How to inspire AEC leadership to care about marketing

Getting leadership to value marketing can feel like an uphill climb. A recent SMPS webinar, "How to inspire AEC leadership to care about marketing," offered practical ways to change that. Here are the takeaways worth carrying back to your team.

Know your differentiators and revisit them often

You cannot sell what makes your firm special if you have not defined it. The webinar stressed that differentiators are rarely generic. They come from digging into who your clients are, which projects you have won and even the ones you have lost. That post-loss review can sting, but it often reveals something new you can use in your marketing.

This idea echoes AOE's concept of a Strategy Statement, a core piece of the strategic planning process. We define it as "the overarching approach to business that is unique to your organization; considering who you work with, how you do it and what makes you unique." Evaluate that statement regularly, because your differentiators shift as your firm grows.

Relationships and satisfaction drive future work

AEC is a relationship-based business. How clients feel about working with you carries directly into their next project and the one after that. Client satisfaction is not a soft metric, it is a pipeline predictor.

One of the most reliable ways to understand those relationships is through structured client surveys. Asking the right questions (about project experience, communication, outcomes and overall satisfaction) gives your firm concrete data to work with rather than assumptions. Surveys surface patterns that informal conversations often miss, and they signal to clients that you take their feedback seriously. AOE works with AEC firms to design and deploy surveys that go beyond surface-level responses, helping you identify where client relationships are strong, where they need attention and what themes should inform your marketing and strategy. When that feedback loops into your strategic planning process, it stops being a stand-alone exercise and becomes a driver of meaningful improvement.

The same logic applies internally. How your people feel about your brand shapes whether they stay and how they represent you. Give employees at every level a way to contribute. A 500-person firm has 500 people who can help build the brand, and most want to feel part of it.

Treat your brand like a real brand

Many AEC firms treat their brand like a company: police the logo, enforce the guidelines and stop there. The webinar challenged marketers to go further. A real brand is built on values, passions and the stories behind the work.

Get specific to make that brand memorable. Name the architect, the material or the technology behind a project. Concrete details beat generic marketing language every time, and they are one of the strongest defenses against bland content. In a recent AI Trends report from SMPS, they noted that small details like including contributor names and LinkedIn profile links make an impact on how your website gets referenced by AI models.

Thought leadership becomes far more powerful when it is grounded in what your clients experience. Rather than publishing content based on what your firm finds interesting, build it around the challenges, barriers and questions your clients raise time and again. That intelligence is already within reach when you have a strong survey program in place. Feedback gathered through structured client surveys can reveal recurring pain points, emerging concerns and gaps in understanding. All of this information showcases opportunities for your firm to step in with informed, relevant content. A well-timed article or case study that speaks directly to a client's current challenge does more for your brand than a dozen generic thought leadership pieces ever could. AOE helps AEC firms not only design surveys that surface these insights but also translate those findings into a content strategy that reflects genuine expertise and builds a brand voice your clients will recognize and trust.

Track everything and shift the conversation

What gets measured gets managed. Whether you use a spreadsheet or a CRM, track your activity so you can walk into a leadership meeting with evidence. Even "soft" numbers like engagement and site traffic show levels of interest you can tie to firm strategy.

Then shift how you approach leadership. Instead of asking permission to market, lead with action: "Here is what I am going to test, and here is where I expect it to work." It is easier to have leadership edit something than to convince them to build it from scratch.

This connects to a point Brian Wheeler made in his AOE guest post, Why marketing is not just another business cost. When you frame marketing as a growth driver and a reducer of business risk rather than a line-item expense, leadership starts to listen differently.

Put it into action

Start small and stay consistent. Define your differentiators, protect client relationships, invite internal buy-in and prove your value with data. Do that, and marketing stops looking like a cost and starts looking like the engine it truly is.

Ready to sharpen your firm's strategy and marketing story? Connect with AOE to build a plan that gets leadership on board.