AEC Marketing Tips, Advice & Ideas

Business owners shoulder a ton of responsibilities, however, doing the work always takes priority. While a certain degree of success can be achieved by applying the “fly by the seat of your pants” model, it’s important to take the reins and intentionally drive your firm in the direction you choose to head. And Lindsey knew she couldn’t go it alone.

At Golden Egg, we see a multitude of client attempts at laying out flyers, presentations, brochures, proposals, and Statements of Qualification utilizing a variety of software platforms. We've witnessed fonts getting unknowingly replaced and resized, text getting inexplicably relocated, and images getting skewed and disproportionate. Despite good intentions, projects that were so painstakingly created barely resemble the original concept. Who wants to leave that impression with a potential client?

Let's talk about your website.  How are UX, UI, SEO and Mobile Optimization working for you and your firm?  I wrote this little ditty breaking down some of the confounding lingo of website design into layman’s terms.

Lindsey Mathieu and partner Arik Brooks of SoSimple Interactive recently co-authored an article published in Marketer - a bimonthly journal published by the Society for Marketing Professional Services, reporting on current business development and marketing practices, issues and trends for the AEC industry. In this piece, Lindsey and Arik stress the importance of practicality during efforts to define (or redefine) your firm's identity.

From DIY to professionally created options, the creation of your company's logo should begin with a solid positioning statement and an anticipated business model. Consider your various print and digital brand applications. From business cards and email signatures to websites and vehicle graphics, your logo should be prepared to put its best face forward in a variety of formats. Changing or even fully redesigning an existing logo is OK - as long as you're prepared!

While AEC marketing is arguably a niche focus, we find there to be plenty of opportunity with not only the (A)rchitects, (E)ngineers and (C)ontractors that identify inherently with this industry acronym, but with many related organizations in the greater built environment.

I find the importance of color selection, specifically, as it pertains to brand identity, to be one of the most interesting and complex facets of graphic design. Like me, you may have assumed it to be a choice as simple as declaring “I like blue”. But there’s more than meets the eye.

What exactly do we do at Golden Egg? There is no one sentence or phrase to succinctly describe all the ways that we work to help our clients in the built environment, so Lindsey decided a visual narrative could be the answer. This was the genesis of our new brand film “Connected: The Built Environment."

In my brief time on the job, I have seen RFPs range from 3 paragraphs to 70 pages in length (and I’ve been warned they can be considerably longer).  The range of information requested and how it is to be formatted can vary from excruciatingly detailed or very vague.  One thing I know for certain: if you don’t prepare your response comprehensively and accurately, your time and effort will be for naught.

Seven years ago, I made one of the most intimidating decisions of my life. During the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, I voluntarily left the security of my business development position with a construction management firm to start Golden Egg Concepts, a marketing communications firm focused on clients in the built environment. I traded the comforts of a steady paycheck and a ‘9 to 5’ schedule for something completely unfamiliar.

If you're anything like me, you enjoy keeping up with your online friends and business associates. A productive work day can certainly include some social networking and interaction with contacts. As you read over and respond to the various posts in your newsfeeds, you hope that other people will return the favor by liking and sharing your posts. Wouldn’t it be great if more of those online exchanges led to meetings and project collaborations?

The old ‘cost of doing business’ rages on the brain when it comes to responding to RFPs. Have you ever calculated the actual investment associated with your average RFP response? Measured primarily in precious time, travel to and from the project site, production and shipping costs, and sometimes consultant fees to support the preparation of your submittal, your firm pays big bucks to chase after projects… and the costs can be extraordinarily high (and recurring) for those of us in the AEC industry. 

Nurturing relationships with other consultants and contractors on the same project alleviates friction and finger-pointing between the collaborators. Better cooperation makes each entity stronger and streamlines project implementation… not to mention makes for a more enjoyable working experience. As an industry, we have a little work to do on improving our relationships according to Nancy Greenwald of the Construction Institute.

Have you ever lost a big job to a competitor even though your firm was a much better fit? If your qualifications and experience were rock solid, why did you lose out? Maybe it’s because the competitor had a better relationship with the prospect. Construction is a people business, after all.