want everybody back in the office five days a week. And I think a lot of companies are getting a lot of pushback on that, especially from their millennial, age group employees.
So I think it's gonna be interesting watching where that goes in the future. I did some unofficial research, if you wanna call it that, chatting with some, industry friends of mine from across the country last summer about their marketing and business development teams and how much of their work was in office and hybrid.
And most of them had a three day in the office, two days out, or. Vice versa, three days out, two days in the office. I think the real important thing that they all thought about was that when their teams were in the office, they were in the office together.
So that they had that ability to just walk down the hallway and talk to somebody and work with somebody.
I think it'll be interesting to see where we go with hybrid work in the future, especially on the marketing and BD side. Of course, right now in both the economy overall and especially in the AEC industry. We don't know what's going to happen project-wise. Some of them are being put on the shelf, some of them are being canceled or delayed. I think firms across the board are maybe tightening up their budgets.
And of course, one of the first places they tighten is marketing and business development. I think we're going to be asked, as marketers and business developers, to do more, bring in more work. But do it with less money. So I think, as Scott was saying earlier, I think the automation and the AI and the things that we can learn to use to free up some of our time to increase the productivity of the marketers that you have on staff, it's gonna be important.
And then, the last thing I'll add onto what Scott said, is that importance of the digital presence. Because so many of the decision-makers now grew up as digital natives, and before they hire a company or talk to a company, they're going to the website. I can guarantee you they are going to your website and looking at you, and if your website doesn't interest them.
You're out of the picture. Yeah. So I think, marketers being able to do more with thought leadership and helping their companies generate thought leadership and getting it out there, to build that brand, your firm brand and your subject matter experts, individual brands, is going to be even more important in the future.
And, I think you'll see a lot of marketers spending a lot more time on that.
[00:07:27] Emily Lawrence: Yeah, I totally agree with Barbi. Just to add on, it's not just about visibility anymore, it's really about that value and how are you bringing that value. So we're expecting, smarter content, faster follow-up, and that personalization, making sure it's well-rounded and cohesive.
[00:07:45] Jen Knox: Yeah. Yeah. And, building off of that, hitting those three things, value added, smarter, faster, I would think technology can help us get there. Right. Let's pivot and talk about how automation and AI are starting to change how AEC is approaching marketing.
[00:08:05] Emily Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, I know Scott has tons of thoughts on automation and AI. From my perspective, as that marketing specialist and doing the outsource marketing, really we're doing a lot of like content repurposing. E-blasts, everything. I mean, AI and automation are touching everything.
[00:08:25] Barbara Stiles: Yeah.
[00:08:25] Jen Knox: Yeah. And that's even one thing we talk about with this podcast. How can we use one asset in so many different ways, right? You've already spent the time to invest, create it, et cetera. So, how can we leverage it in multiple ways?
[00:08:38] Emily Lawrence: I think really viewing AI as more of a collaborator, and Scott, I know you have an example of what a client has told you that they see as the future of their marketing team. given the AI motivation.
[00:08:51] Scott Butcher: Emily it was a fascinating and terrifying statement. And I think, it's the reality. And this is where, I say I'm bullish on the future for marketers because you get to do marketing, but positions are at risk.
And this was a Chief Marketing Officer for a firm of more than a thousand people, and he made the comment, I have 10 proposal coordinators who are going to be AIed. It's a verb now, by the way. AIed out of existence within three years, and they don't even realize it.
[00:09:21] Jen Knox: Yeah,
[00:09:22] Scott Butcher: And to his point, the proposal automation tools that are already out there. Number one. The extreme continued advancement of AI as a design tool is allowing far more rapid proposal production. You're never gonna get rid of your proposal leaders, because you need the human insight on the front-end. You need the human quality control on the back end. And you know, by the way, anything coming out of AI, it's not your intellectual property. You can't copyright it. And it may be wrong. So, we need to make sure we still have the front-end thinking and the backend quality control. The red team, if you will. But a lot of the production is starting to be, and will continue to be, done on the machine side. And again, is the glass half full or is it half empty?
I think it's half full because now these marketers who are subject matter experts in marketing can add greater value to their companies by really doing what we talked about earlier. Demand generation, understanding the market, developing inbound leads, huge opportunities there in our industry, because that's where we've kind of trailed other industries, as in true marketing.
