AEC Marketing Communication in the New World:
Low cost strategies
that really work
By Mark Buckshon
What are the best techniques
and methods to find new business
in the current era of rapidly devel-
oping technologies and intensified
competition? The answer to this question
combines some new approaches
with long-standing traditional and
effective marketing strategies. You
need to build on your brand - and
that is primarily based on your ac-
tual client experiences and their
genuine enthusiasm and enjoyment
in working with you.

Then you apply technological in-
novations to accelerate and en-
hance your positive reputation, with
effective client-focused editorial
and visual marketing content, a
solid website, and some easy to
manage social media strategies. Fi-
nally, if you wish, you can package
these qualities, combining current
technologies with future-looking
concepts including Building Infor-
mation Modelling, virtual/aug-
mented reality, and – looking
forward – the powerful potential of
machine learning and artificial intel-
ligence. At root, the basics of effective
AEC marketing haven’t changed in
decades. People (and business-to-
business clients are of course indi-
viduals working for companies) like
doing business with organizations
where they feel good about their
experience. Clearly, your actual
work/service/product must be com-
petent, but if your clients’ overall
experience isn’t at least satisfac-
tory, you will have a one-time rela-
tionship. However, your goal should
be to make their experience super
great, by anticipating needs, com-
municating frequently, and where
4 – WINTER 2018 — New York Construction Report
you can, providing value added ex-
tras that don’t cost much money
but make the process more enjoy-
able. Why is the client experience so
important? Consider the fundamen-
tal data that I’ve gathered over the
past decade through an ongoing
poll on my constructionmar-
ketingideas.com blog. At least 71
percent of the contractors, archi-
tects and engineers who have re-
sponded over the years say that
repeat and referral business is their
most important source of revenue.

(It breaks down to 41 percent from
word-of-mouth/recommendations and 30 percent from repeat clients.)
Advertising (at 13 percent) and
leads services/open RFPs and pub-
lic tenders at 11 percent are signifi-
cant business builders but don’t
really move the needle as much. Ir-
ritating and intrusive techniques
such as telemarketing and door-to-
door canvassing work for only a
few contractors (at five percent).

The point in these numbers is
that anything you can do to im-
prove your repeat and referral busi-
ness will have disproportionate
impact on your bottom line. So you
need to do everything you can to
connect with and deliver value to
your clients.

Your goal: Win sincere testimoni-
als and recommendations – so you
can make it easier for other clients
to say “yes” - and of course, to de-
velop additional repeat or recurring
business. Please note: While it is essential
to provide great client service, you
must never assert that your market-
ing/business strength is providing
“great customer service”. This is in-
effective. If anyone asserts this fact
(assuming it is true), it should be
your customers themselves,
through their actual experience and
testimonial statements, either writ-
ten (or even better) in video format.




That said, there are some things
you can do beyond delivering an in-
credible client experience These in-
clude: • Developing an expertise and rep-
utation building content creation
strategy (blog, white papers,
videos); • building a truly effective website;
and • adapting your website and con-
tent to responsive social media
relationships and concepts.

None of these strategies requires
much money, though they all re-
quire some effort and coordination.

I’ll outline some approaches to suc-
ceeding in these three focuses.

Content creation
The goal here is to make it easy
for current and previous clients to
say good things about you, and to
learn valuable information to build
on your quality/expertise reputation.

Your blog provides a good starting
point – because by regularly writ-
ing/videoing your insights, observa-
tions, and stories, you add to your
reference points and knowledge.

Your blog messages can easily
be posted to your website (see
below) and then auto-posted to so-
cial media.

Videos don’t need to be slick or
fancy. In fact, testimonial videos
that are grainy and rough are in my
opinion more credible and effective
than slickly narrated commercially
produced efforts.

However, I think your writing
should be solid and well-edited. If
you don’t have someone who writes
well on your staff, you may need to
contract with a freelancer to gener-
ate or edit your material. This will
cost you some money, but will be
far less expensive than conventional
paid advertising.

Developing your social
media relationships
Company profile pages for Face-
book, Twitter and LinkedIn can be
created without fee, and you can
easily connect them to your website
so that every time you add a rele-
vant post, it will auto feed to the rel-
evant social media sites, leveraging
your marketing presence, without
costing you any additional money.

You’ll want to develop tools to
monitor and manage your social
media image, inducing positive tes-
timonials and comments while
avoiding negative comments and
reviews. There are some third party
services that help this process.

They invite your clients to provide a
“satisfaction” report, and if it is ex-
cellent, they will encourage cus-
tomers to post their positive
comments directly on the social
media sites. If they are negative,
they will encourage your clients to
communicate with you privately so
you can resolve the issue and avoid
negative reviews.

How much will all of this cost?
Your greatest expense will likely
be the review/enhancement of your
internal processes and existing
client service/relationships. You may
need an outside consultant to look
more closely at your operations and
suggest improvements, but if you
can see the issues that need to be
resolved and make things more
friendly and satisfactory for your
clients, you’ll be well on your way.

Full-scale website development
services vary in price, but generally
you can get a specialist to complete
a solid project for you for about
$5,000 or so. If you are ready to do
it yourself or contract directly with
website developers, you can reduce
this cost by one or two orders of
magnitude. (Yes, that would mean
$500 or even $50.)
Writing services can be free (out-
side of your time) if you are compe-
tent and literate or have an in-house
staff person who can write well. Ex-
pect to spend upwards of a few
hundred dollars per significant piece
if you need to pay a freelancer or
outside marketing consultant for
these services.

Forward thinking options
If you are ready to step into the
future and embrace new technolo-
gies, you can achieve a significant
marketing advantage by building on
your uniqueness and forward think-
ing vision.

I think the best starting point for
most AEC professionals will be to
embrace Building Information Mod-
elling. Costs for BIM resources have
been declining, and there are in-
creasing opportunities to learn how
to use these tools. With BIM skills
and resources, you can have fun
with automated/virtual reality (and
really showcase your presenta-
tions/projects in an interactive way).

If you want to go even further
into the future (but we are talking
years, not decades), recent develop-
ments with machine learning and ar-
tificial intelligence offer exciting if
somewhat scary automation op-
tions – because the machines can
learn from their environment and ul-
timately the science fiction concept
of computers being smarter than
humans could become a reality.

Conclusion: You don’t need to
spend much to achieve a lot
Even if you go full-bore and con-
tract out all the services described
above, I can’t see it necessary for
you to spend more than $10,000 a
year on a truly effective marketing
strategy. This is a drop in the bucket
compared to even the cheapest
forms of paid media advertising. If
you elect to spend money on other
forms of marketing/advertising, in-
cluding trade show exhibits, print
and paid online advertising, the
client relationship, website and so-
cial media models will provide you
with a powerful backbone and will
boost the effectiveness of your
more expensive marketing ap-
proaches. Go for it. You can truly achieve
great marketing communications re-
sults for very little money.

Additional resources
I’ll provide you with a list of serv-
ice providers (and some observa-
tions/recommendations about
them) without charge if you email
me at buckshon@constructionmar-
ketingideas.com. New York Construction Report — WINTER 2018 – 5