Are you a business advisor or a vendor?
Starting out in your career, your work load is likely very task heavy. But don't get stuck in the tactical trap forever.
The key to getting out of the trap is leveraging your expertise as a marketer and speaking in business terms (not marketing terms) with other company leaders.
Also, learn about the technical side of your company. It'll make a world of difference to your role as well as to internal collaboration.
Plus, get familiar with the economics of projects. Understand what healthy margins look like for your market sector, why utilization rates matter, and the average project fee by studio/market/specialty.
The number one career mistake that I see marketers making in the AEC industry is that they're stuck in a tactical trap. They may have been hired to produce a brochure, put together a proposal during a project pursuit, and maybe do social media content. And that is all very task driven. You're almost like an internal vendor to your company if that's where you feel like your career is right now.
I want you to think about a couple of things that can really turn around your career. One of the career limiting mistakes that marketers can make is only speaking the marketing language and not the business language. We tend to focus on the tactical things that we do and that's what we're reporting up to leadership at our company. The right thing to do is to talk about the strategy behind why we are posting to LinkedIn and how thought leadership is going to position the company to pursue work in that new market that we want to go after. So really coming at reporting up to leadership from the business side of what we do as marketing professionals.
Another thing that we can get caught up in is that we don't understand the technical side of the business and that can make us seem like an outsider to the company. But the more that you can learn the technical side and working with your designers, your engineers, the people that are out there in the projects doing it day in and day out is you write better proposals, you write more good case studies and stories that tell why your company is different than the others.
And the last pitfall that I want to bring up today is not really understanding the project economics. That may look like what's your average project fee by market sector. Not understanding the profit margins by the type of project your company pursues. And that can come across as marketing not prioritizing what is important to the business.
I want to encourage you to not wait to be asked to start doing this stuff. Just take the initiative, start doing it today.
Start looking at your marketing data. Start looking at your pursuit numbers. Have conversations and have lunch with the technical side of your company to really understand what they go through and what they enjoy about their type of work.
Because really, while you may have a title that is in the marketing department, what we really want to do is make you a business advisor to the company. And so it's removing yourself from the tactical to-do list and really becoming a strategic thought leader within your company.