[00:10:33] Emily Lawrence: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. And your response to that, "oh, great, now they don't have to just focus on proposals."
[00:10:39] Scott Butcher: Yep.
[00:10:40] Emily Lawrence: They can focus on marketing the company.
[00:10:42] Scott Butcher: Yep.
[00:10:43] Emily Lawrence: As well. So, and like you were kind of mentioning, I think that there's this shift.
So yes, it is a tool, it is a tool for ideation. It is a tool for production. And we talked about this in our last episode with Kristin, a little bit. But, it's that tool. Like you were saying, we are always gonna need that. Like, it's not just gonna generate something out of thin air.
Right. And I don't see high-level leaders at the company going in and being involved in the production, even if it is more automated. Mm-hmm. So I think, you know, maybe instead of that 10-person proposal team, you'll have more like a few people on proposals, you know? Mm-hmm. Three or four.
[00:11:27] Scott Butcher: Yeah. And, it requires training the model.
This is where we have to be extremely careful in our companies because, you know, a story, it was something that happened to me very recently. I did a training program for a client in person. And, a whole group of marketers and business developers or those touching it, like seller-doers, were part of the program.
And at the end of the day, I was in an Uber with a couple of employees from this company, and we were heading off to happy hour. And just chatting away. And, one of the gentlemen in the vehicle handed me his phone and had all sorts of notes on, and he's like, what do you think about this, summary of your training program today?
And I'm looking through it, I'm scrolling on his phone. I'm like, yeah, you really nailed this, really good notes. And he is like, well, I recorded you. And then I had the transcript created, and then I uploaded it to ChatGPT, and I asked for a summary. And I'm like, oh, you know, that's an innovative use of AI.
And then light bulb goes off, and our intellectual property is now on the ChatGPT model. Being used to potentially train the competition about what we do. And so, if we are using these tools, we have to have controls and safety mechanisms to make sure our IP is not headed out the door. Because the stories we have, the approaches to our projects, the case studies, this is proprietary company information that is our own intellectual property, and we can't allow it to be out there for the world to see.
[00:13:02] Jen Knox: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's so true. And Scott, it makes me think of that that CFMA conference, and one of the speakers said just how much Google search has dropped off because everyone's going to ChatGPT now. So their firm is trying to think strategically and creatively of how they can almost train ChatGPT to answer with their company brand, their company, you know, skill sets, and consultants, et cetera.
So, I know right beyond just proposals. AI can help us with even personalization of that account-based marketing. So, getting ChatGPT to answer with our company's name and brand may be pretty hard, but we can definitely, create some specific, personalized, marketing strategies, for, our markets and for who we're trying to reach.
[00:13:54] Scott Butcher: Yeah. And it amazing what's in these models. It took me a while to come up with an ideal prompt to do quick front-end market research about a potential client before I might be having a meeting with them, but I have this prompt down and I pull it up before the meeting and, you know, run the data to really do a profile of the firm I'm about to meet with.
So I don't have to do Google, I don't have to go on LinkedIn. I don't have to go on the website. The AI is doing that for me, or has already done that for me, and is just accessing the model. And, it's incredibly useful for me as a time saver, in the business development realm. But, the other thing I will say, Jen, the example you just shared.
At Stambaugh Ness, a lot of people know we're very active with seller-doers, seller-doer, strategy seller, doer training, those technical professionals that have some business development responsibility. And so we put out a lot of content in blogs. We've done webinars, we've done studies. We did a study with the SMPS Foundation.
And so sometimes I'll go in and I'll test out the AI and you know, talk to me about the seller-doer model and what are the recommendations of what are the trends. And because it's digested Stambaugh Ness content, I see Stambaugh Ness recommends:
And then there will be a link to our study that we did.
Perhaps.
[00:15:09] Jen Knox: Mm-hmm. And
[00:15:10] Scott Butcher: So that's exactly what you were talking about is trying to train the model to use your brand.
[00:15:14] Jen Knox: Yeah. Yeah. And I would think like, that's essentially getting thought leadership out there, right? Yeah. And Barbi, I know you're such a big proponent of that thought leadership as a strategy in marketing.
