Hi friend,
Many of you know by now that I wrote a book.
I wrote it because I believe there is a systemic issue in the AEC industry that we need to resolve if we want marketing to become more effective, more respected, and more connected to growth.
I have talked with too many marketers who genuinely believe their AEC leaders do not care about marketing or the people who make it happen every day. At the same time, I have sat in too many C-suite conversations to know that is not true.
The systemic issue I write about in my book is that the way AEC leaders think about marketing and how marketing works are not always aligned. For example, we recently sat in one of our client’s quarterly company meetings, and this gap could not have been more apparent.
When it came time for the marketing part of the agenda, the marketing director began his report on how one of the firm’s paid campaigns was performing. About a minute into his explanation, the first interruption came, as predicted.
“No one at the company has seen these ads you’re talking about.”
At this point, Katie Cash, Senior Strategist at Smartegies and host of the AEC Marketing for Principals podcast, was peering through the screen so intensely it looked like she was trying to channel her thoughts directly into the marketing director’s brain.
Is that a real question?
Did one of the principals of that firm just ask the marketing director why he is not paying LinkedIn to reach employees at their own company? Did the principal really mean to imply that marketing should be targeting and paying for visibility in front of eyeballs they could communicate with for free? This cannot be the case, right? This highly intelligent Gen-Xer, who has built a multimillion-dollar engineering practice, surely understands what he is asking, right?
Nope.
And this is where I tell marketers you need to tap the brakes and educate your audience. If you skip this step, be prepared for circular conversations, unclear direction, and a whole lot of wasted time.
The more we talk about the gaps in understanding between how AEC leaders think about marketing and how marketing actually works, the better chance we have of closing them. One of the biggest areas where we see this gap is in the digital arena.
Most AEC firm leaders understand LinkedIn as a place where people and companies post updates. They understand it as a platform for networking, recruiting, sharing news, and staying visible. What they do not always understand is how little control organic social media gives you over who sees what you post.
And when knowledge gaps like this show up in meetings, marketers have a choice. They can either take the question personally or recognize the moment for what it is: an opportunity to teach.
The principal’s question in last week’s meeting was not malicious. It was based on a misunderstanding of how digital distribution works. He assumed that if people inside the company had not seen the ads, the ads might not be working. The irony is that if employees had seen those ads, that would have been a problem. It would have meant the campaign was spending money to reach people the firm could communicate with for free.
Another area where AEC firm leaders get themselves sideways is organic social media. Some people still believe organic social is free. Sure, you may not pay for it in media dollars, But time is the greatest currency in our industry these days, and organic social uses plenty of it.
We spend a lot of time creating content. A subject matter expert gets interviewed. A project manager may review the details. A technical expert may weigh in. Then marketing writes it, edits it, formats it, turns it into a post, a newsletter, or a story, and sends each piece around for review.
And because we are AEC, twelve people will find twelve different ways to question one sentence that was perfectly fine the first time. By the time that content goes live, the firm has made a significant investment. It is not just about marketing time. The bigger issue is that it wastes the time of people who are already short on time, whether they are in marketing or not.
Then the content gets posted organically on LinkedIn, and everyone acts like the job is done.
It is shocking to me how many people still do not understand that posting something and being seen are different things. That is the part we, as AEC marketers, have to get better at explaining.
When your firm posts something organically, LinkedIn does not automatically show it to everyone who follows your company’s page. It does not even show it to everyone who follows the person posting it. The platform decides who sees it based on relevance, engagement, relationships, behavior, and a whole bunch of other signals most firm leaders have never had a reason to study.
So, when I hear someone say, “We posted it on LinkedIn,” my next thought is always, “Who saw it?”
And if we cannot answer that question, we do not really have a distribution strategy. I am not implying that organic social is not valuable. It is extremely important. Organic social supports credibility. It shows activity. It gives clients, prospects, recruits, and partners a place to validate who you are. It helps reinforce what your firm wants to be known for.
But organic social is not the right channel if your goal is to generate visibility with your highest-value targets. When targeted visibility is the goal, you must pay for that.
This is where paid media enters the conversation. Paid media is one way to make sure good content reaches the people it was created to influence.
That is it.
That is the business case.
If your firm is asking technical experts to contribute their thinking, it should also be asking how that thinking will reach the right audience. Otherwise, we are taking some of the firm’s most expensive expertise and tossing it into an algorithm we do not control.
I think everyone understands by now that buyers are forming opinions long before an RFQ hits the street. They are looking at your website. They are checking LinkedIn. They are watching what your people are talking about.
They are asking their peers. They are seeing what shows up in search, or they are having a conversation with a language model. They are forming impressions quietly, often long before they are ready to talk to your firm.
That means marketing is not just about producing content. It is about helping the right people encounter the right ideas enough times that they begin to understand what your firm stands for. If you have ever heard me speak, it is highly likely you have heard me say, “repetition builds reputation.” But repetition does not happen just because we posted something once and hoped LinkedIn would take care of the rest. It happens because someone made deliberate decisions about the audience, message, timing, budget, and distribution.
And yes, sometimes that includes paid media. I know paid media still makes some AEC leaders uncomfortable.
There is a long-standing belief in our industry that advertising is somehow less credible than an earned reputation, and I understand where that belief comes from. AEC firms do not want to look gimmicky. They do not want to look desperate. They do not want to feel as if they are buying attention rather than earning trust.
Fair.
But that is not how I want firms to think about paid media. Paid media does not earn trust for you. Your expertise does that. Your relationships do that. Your work does that. Your point of view does that. Paid media simply helps more of the right people to see the expertise, relationships, work, and point of view that already exist.
And marketers need to be able to explain it. Because if you are sitting in a meeting with a principal who believes “no one at the company has seen these ads” is evidence that the campaign is not working, you should not be having a campaign performance conversation yet.
You need to have a marketing education conversation first.
If leaders do not understand how digital marketing works, they will ask the wrong questions.
If they ask the wrong questions, marketers will chase the wrong answers.
And then everyone ends up frustrated.
The leader wonders why marketing feels scattered and disorganized.
The marketer wonders why leadership does not trust the work.
And the firm keeps creating content without a clear understanding of whether it is reaching the people who matter.
That is why we are dedicating July’s SmartSKILLS session to paid media.
We are excited to help AEC marketers who need better language, better context, and greater confidence when talking to non-marketers about paid media.
At the same time, we hope this session will help firm leaders understand what they are approving.
On July 22, Megan Gregory, our Paid Media Specialist, will lead Paid Media for AEC: Making Smarter Decisions That Actually Support Growth.
We will talk about how paid media works, how it connects to organic social, how it supports business development, where firms waste money, which metrics matter, and when paid visibility makes sense. Because if your content is worth creating, it is worth understanding how it gets seen.
Be sure to register before the seats are full.
Until next time,
Judy