As sustainability becomes increasingly crucial across industries, marketing professionals AEC must adapt their strategies to align with this global shift. This session will explore how to integrate sustainable practices into marketing initiatives without compromising creativity or effectiveness. Attendees will learn how to reduce the environmental impact of their campaigns, communicate sustainability authentically, and leverage green marketing as a competitive advantage. Whether you're just beginning your sustainability journey or looking to enhance existing efforts, this session will provide practical insights and actionable strategies to make your marketing more eco-friendly.

Key Takeaways:

1. Integrating Sustainability into Marketing Campaigns: Learn how to incorporate eco-friendly practices into every aspect of your marketing strategy, from content creation to event planning, ensuring your efforts align with broader environmental goals.
2. Authentic Green Communication: Discover effective ways to partner with the sustainability leaders to communicate your firm’s commitment to sustainability, avoiding greenwashing and building trust with clients and stakeholders through transparency and integrity.
3. Leveraging Sustainable Marketing for Competitive Advantage: Understand how positioning your firm as a sustainability leader can differentiate you in the market, attract like-minded clients, and contribute to long-term business growth.

SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 continuing education units for the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) program and 1.5 learning units from the American Institute of Architects. Recordings of SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 CPSM CEUs.

Per-Site Registration Fee*  

SMPS Member Site Registration: $199

Nonmember Site Registration: $259  

*Remember: webinars are open to your whole staff. Your team can participate from one location in your office for one fee. Register today and benefit from affordable, convenient, actionable learning and earn valuable CPSM CEUs and AIA LUs!

CPSMs, you asked for it—and we listened! After receiving great content ideas from the CPSM community in early 2024, SMPS has created an exclusive program to meet your needs with the top topics requested.

At SMPS, our goal is to provide you with lifelong learning and skills that matter to you, your career, and your firm.  This first series includes three virtual programs and aligns with the six domains of practice.

Session 1: Anticipate Tomorrow: Megatrends Impacting the Design & Construction Industry

Design and construction firm leaders need to continually scan their environments to uncover trends that will impact their vertical markets, clients, and firms directly. For CPSMs, this is a way to transform your company through marketing leadership, no matter your role.  

This program, inclusive of a Q&A portion, will cover many of the trends or potential trends that are currently affecting design and construction firms - or are coming in the near future. This presentation captures more than two dozen of these megatrends and interprets them for AEC professionals and is continually updated to capture changes and disruptions in the market space. 

Speaker:
Scott Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM 
Managing Director, Strategic Growth Advisory 
Stambaugh Ness 

Session 2: From Insights to Impact: Proven Tactics for Social Media Success

A lot has changed since Holly Bolton, FSMPS, CPSM, Dana Lancour, FSMPS, CPSM, and Adam Kilbourne, FSMPS, CPSM researched and wrote the 2011 SMPS Foundation whitepaper, The Client’s Use of Social Media and Social Networking. Yet while new tools, platforms, and challenges continue to emerge, certain human tendencies remain. Understanding those tendencies will help you develop content and posts that connect with your audience and support your goals.  

Join your CPSM peers as Holly shares five science-backed strategies to increase the impact of your content, whether through social media or other marketing communications tactics. To learn more about effective strategies currently in play, you’ll then hear from the three 2024 MCA Awards of Excellence winners in the Social Media category who will share their winning and successful projects, project goals, and included campaign elements.  

Post program, you’ll walk away better informed on successful marketing practices with strategies to increase content impact. 

Speakers: 
Holly Bolton, FSMPS, CPSM (she/her) 
Owner, 3chord Marketing 

Dana Ramsey, CPSM (she/her) 
Senior Associate / Marketing Director 
HBG Design 

Tully Mahoney (she/her)  
Storytelling Content Coordinator 
Page  

Joyce Watson, CPSM 
Principal | Marketing 
Cleary Zimmermann Engineers 

 Session 3: Conversation & Considerations: Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are becoming a much more common form of growth strategy for firms. Join your CPSM peers as Jennifer Danforth, CPSM, senior associate and proposal director at Woolpert, shares considerations and lesson learned through Woolpert’s 14 acquisitions during the last five years. Join us online as Julie Huval, FSMPS, CPSM, leads the interactive and lively discussion.  