Um, and I know we've been kind of talking about marketing and separately business development, and in a lot of firms they're siloed. Can you talk to me a little bit about why that integration is so important?
[00:15:40] Barbara Stiles: Um, I can, and, and actually Scott and I were just talking about this with a company we were doing strategic planning with, yesterday and the day before. So I truly believe that marketing and business development have to work together, okay. Because otherwise, you are not getting all of the results that you want. Marketing's off here doing their own thing, and business development is off doing its own thing.
There's no synergy there. Mm-hmm. And is your company really going to meet its strategic growth goals that you're trying to meet? So, I fully believe that if your company has a strategic plan or if you have an annual business plan, and you have your growth goals in there. Then, you should be making a business development plan for the year on how you're going to meet those goals.
So, who are the clients you're gonna go to? What are their new services you want? Are there new geographic areas you wanna move into? All of those business development type of client facing stuff you wanna do have that plan, but then your marketing department should be sitting down with your business development people and saying, how can we support this?
If you're trying to move into a new geographic area and you want your thought leaders to be seen in that area, what are the white papers we can put out there, and then email out to prospective clients? What are the webinars that we can invite them to? What blog posts are we gonna put on our websites about this? Are there industry client-facing conferences that those clients are going to be at, that we can be a speaker at and become a thought leader and a subject matter expert in their eyes before we ever really move into that area? So I think your marketing plans every year really need to be supporting your business development, and company growth plans.
[00:17:36] Scott Butcher: And you know what's fascinating? So, I came out of marketing, I went to college for marketing, and anybody who took marketing courses in the, um, let's just say last century, used the textbooks written by Philip Kotler. So, Kotler, sort of the, the godfather of modern marketing. And when you look at what he would call the marketing umbrella.
You had advertising, you had public relations, you had all these different components, and one of those components was called selling. Our industry sell is a four letter word, so we use business development, but the rest of the world, it's sales, right?
[00:18:15] Jen Knox: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:15] Scott Butcher: And sales was taught to be a function of marketing.
And it did not evolve that way in the build environment. It evolved into silos. But to Barbi's point, let's just use the webinar as an example because you know, I'm sure some of your podcast listeners have also participated in a Stambaugh Ness webinar or two, hopefully, it's it's business development for us.
Yes, a webinar. It's taught leadership, it's marketing, but we use it to identify opportunities and generate inbound leads. We wanna share our knowledge, we wanna build our company brand, and our personal brand. But you deliver a webinar, and maybe you get a lead or two right after, maybe you get a lead or two six months or 12 months down the road.
As a business developer, when I wear that hat as a seller-doer, my time is very limited. So I would much rather be pursuing a qualified lead, and when somebody reaches out and says, Hey Scott, I attended that webinar and I want to talk to you about business development strategy, outsource marketing, strategic planning, whatever the case may be. They have pre-qualified themselves. So old school business development, that was all push. We're going to do direct mail campaigns and snail mail. We're gonna do email blasts. We're just gonna hit you and hit you and hit you, and hopefully you respond to something.
And yeah, we have one out of every 100 we get a result from. You know, this is so much more effective. Totally requires marketing, business development, integration and my viewpoint, it is far more effective.
[00:19:47] Emily Lawrence: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think. It's that intentionality too, right? Like it allows you, when you're not so siloed, it allows you to be very intentional and targeted.
And the efforts from that business developer, from that marketing coordinator, marketing specialist, or director, it allows the team to really work together. And make sure that the efforts are getting that return on investment and that they're coordinated, they're on the same page. What metrics are we trying to hit?
It allows that effort to be really intentional and allows that reporting. The company can see the return on investment from both the business developers and the marketers. Which I think is key.
[00:20:29] Jen Knox: Yeah. And Emily, I think you hit a important thing there around like KPIs and that integration between business development and marketing.
I'm assuming there are some joint tools, right, that both groups and company-wide should be leveraging as we're talking about that. BD strategy and that marketing strategy, and how we track performance then.
[00:20:50] Emily Lawrence: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Barbi, I know you have some thoughts on CRMs and how that should be utilized.
