As a general rule, we don't recommend obsessing over the competition. It's much more productive to focus on what your firm does well. But on occasion—say at the start of a new year or as part of a larger strategic planning effort—it can be worthwhile to turn your attention to a handful of companies you most frequently compete against. What is their share of voice and how is it influencing their share of market? In Part 1 of this two-part series, Middle of Six's Senior Marketing Strategist, Allison Tivnon outlines why a competitor audit can be valuable, what characteristics to assess, and how to compile and quantify qualitative findings. In an increasingly competitive market, now might be just the right time to identify hidden windows of opportunity where your firm can stand out from the field.
CPSM CEU Credits: 0.75 | Domain: 1
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to The Shortlist.
We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.
I'm your host, Wendy Simmons, and each episode, I'll be joined by one of my team members from Middle of Six to answer your questions.
Today, we have Alison Tivnon joining us to talk a bit about competitor audits.
What that means could mean lots of different things, depending on your firm or what your role is, but she has some experience with this and has lots of things that we can dig into and explore in the world of looking at your competition and how you size up and your share of voice in the marketplace, all that good stuff.
Hi, Alison.
Welcome back.
Wendy, yeah, that's great to be back for season two.
Right.
We have a whole huge list of things to talk about, things our team brainstormed, things that came up over the hiatus as we were doing work for our clients and hearing kind of the issues and challenges out there for AEC marketers.
So got lots to talk about this season and thought starting off in this first quarter when you're doing marketing planning and thinking about how to better differentiate your firm and what's going on out there in the marketplace.
Maybe we start with looking at the competition.
Yeah.
And isn't it funny what we had like 30 episodes.
You think we'd run out of things to talk about, but nope, there's always something else to explore in this industry of ours.
I know, right?
We thought maybe we are out of things to talk about.
And then we quickly made a list of 45 things to talk about.
Okay.
So set the stage for us about competitor audits.
Why would you want to do this?
You know, what is the either firm leadership or marketing director or marketing coordinator thinking when they're like, we should dig deeper into this?
One, this is a really good exercise to do this time of year, just getting ready to kind of set your sights on a 12-month calendar right ahead of you, and wrapping your arms around where you are in the marketplace is a really good way to feel like you have your feet under you, and pretty confident in where you're putting your marketing resources.
So case in point, we have a client that we're working with who is thinking through next steps for their firm in terms of growth, taking over more of the marketplace.
And I think the way they put it was, they're the most successful company you've never heard of.
They just felt kind of anonymous in the big scheme of things, and they didn't really know where to start.
A lot of it was, well, should we update our logo?
Should we blow up our website?
Should we change up our messaging?
And ended up being kind of like, yeah, to all of those.
But there was a bigger picture item that needed to happen, I think, before that, which was really understanding their share of voice in the market.
And I know you and I have talked about that before, share of voice versus share of market.
And in the context of this conversation that we're having, really understanding how loud their firm was in relation to all of the different competitors that are operating within that same market and how loud they are.
So how prominent is your voice, is your brand versus your competitors?
And how do you wrap your arms around a project like that, I think, is a really worthwhile subject to talk about for our listeners.
Can you share a little bit about the difference between share of voice versus share of market, how they impact each other?
And then, of course, we'll get into how marketing influences both of those.
So your share of voice is really your time, energy, resources that you're dedicating to marketing your company, branding your firm.
It's your sponsorships, it's your social media presence, it's your website.
It's the amount of time that you spend attending events and getting out there to be seen, the boards that you decide to serve on, all of those little touch points that you're making, kind of what seems to be independently of each other, ends up becoming this big loudness, or that's the way I think of it.
And that's basically, if you think about it in terms of a pie, say there's only so much noise that you can make in a marketplace, what is the amount of noise you're creating versus your competitors?
So that's kind of in a nutshell, post-it note stamp version of what Share of Voice is.
And then Share of Market is the amount, literally, of the market that you control versus your competitors.
So in our case, easiest way to think of that is, who's winning more work?
Who's doing the project work?
How much of an impact have you made within your marketplace in terms of, one, winning new projects but also getting the best teaming partners?
And are you the team to beat?
So the correlation between Share of Voice and Share of Market, and you can test this out by going online to see that this has been proven over and over again, is that there is a direct link between the amount of time and resources and money that you're spending on your Share of Voice to the amount of the market you control.
