Busy doing marketing, or actually winning work?

Most firms have a marketing plan. Far fewer have a marketing strategy. Here's the difference, and why it decides whether any of it pays off.

Most AEC firms I meet are doing marketing. There's a website refresh on the go, a stand booked for the next show, someone posting on LinkedIn, maybe a rebrand being talked about. Activity, plenty of it. What's usually missing is anyone able to say what all that activity is for: which work it's meant to win, from whom, and whether last year's version of it actually did.

That's the difference between having a marketing plan and having a marketing strategy. Most firms have the first and assume it's the second.

A plan is a list. A strategy is a set of choices.

A plan is a list of things you're going to do: the campaigns, the channels, the calendar. Useful, but it doesn't tell you whether you're doing the right things. A strategy is the layer above it. The choices about what work you actually want, who you need to be known by to win it, where you'll compete and, mostly, what you'll leave well alone. Strategy is largely a set of decisions about what not to do. A firm chasing every sector and every client type with the same flat message has a busy plan and no strategy, and it tends to show in the results.

Marketing belongs further up than the brochure

In a lot of firms, marketing is treated as the place where brochures and stands get made. The service desk at the bottom of the building. That's a waste of it.

The decisions that actually settle whether marketing pays off sit higher up. Which markets are worth chasing and which aren't. How you stand against the three other firms on the same tender shortlist, and why a client should pick you over them. What makes you the obvious choice for the work you actually want, rather than a credible option for any work going. Those are commercial questions as much as marketing ones, and they're where marketing either earns its keep or doesn't.

It starts from what the business is trying to do

Strategic marketing doesn't start with marketing. It starts from a commercial goal the leadership already cares about, and works back to what marketing has to do to help get there.

Say the goal is to stop being a sub-consultant and start winning lead appointments. Or to break into data centres while the work is there. Or to get specified by architects at the start of a job rather than fighting on price at the end. Or to grow margin by winning better work, not just more of it. Each of those is a different marketing strategy. Same firm, same budget, an entirely different set of choices about how you position, what you prove, and who you go after. If the marketing isn't tied to a goal like that, it's decoration.

None of this happens without someone in the room

Here's the part that's easy to skip. This kind of marketing can't be run by someone sitting at the bottom taking a brief. It needs someone operating where the commercial decisions actually get made: sitting with the leadership team, hearing where the business wants to go, and turning that into what marketing should do about it. Someone who can question the goal as well as serve it, and who owns the direction rather than waiting to be told.

Most firms this size don't have that person. They have a capable marketer doing the doing, and a leadership team making the business decisions, and not much joining the two. The strategy falls down the gap between them. Whether you fill it with a hire, with someone fractional, or by giving a senior person a proper seat, the point holds: strategic marketing needs a seat at the table, not just a pair of hands.

Measure the few things that matter

Tie marketing to a real goal and you can finally tell whether it's working, which most firms can't. You stop counting followers and impressions, which don't pay anyone's salary, and start watching what does: whether the right enquiries are coming in, whether you're getting onto the shortlists you want, whether your win rate on target work is moving, whether the calibre of the work is improving. A handful of measures tied to the goal beats a dashboard nobody acts on.

The tactics still matter. The project sheets, the trade-press pieces, the clients kept warm between jobs. But they only pay off when they're pointed at the right work, and strategy is what points them.

 If your firm is busy marketing and you couldn't quite say what it's all for, that's the conversation worth having. clare@clarewatson.uk.