[00:20:58] Barbara Stiles: Um,
[00:21:00] Jen Knox: or not utilized very well in most firms.
[00:21:06] Barbara Stiles: You know, CRM is really the tool that everybody should be using, and it's probably the tool that the least number of people in your company use, um, robustly anyway. I mean, I, let's be honest, even here, internally, within Stambaugh Ness, every once in a while, I have to be reminded to go put my stuff in CRM.
So I, I am not, you know, I, I, I'm not gonna say I'm perfect at walking the walk, but, um. You know, your CRM really is a wealth of information, and especially in today's world where your business development folks sometimes are siloed. You know, if you work for a bigger firm, you might have a business development person that only works in healthcare or a business development person that only works here.
Or you have a business development person in a certain geographic area that covers all your markets. And then you've also got seller-doers who are working in the same area. And you go to a meeting and you've got two or three people from your own company there, and nobody knew that you were all going to talk to the same client.
So I just, that internal being able to be seen as one firm and that one coordinated effort across all of those service lines with that one client is very helpful. But also using your CRM on the business development side to track your pipeline is so important . If you don't know where your future work could be coming from and you're not filling that pipeline with possible future work, you're never gonna make your revenue and growth goals.
I know Scott probably has a million other things to say about CRM, but it really is an important tool. And it doesn't really matter what CRM tool you use, but it's important that you use it. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[00:23:03] Emily Lawrence: Well, and I think as we go to more of that hybrid work model or people are going more digital, having one singular point of reference that people are keeping up is even more important and will continue to be more important.
That communication, making sure that people are on the same page.
[00:23:22] Scott Butcher: Right. It's the central source of truth. Mm-hmm.
[00:23:24] Emily Lawrence: Yeah.
[00:23:24] Scott Butcher: And in a lot of our firms, we don't have a central source of truth, and that's really limiting what we can do. And then it's a point of integration for business development and marketing, but also to enable a lot of what we wanna do with our marketing and business development.
It can't happen without that robust CRM that Barbi talked about. And so you think about, thought leadership marketing. Well, you can post a blog on your website, and the world doesn't see it. You have to promote it on your social media. Maybe you push it out via email. Maybe you reach out to some of your other seller-doers, business developers, and internally, and ask them to push it out.
We have to make sure people read it, and CRM becomes the foundation for that. If we wanna embrace some of the current trends and marketing that are really slowly coming to the AEC industry, account-based marketing, which was referenced earlier, personalized marketing. That cannot exist without a robust CRM, and I don't know, I'm sure it's a homegrown system, the CRM used by amazon.com, nobody has a better CRM than Amazon. They know everything about you. I'll quote my wife, A box will show up. An Amazon box is always showing up at our house. And she will say, Amazon made me buy it. Amazon made me buy it. And you know, initially I'd be like, what?
And then she'd tell sort of the story that I tell as an example. Well, you know, I looked at this product on Amazon 'cause it came up, you might be interested in. And I decided, no, I don't need that. And then I was on social media. And the ad popped up, and then I did a Google search, and an ad popped up, and I thought, well, maybe I do need this, and I ordered it.
[00:25:05] Emily Lawrence: Yeah.
[00:25:06] Scott Butcher: And it's because Amazon has this robust CRM that they can get down to the individual, not even at the family level, but it knows what I like, it knows what my wife likes, and so it gives us personalized recommendations, and it's always there in front of us, and they get.
Every year, an increasing amount of business from us.
[00:25:26] Jen Knox: Yeah. And I know, we can't elevate our skillset to the efficiency of what Amazon does. But all these trends we've been talking about and where it's going in the future, it almost seems like it's gonna require a little bit of a skillset shift for BDs and BD individuals and marketers specifically, what are those skill sets that marketers for AEC will need in the future?
[00:25:52] Barbara Stiles: Uh,
[00:25:52] Emily Lawrence: I
[00:25:53] Barbara Stiles: mean,
[00:25:53] Emily Lawrence: who wants to take this one? Yeah.
[00:25:57] Barbara Stiles: I think we all have thoughts. Yeah. But I think I'll start it off with, um, I think instead of marketers sitting back and being, I guess order takers, it's sitting back and waiting till somebody says, okay, now I need you to do this. Now I need you to do this.