I would imagine marketers and firms may be wanting to do a competitor audit when they feel the pressure that maybe they don't have the share of market that they want.
Whenever it gets more competitive out there, and you're up against 12 firms going for a project instead of four firms, you know, you feel that squeeze and you want to look at the competition, what they're doing.
In the case that you were mentioning with this particular client where they were the most successful client you've never heard of, or a firm you've never heard of, their situation is a little bit reversed, right?
They have strong share of market, but they were looking to expand that and grow even more.
Can you tell me a little bit about what about when you're not focused on the market part, but you actually want to strengthen the share of voice component?
Well, and I think another driver for them was they felt new competition coming into the market encroaching on their territory.
And they also had a main competitor who was really kind of upping their game.
So, they were starting to feel pressure to respond in kind of that.
But to what you're talking about, I think all of us have had this happen to us who work in marketing in our industry.
I call it the keeping up with the Joneses syndrome, where you'll have a seller doer or someone with a lot of positional power within your firm come in, kind of waving their smartphone around saying, look at what such and such firm just did online.
We need to do this too.
Or you'll get the proposals from a recent pursuit that you didn't win.
And you look through them and you start kind of Frankensteining together ideas from the other proposals of, well, they did this, maybe we should do that.
And it is this pressure to keep up with the competition, but when it's disjointed and in the moment and just off the cuff, you are not pulling all of your strategy together into one cohesive whole.
So, it's always going to be in fits and starts, and you're not going to be able to truly measure if you're having any impact on your quote unquote share of voice.
Yeah, just as you described that, and having been an AEC marketer for a dozen or so years, I know that feeling of looking at what the competition is doing, being inspired in some ways and kind of trying to dissect and wonder how that could be used in your firm or successfully.
But it can also feel stressful and you're like, I don't know if this is the right fit.
Is this what we should be doing?
You're trying to, whatever that's saying is, square peg and a round hole or something.
Basically, you're like, ah, not quite right.
And that can feel frustrating when you're in the marketing seat.
So basing it on strategy, then you can take a breather and feel good about it.
You're like, no, this is how we're going to implement certain components because we can see the areas of focus, how to prioritize and not just be ad hoc, grab this, grab that, keep up with the Joneses.
Keeping up with the Joneses, and how many of us have heard, well, XYZ has a newsletter, we need a newsletter, and you start the newsletter and then you don't keep doing the newsletter, or it sucks out so many resources and that opportunity cost is a real thing.
Yeah.
And you don't even know if your competitor's newsletter was successful.
How much do they spend on it?
What's the return that they're getting off of their newsletter?
What's the click rate if they're sending it out via email?
You don't have access to those statistics, so you have to get way more surgical about your analysis of your competitors in the form of a competitor audit, is the way I like to think of it, so that you can kind of start teasing out, well, is this beneficial to them or not?
And it's not about blowing them out of the water.
It's about doing it as well or just a little bit better than they do, which protects you from that very real threat of the opportunity cost that comes with focusing too much in one area over another.
So going into a recession or balancing on the edge of a recession or whatever environment we're in at this moment, how does the share of market become such a driver for marketing strategy and how does the competitor audit help with that?
That's a really good question.
I know everyone out there has the big R in their heads thinking about recession in 2023.
And it seems that economists who sometimes can't agree with each other seem to all be falling in line that something's going to happen.
And I think with that, there is a sense that, well, maybe some of the opportunities are going to dry up or maybe more people are going to be going after this work.
We also see a lot of acquisitions and mergers when we enter into economic depression, downturn, recessions.
And with that, you start to see new players come into your geography, which of course disrupts that share of voice, and they're going to try and take some of yours.
That's why, for instance, like at an organization like the American Planning Association or SMPS or ACEC, those sponsorship levels are capped.
So they have one big sponsor, they have a couple for the second highest, they have a couple more for the third highest, and they cap it so that there's a value attached to the amount of money that you're spending.
And people do try to unseat each other in that.
And that's just one little example of where there's more tension.
People are, it's almost like the room is getting smaller, but the amount of people in it stays the same.
And now you're just kind of all scrunched up together, and you have to figure out how to make more room for yourself so that you don't get lost in the crowd.
When you decide that you want to kick off a competitor audit, how do you know which firms to look at?
If there's so many people in that room, which ones are worth looking at?
How do you narrow it down?
In any good business, you do have competition.
You don't want to, it's not a good strategy to have no competition out there.