During this online program, CPSMs will learn: 

• What questions to ask for long-term success during and after a M&A 
• How documenting firm processes leads to better integration 
• Why using team/firm metrics is the best form of persuasion 
• Tips on keeping your team focused and engaged 
• How supporting M&A activities benefits your career 

Speakers: 

Jennifer Danforth, CPSM 
Senior Associate | Proposal Director 
Woolpert 

Julie Huval, FSMPS, CPSM 
Owner, Marketing Operations Advisor 
Society Board At-Large Director 

Modern recruiting for talent begins online and concludes with a digital application. Your website is the first place prospects will go to research, evaluate, and contact (or not) your firm. It's also a tool that can help to retain current employees. Designed and developed correctly, your website should help you win the war on talent recruitment & retention.

Key Takeaways:

1. Gain insight on what employee prospects really want from your site
2. Learn what pages, and content, you need beyond a single Careers page
3. Hear the pros and cons of integrating your HR software within your site
4. Understand how key content supports firm culture and employee retention

SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 continuing education units for the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) program and 1.5 learning units from the American Institute of Architects. Recordings of SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 CPSM CEUs.

Per-Site Registration Fee*  

SMPS Member Site Registration: $199

Nonmember Site Registration: $259  

*Remember: webinars are open to your whole staff. Your team can participate from one location in your office for one fee. Register today and benefit from affordable, convenient, actionable learning and earn valuable CPSM CEUs and AIA LUs!

This webinar introduces AEC marketers to the fundamentals of AI, emphasizing its relevance to marketing within the AEC industry. Participants will explore AI concepts, including machine learning and data-driven decision-making, and how these can enhance research, planning, and client development.


Key Topics:

• Introduction to AI and machine learning
• AI’s role in enhancing market research (Domain 1: Research)
• Integrating AI in marketing planning and business development (Domain 2: Planning)

Activity:

•  Interactive Poll and Group Discussion: Use a live polling tool to gauge participants' current understanding of AI applications in their marketing strategies. Follow up with a guided group discussion where participants share ideas and experiences related to AI in AEC marketing.

Key Takeaways:

1. Understanding AI basics and its application in AEC marketing.
2. Enhancing market research and planning processes using AI.
3. Identifying marketing tasks within the AEC domain that can be improved with AI tools.

SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 continuing education units for the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) program and 1.5 learning units from the American Institute of Architects. Recordings of SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 CPSM CEUs.

Per-Site Registration Fee*  

SMPS Member Site Registration: $199

Nonmember Site Registration: $259  

*Remember: webinars are open to your whole staff. Your team can participate from one location in your office for one fee. Register today and benefit from affordable, convenient, actionable learning and earn valuable CPSM CEUs and AIA LUs!

At many firms marketing and business development are considered two separate activities, often with separate staff leading them.  However, smart firms recognize the interplay between the two and use each to help inform the other.  This webinar will talk through the ebb and flow between marketing and business development before, during and after the pursuit process, share examples of how they have been coordinated successfully, and offer practical tips for engaging with your colleagues on the “other” side of the marketing aisle.

Learning Objectives

• Understand which parts of the BD/M effort take precedence during which phases of a project pursuit
  
• Recognize the ways in which each part of the BD/M team informs/supports each other
  
• Identify practical ways to bridge the divide to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts
  

SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 continuing education units for the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) program and 1.5 learning units from the American Institute of Architects. Recordings of SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 CPSM CEUs.

Per-Site Registration Fee*  

SMPS Member Site Registration: $199

Nonmember Site Registration: $259  

*Remember: webinars are open to your whole staff. Your team can participate from one location in your office for one fee. Register today and benefit from affordable, convenient, actionable learning and earn valuable CPSM CEUs and AIA LUs!