I think they're going to have to become more strategic thinkers.
[00:26:19] Scott Butcher: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:19] Barbara Stiles: I think they have to think big-picture now, and they have to think, how is what I am doing, connecting with business development, the strategic plan where our company wants to go, they really need to start thinking along those lines instead of just waiting for somebody to tell them to do.
And that's gonna be, I think, a big shift for some of the marketers. I think a lot of the marketing professionals out there are going to be going, yes, finally. But it may be a shift for some firms. To think about your marketing people have this background, they can be strategic thinkers and they can help you grow.
I think that's one of the big things that people are really gonna have to shift toward and they might need to build that skill set up and how to look at that big picture
[00:27:09] Jen Knox: mm-hmm.
[00:27:10] Barbara Stiles: And connect the dots.
[00:27:13] Jen Knox: Yeah. And I wonder, as they're being a bit more strategic. I don't have to explain it to all three of you, but I was right on the engineering side, and I often get business development and marketing confused back in the day when I was in industry. And I, I just know.
Working on projects, right? Trying to show a client, maybe the ROI of a project, and how important those data analytics are. I assume that those data points as well on the marketing side can be really beneficial to sway maybe an engineer like myself or a leader in that kind of technical frame.
How do you kind of view data analytics when you're thinking about marketing internal to an organization?
[00:28:01] Barbara Stiles: We'll let you take that one, Scott,
[00:28:05] Emily Lawrence: Our data guy.
[00:28:07] Scott Butcher: Look, I love data. I think, you know, marketing, I'm not gonna say marketing has had a free ride 'cause that's not a fair statement, but in general, there's been less calculation of return on investment for marketing. Yep. In the build environment, than there traditionally has been in other industries.
[00:28:25] Jen Knox: Yep.
[00:28:26] Emily Lawrence: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:26] Scott Butcher: And now there are so many points where we can collect data, and there's increasing pressure on marketing departments to prove their worth. Other than the metric that marketing departments have been judged by forever is the hit rate.
We pursued 10 opportunities, we won four, we have a 40% hit rate, which by the way, that's not a bad.
That's not a good metric either. I'd much rather have it looked at in terms of dollars, not quantity, but we know from prior research the industry uses quantity. Most firms are doing that, but we can look at website traffic, and we've been able to do that for years. But quality of the traffic where they're focusing. We can see if we're getting responses to our thought leadership. We can look at our social media, our posts, our engagement, and start to identify opportunities that could be coming outta that. There are just so many places we can be collecting data now that we need to figure out for our firms.
What are those three or four most important data points? What do we care about most? Obviously, at the end of the day, it's about revenue generation. It's about bringing opportunities in. And by the way, marketing departments aren't generating the revenue. They're more so with business development, generating the opportunities.
And then it's the business development function. It's the seller-doers. It's the closers that are really, you know, the bottom of that funnel of bringing the work in the door. Marketing and business development contribute greatly to that, so we have to make sure our data that we're tracking is reflective of that.
I was, as a business developer in a past life, it was unfair to say, well, Scott brought in X dollars, but he didn't bring in Y dollars, and that was the goal. Well, Scott contributed to bringing in X dollars, and the Y dollars, it was there. We had the opportunity there, but we didn't close it. We didn't win.
And so it's not just the business developer or the marketer that should be, you know, judged on that. So it has to be metrics that are reflective of the job and of the responsibilities of the individuals.
[00:30:24] Jen Knox: Yep. And that makes sense. So we're kind of getting towards the end of our time here. Wanna do a little bit of a rapid fire for each of you.
It won't be that rapid. You'll each have time to think, except if you're the first one to go. So, kind of as we think about everything we've talked about. Lot of trends, lot of transformation for the future when we're talking action. What is one thing firms can do today to kind of future-proof their marketing?
And Scott, I'm gonna jump to you first.
[00:30:55] Scott Butcher: future-proof their marketing. Boy, that's a loaded question. I think to future-proof the marketing, we have to focus on the future. And this is an area that I think firms are just not good at. We will often, in our strategic planning commissions, in our marketing strategy commissions, we will do trends, workshops.
