#68: [ModMarketing] Modernizing AEC Marketing
I am so excited to bring you this brand-new ModMarketing Series! This series will walk AEC marketers through how to modernize their marketing techniques using digital, online, thought leadership, and content marketing strategies. These strategies will help you to raise your firm’s brand awareness, capture new leads, and eventually drive the growth of your firm.
ModMarketing is going to cover the nuts and bolts of how to do this. But before we get into that, let’s define what it means when I say Modernize Your Marketing – or ModMarketing – and why engineering, architecture, and construction (AEC) firms must modernize their marketing to stay relevant.
As you may have figured out, the AEC industry has often been slow compared to other industries when adopting new marketing trends. But in 2020 with the global pandemic, AEC firms were propelled to rapidly make changes to their marketing programs, including shifting resources to digital marketing.
In fact, according to a 2021 study of AEC firms conducted by Hinge Marketing, high-growth firms are generating 50% of their leads from digital sources. These digital sources include websites, email, social media, and digital advertising. Also, high-growth firms are increasing their marketing budgets and dedicating almost 27% of their revenues to marketing efforts.
And according to the 43rd annual Deltek Clarity study, well over half (59%) of the firms surveyed continued to struggle with finding the time to nurture client relationships, with 23% of firms identifying this as their top challenge.
In that same study, social media posts were the top marketing technique at 84% with client-specific marketing following close behind at 67% listed as their top marketing technique.
Looking to the future, firms who responded to the Clarity report are banking on certain marketing techniques over others to position themselves over the next five years. Those top 4 techniques were client-specific marketing, social media, thought leadership, and content marketing.
What do these two reports tell me? Well, they tell me that the high-performing AEC firms are already allocated budgets and seeing results from what I am calling ModMarketing techniques and other AEC firms are planning to at least for the next five years.
This research along with my dozens of conversations with AEC marketers across the country and the kinds of sessions I am seeing at marketing conferences compelled me to create this series for you. These ModMarketing skills are going to be crucial for you to develop to stay relevant as an AEC marketer.
So, what are we going to cover in ModMarketing? I am so glad you asked. In this series, you will learn how to develop a ModMarketing program that is right for your firm. Some topics I plan to cover include:
- How to define your personas
- Setting ModMarketing goals
- Outlining a content strategy
- Different content strategies and examples
- Repurposing content into multiple formats
- Search engine optimization
- Promoting content
- Optimizing marketing performance
- Analyzing marketing results
Make sure you are subscribed to the Marketers Take Flight podcast, so you don’t miss any episode in this series!
And in this episode, I am going to go into a little more in detail about what the heck I mean by ModMarketing.
Links mentioned in this episode:
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