Mastering Thought Leadership to Build Your AEC Brand

Dear Doctor:

Our firm is small, so we don’t always have a lot of projects to publish, but we have great ideas. Someone
told me that we should be doing thought leadership, but I don’t know what that is or where to start. Can
you help?

– Just a Thought

Ah, yes, it’s a great question, Just a Thought! And you’re in luck, the Doctor has the answer to this one. Just give me a second to rummage through my bag of trickedy tricks, which I happen to have right here! So, it sounds like you know how to do marketing, which is terrific. The doctor loves pro-activity. Now you want to take on some new projects to push your firm forward. You probably know—no news flash— if you have done any kind of marketing for your architecture, engineering, construction or fill-in-the-blank type of AEC firm, it’s not only the services that you provide, but how you market them, that brings home the bacon. Even if you do have a giant portfolio of projects, and it’s ok if you don’t, no one’s gonna hear about them unless you make some noise.

But the thing of it is, a project (and news about that project) only has a certain shelf life, like cereal for example! It gets stale. Once you have finished it, it’s practically out of date. That’s why the doctor wants you stop looking at the white lines in the rear-view mirror and look forward to trends and big ideas. Oh, there she goes with all that jargon! What does the Doctor mean by that? I’ll take an example. For instance, if you want to pitch a multifamily residential building to the media, you probably start by gathering all the information you have about the what and where (size, program, location, blah, blah, blah). That’s ok for a news item, but it can get kinda bor-ing! But what if you started to talk about trends in the future of housing. Or, instead, if you’re working on a hospital, what if you talked about the patient experience. Etc., etc. Get it?

You’re probably thinking, yeah, sounds good, but what does that have to do with selling my project to get more of them? But see, here’s the trick: you are still selling, but you’re raising the conversation. Instead of showing clients a catalogue of buildings, you’re selling your reputation, your promise, and your track record of overcoming your clients’ stickiest challenges. By highlighting your strategy and vision, you are shifting the conversation to your expertise and knowledge. That is what will put you ahead of the proverbial pack. But remember, as you go down this little thought leadership highway, not all thought leadership is created equal! You can get the most bang for your buck by focusing on high-value thought leadership content. That means talking about potential challenges that you have overcome and how you brought new opportunities to complex projects; how you saw things that might have been overlooked by a client; or ways that you gave expert guidance that your competitors didn’t—or just plain weren’t able to.

Last, there are some hurdles that I beg you to avoid. First, don’t repeat what everyone else is saying. Be authentic, be real. And make you are giving good advice, not the hard sell. Look, Just A Thought, I’m sure you have been in meetings with people, and they start their standard pitch, but you can’t stop them ‘cause they have turned on the autopilot. And that’s just an all-around snoozer. I know you and your people have some good ideas in your pretty little heads. I look forward to hearing about them! And I’ll leave you with one final thought (smile emoji). This stuff does work. A recent survey showed that 47% of decision makers who were researching a specific topic came across thought leadership just by doing the old Google thing! You can also use thought leadership for blogs, e-blasts, social media, and media outreach. So, what are you waiting for?