And the idea here is to be more anticipatory, to understand what is coming at us. Because if we don't know those trends and those disruptors, our marketing cannot adjust, until it's too late. We wanna be proactive, not reactive. And that's looking at everything from the economic conditions to the trends in marketing as far as how to reach the, you know, digital native decision-makers, and not the old school decision-makers that didn't rely on technology at all.
Yeah. But to me it's also, right down to population patterns. Because we know where people are gonna be, that's where the construction market is going to be. And if the construction market is there, the design market is there. And so monitoring the population shifts, monitoring the funding mechanisms in our industry, and preparing to weather storms.
I've heard two economists, totally unrelated, different companies, just in the past couple of months talk about the great depression of the 2030s. A terrifying thought to, to correlate the Great Depression of more than a hun, well, almost a hundred years ago now, forward into a hundred years later.
And how do we position our firms to prepare for that? Does not mean it's gonna happen, by the way, but we should be paying attention to what some of these economists and forecasters are doing. So I guess the future for marketing, you have to focus on the future. And I'll end my little soapbox, here with a quote, that's been said many times by many different people through the years, but the future is where we're all gonna spend our time. Why not spend some time focusing on it?
[00:32:59] Jen Knox: Mm-hmm. Great advice. Great advice. All right, Emily, what is one thing firms can do today to future-proof?
[00:33:07] Emily Lawrence: Yeah, I think this also ties into our upcoming episode with Kristin, but, where we focus on AI tools, I would say one thing to do that could be kind of a fun thing. We've talked a lot about AI and automation, but creating maybe a small AI experiment to pilot for the quarter. So that could be, we're really gonna gather some information before we go into our kickoff meetings for proposals on the client that we're pursuing. Or, you know, we really wanna do a targeted campaign on this specific market and using AI to help ideate on some content that could resonate for your company., Or even have it help you do an audit of your website content and maybe areas that could be improved. So I would say, Scott, hit the nail on the head of focusing on that future, and really trying to think about it today and focus on those trends.
And then just sort of a smaller experiment that someone could do today as a marketing professional, using AI. Just do a small experiment. Pilot it this quarter, just give it a try.
[00:34:19] Jen Knox: Yep. And that's how everything starts, right? Small steps forward. So love that advice Barbi. What's one thing firms can do to future-proof?
[00:34:28] Barbara Stiles: I'm gonna go back to marketing, being aligned with your business development. As Scott said, your business developers and your firm leaders need to be anticipatory. They need to be out there looking at what's coming at your firm, and so they're building those plans to hopefully help deal with whatever positive or negative. take advantage of those opportunities that are coming at you or negate something not so great that's coming at you. And make sure your marketing people are involved in that. They know what's going to happen because then they can help you with the content, with the thought leadership, with the webinars, with the conferences, all of the things that you need to build that brand, build that subject matter expertise to really jump on what's coming and be at the forefront of it and be one of those early adapters to something, and be seen as, these are the people we need to go to because these are the people doing it well. I think if you do that now, you get that integration going now that when something big happens, that comradery and teamwork is already there and it's just, let's go.
[00:35:42] Jen Knox: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:35:44] Scott Butcher: Something Barbi hit on there that I think is really important. Articulate a little differently. Marketing has to have a seat at your strategy table.
[00:35:51] Emily Lawrence: Yes. Yeah,
[00:35:53] Barbara Stiles: Absolutely.
[00:35:54] Jen Knox: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[00:35:55] Emily Lawrence: I think we all feel very strongly about that.
[00:35:58] Jen Knox: Yeah. Well, no, I mean, given today and what we've talked about around those trends around tech and the transformation, AEC marketing is gonna be a key component in all of our firms to really drive growth, drive performance, and really that that benefits our family, the family's tied to the company, the family's tied to the projects we deliver, et cetera. So marketing is such a huge part of that. Wanna thank all three of you for your expertise today?
I know our listeners will definitely find value in it, even if you, yourself, are not on the marketing side share this with one of your marketing professionals in your organization. It's a great way to connect, like Barbi said, build those bridges between the tech team and the marketing team.
We appreciate all of our listeners. Hope you tune in next, to future episodes.
[00:36:51] Scott Butcher: Thank you for having us. Yeah,
[00:36:53] Jen Knox: thanks.