A recent study by the B2B Thought Leadership Agency FT Longitude found that 88% of business leaders spend significant time researching companies before engaging with them. This and similar research show that the vast majority of decision-makers within your client organizations rely on your firm’s content to assess your innovative thinking, expertise in their specific issues and the quality of your talent – all long before the formal selection process begins.

But there’s a catch: With more and more firms publishing more and more smart, high-quality content, simply creating more/better content is unlikely to create a competitive advantage for your firm. You need a new blueprint!

This three-part series will introduce the next-gen content strategies and approaches designed for today’s AEC buying journey. You will learn how creating content that addresses your prospects’ and clients’ needs at all critical points in their decision-making process will grow your firm’s influence and reach and bring more best-fitting projects through the door.

Using research, data, and insights along with compelling examples, adaptable models, and useful checklists, this program will provide you with a practical roadmap you can put to work immediately.

Is your firm ready to transform content into business?

Session 1: Using Content to Win Business

The first session in the series will answer the fundamental questions about how using educational and thought leadership content as a business strategy directly contributes to your firm’s ability to attract and win more business.

 Session 2: Aligning Content to Today’s AEC Buyer Journey

The session will provide a comprehensive overview of developing content for different stages in today’s mostly digital and self-directed AEC buying process

 Session 3: Activating Content for Results

This final session will cover how to activate content to meet stated objectives, engage the right audiences and influence business decisions. From execution, publishing, distribution, promotion, and measurement, we’ll cover every aspect of making sure your content deliverables are primed to achieve a return on objective.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• Understand the role of educational and thought leadership content in achieving your firm’s business objectives and accelerating growth.
• Learn how to align content to every stage in the AEC buying journey, helping your firm reach, engage and convert the right decision-makers, faster.
• Discover what makes educational and thought leadership content effective in today’s digital environment and how to ensure it’s easy for business decision-makers to find, access and consume your content.
• Learn how to transform content into a strategic business function and create efficient content operations for your firm.

Schedule at Glance

June 25, 2024 (2-hour program) LinkedIn Thought Leadership Amplified by Unique Insights

Explore the transformative power of Thought Leadership in our exclusive session, designed to enhance your brand’s digital influence. Discover why Thought Leaders excel on LinkedIn, and learn how to establish yourself as a credible authority. We’ll also delve into the intricacies of LinkedIn’s algorithm, revealing key strategies to amplify your reach and engagement. Gain practical insights into content optimization for immediate impact.

Key takeaways:

1. The Power of Thought Leadership: Understanding why Thought Leaders achieve the best results on LinkedIn.
2. Building Authority: Strategies for branding yourself as a trusted authority and gaining instant credibility.
3. Cultivating Company Thought Leaders: Implementing a 4-layer Employee Branding Model to foster thought leadership within your organization.
4. Navigating LinkedIn’s Algorithm: Insights into current algorithmic challenges and how to overcome them for better visibility.
5. Content Strategy Mastery: Learning how different content formats influence reach and engagement, and how to use them effectively.
6. Actionable Algorithm Insights: Six implementable insights to enhance your LinkedIn strategy for immediate results.

August 15, 2024  (2-hour program) Turning Your Brand Story Into A Hiring Strategy

Before spending a dollar on promoting a job, recruiting teams should know whose attention they want to capture. Hiring teams must understand what matters most to quality candidates. Instead, many simply post jobs on more websites in hopes of filling niche roles with any warm body rather than the right person.

Best-in-class candidates aren’t settling for templates and worn-out tactics. They want to know why they should work for you. If you’re not expressing it in a language that attracts the right person, it’s costing the company money. This presentation can help. People who have attended this session with hiring expert Katrina Kibben have said it helped them learn simple steps to stand out with recruitment marketing that uses real stories.

What’s In It For You

• Steps for translating your stories into a unique recruiting strategy,
• An introduction to recruiting personas and how they work,
• 4 things you can do to increase applications without an employer brand budget,
• And more!

Attendees will leave this session with actionable insights that help companies of all sizes stand out.

September 11, 2024 (2-hour program) Unlocking Employee Potential through Powerful Conversations 

Managers are expected to motivate, train and develop their direct reports. To do so, managers need tools to help them draw boundaries and sustain empathy while also holding employees accountable. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a powerful communication technique that helps do just that. Often utilized by coaches, social workers, therapists and healthcare practitioners, MI is designed to enhance effectiveness in eliciting positive behavior change by empowering and engaging the individual. This presentation will introduce MI’s principles and key skills and provide attendees with a safe learning environment to practice its application to real-world business scenarios.

Motivational Interviewing (MI) skills offers several benefits:

• Enhanced Communication: MI improves communication between managers and employees by fostering a collaborative, non-confrontational atmosphere. This leads to more open and honest discussions.
• Empowerment: MI empowers employees to explore their own motivations for change, rather than being told what to do. This autonomy increases their commitment to making positive changes.
• Increased Engagement: By using MI techniques, managers can effectively engage employees in conversations about change initiatives or performance improvements, leading to greater buy-in and participation.

Proposals should position your firm to win – they’re sales documents! It needs to persuade the reader that your firm is the best firm for that project. But this is often hard to do when our firm is just like our competitors. How do we truly find those differences, and then translate those into persuasive proposals?

Enter in the Differentiation Framework. This can be used on any proposal, for any client, and in any market. This program walks you through the Differentiation Framework with the end result that of value proposition that gets shortlisted.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what makes a proposal persuasive
  
• Learn how to apply the Differentiation Framework to your proposals
  
• Get ideas on how to infuse creativity into each proposal
  

SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 continuing education units for the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) program and 1.5 learning units from the American Institute of Architects. Recordings of SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 CPSM CEUs.

Per-Site Registration Fee*  

SMPS Member Site Registration: $199

Nonmember Site Registration: $259  

*Remember: webinars are open to your whole staff. Your team can participate from one location in your office for one fee. Register today and benefit from affordable, convenient, actionable learning and earn valuable CPSM CEUs and AIA LUs!

As marketers and business developers, we know crafting a great proposal is more complicated than “just throwing a few things together.” Even if your firm has all the pieces in place like a go/no go filter, proposal process, updated templates, and a badass marketing team, each proposal can feel like a bumpy journey of cat herding and deadline stress. Creating proposals takes an enormous amount of people power, coordination, and time (and therefore $). Establishing a pursuit process that works with your firm culture is critical. In this session, we will share how we evolved our pursuit process to fit our unique firm culture to boost adoption and engagement. We will provide tools and tips on how you can ensure pursuits are led by marketing, but still have buy-in and contributions from your busy technical professionals.

Learning Objectives

• How to create a pursuit process that uniquely fits the DNA of your firm to ensure adoption.
• Understand how marketing professionals and business developers can provide meaningful insight in the go/no go process to influence the decision to pursue and the response strategy using the knowledge they possess.
• Learn collaboration tools that can help keep your pursuit process on track.

SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 continuing education units for the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) program and 1.5 learning units from the American Institute of Architects. Recordings of SMPS webinars are approved for 1.5 CPSM CEUs.

Per-Site Registration Fee*  

SMPS Member Site Registration: $199

Nonmember Site Registration: $259  

*Remember: webinars are open to your whole staff. Your team can participate from one location in your office for one fee. Register today and benefit from affordable, convenient, actionable learning and earn valuable CPSM CEUs and AIA LUs!

Amplify A|E|C Digital is the industry’s premier virtual marketing, business development, and leadership experience. 

With more than 7 hours of on-demand programming, you’ll strengthen your skills—and amplify your knowledge. You can earn up to 7 CEUs by participating in the Amplify A|E|C Digital program. 

Here’s the courses included:

Designing Your Collateral for Success
Facilitator: Tom Silva

The session "Designing Your Collateral for Success" will be a practical, no-nonsense review of what every marketing person needs to know to lay out and produce materials that position their companies, services and products as leading-edge, winning trust and confidence without compromising the quality of information. The session will intro the basic tenets of design but, uniquely, tailor them to the AEC sector and the built environment. How do you showcase projects, team members, and services? How do eyes scan digital vs print collateral. Why is negative space an active part of your layouts? Why should you care about contrast? This is a session to empower a non-designers to make the right decisions moving forward.

The Future of A/E/C Websites 
Facilitator: Danielle Diforio

What is coming next in the world of A/E/C websites? This session will explore the evolving digital landscape within the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. In an era marked by rapid technological advancements, delve into cutting-edge trends and strategies reshaping A/E/C websites, paving the way for enhanced user experiences and greatly improved site management. Attendees can expect to gain invaluable insights on how A/E/C firms are rethinking their websites to help win the talent war, gain new clients, and stay in touch with current clients, all while streamlining the time needed for the marketing team to keep the website up-to-date.

Amplify your BD and Marketing Effectiveness with Better CRM 
Facilitator: Megan Miller, CPSM

Do you struggle getting your project managers, business developers and marketing teams to fully leverage your CRM? Do your teams see your CRM as just "one more administrative thing" they don't have time for? This session will highlight best practices for using your CRM to amplify your BD and marketing effectiveness. Learn how you can truly turn client information into client intelligence and help your teams make better, more informed decisions to build a better pipeline and ultimately win more work. Join Megan Miller, CPSM to hear practical ways that you can truly boost adoption and turn your CRM into a must-have resource for your teams so your teams can prioritize where to invest their time, develop better pursuit strategies, proactively manage your pipeline and track the impact of your BD and marketing efforts more effectively.

Demystifying Document Accessibility 
Facilitator: Dax Castro

This session will answer the burning questions of “What is document accessibility?” and “Why do I need to do it?” We will continue the conversation with key tips to managing your proposal timeline while incorporating accessibility along the way. Dax will share his time-saving tips for things like setting up your templates, writing alt-text, and understanding how to tell if your document is compliant. Attendees will leave with skills that will demystify accessibility and several checklists that will keep you focused in the right direction.

Managing Your AEC Firm Through a Rebrand 
Facilitator: Ida Cheinman

With so many A/E/C firms undertaking complex rebranding projects (often for the first time!), successfully navigating your firm through a rebrand can be a career high point. It’s also a monumental challenge. The role you play in the process and how you play it can make an equally monumental difference in the credibility and the perceived value of the marketing function within your firm. Following a strategic and disciplined process will help reduce headaches and prevent both costs and timelines from spiraling out of control – most important, it will ensure that the new brand meets your firm's current and future needs, creates a competitive advantage and delivers results.

How Brain Science in Meetings Improves Productivity and Communication 
Facilitator: Susan Young

The most overlooked communication skill in AEC is curiosity. Top-notch marketing leaders beat competitors by paying deep attention, asking quality questions, and embracing new ideas.  High-level interpersonal communication goes beyond emotional intelligence and team-building activities. The key is knowing human behavior that drives connections, productivity, and profits. Award-winning communicator and AEC speaker Susan Young teaches Neurolinguistic Programming. NLP is a 50-year-old business and communications model that top executives use worldwide. 

Generative AI Impacts on the AEC Industry 
Facilitator: Frank Lazaro

Join Frank Lazaro as he delves deep into the transformative world of Generative AI and its profound impact on the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. This session unravels the intricacies of Generative AI, setting it apart from other AI frameworks, and provides a comprehensive overview of AI's current footprint in the AEC industry. Whether you are considering integrating AI into your projects or striving for responsible AI deployment, this presentation provides actionable insights and a look into the future. As we explore the horizon, learn about the potential future of AI in AEC and engage in a thought-provoking session. Don't miss this opportunity to stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving landscape of AEC and AI.