How would you advise a client to look at their competition or when you've done it, how do you select who to focus on?
Well, it's part science, part art, I think.
First, go with who's beating you on proposals.
Who's the one, it's like on Seinfeld, Newman.
Who's that firm that you're like, grrr, every time their name comes up.
Yeah, obviously, definitely, they're on the list.
Newman!
But then it's also, who else is kind of popping up?
Sometimes there's one that maybe they haven't really proved to be that competitive for you, but their name keeps being mentioned in your social circles.
Or, if, say, you're trying to team with different firms that you really admire, that you know are competitive, that you would love to work with, but they keep seeming to team up with this other firm, they go on the list.
You can even put firms on there that you just really aspire to be like.
That maybe they're in a league different than yours, but you want to get into that one.
So, there's a lot of different ways that you can slice this, but if you were to go to the leaders of your company and say who's our main competition, they'll have an answer for you.
They might have different answers, depending on what their service area is or their specialty, but there's going to be a list.
I would say sometimes you end up with too many, and you have to cut it back.
No more than six when you're doing one of these audits.
Between three and six is a good number, because there is some time attached to doing this.
And if you keep adding more and more names to it, you're going to end up spiraling into a place where you kind of set yourself up to fail, and the results that you get back are not going to be telling you enough good information to help inform your strategic planning and where you're going to be spending your money and your time and your resources and targeting your marketing activities for the coming year.
Yeah, and I would imagine too, looking at too long of a list.
I can appreciate your recommending six.
That does feel very manageable, and that you're not going to lose steam going through the process.
But if you were looking at 20, how do you really crunch that data?
Because a lot of the findings are soft data.
You're not going to have all of their analytics or the insider information.
While we can grab some of that stuff from the World Wide Web, you can't get all of it, right?
So then you're trying to score things, and can you come away with something that is really substantial, that you can make a decision on your strategy going forward?
So maybe keeping it smaller makes a lot of sense.
So, Alison, what are the parts and pieces of a competitor audit, or what would you recommend a company start looking at first off?
Well, I think it falls into four distinct buckets.
There's a lot of different things that you could look at that are quantitative or qualitative in terms of like hit rate or what clients are winning with, but that's a lot of different rabbit holes, and you can get stuck really easily if you go down those.
But there are four things that you can wrap your arms around, and those are differentiators, the organizations that they belong to those, so those affiliations, memberships, sponsorships.
Sometimes depending on what type of work you do, you also have earned media.
And so that kind of falls into that category, meaning that people are writing about the work you're doing, which is pretty exciting when that happens.
And then you have the real internet rich stuff where there's a lot of research that you can do, and that is around their website and their social media platforms.
So looking in those four categories, you get a broad view of what the firm is saying about themselves through their differentiators, what they believe to make them special in the marketplace.
With earned media, what other people or influencers sharing and repeating and positioning that firm as a thought leader in that area.
You know, the website is owned media.
So of course, that's again, where internally they're putting some messages out there, but you can see what they're focused on, or it appears to be quite dated, what they're not focused on or where it could be an opportunity for you.
And then social media is very current activity, assuming that they're active on that.
So you get a little bit of everything, primarily a focus on what they're saying about themselves, but still you get to paint that picture of what their brand messaging is.
Yeah, and also what they aren't saying about themselves, which is something that you can't really see until you've gathered enough of this data across several different firms and transpose it on yours to kind of see where the gaps are.
Because most of us are not 100% intentional across all of these different categories, the differentiators, the affiliations, your website, and your social media.
We kind of make it up as we go along, or we're in a reactive mode because we're dealing with so many other pressing issues on our time.
And when you take the time to do this and really analyze them and the efforts they're putting in, or the not so effortful things that they're doing, you can see where the soft spots are and where the opportunities are for you to step in and create story, create room for yourself.
And the differentiators especially, I think is a really good place to start when you go down this path of really analyzing you versus everyone else that does what you do.
Well, we should definitely talk about differentiators next before we move on to that.
I just want to underline that point you were making that sometimes you need to do this kind of audit, get things mapped out on paper, start seeing where the different firms are talking about themselves to find out where they're not saying something.
That could be an opportunity, or it could be that there's some strategy behind not being in that space.
So just think that's an important piece.
It is hard to highlight what is not there, but you're saying with enough information, those gaps become much more clear.
So that's a reason to go through this effort.
That could be a potential outcome.
Well, then, let's chat a little bit about differentiators.
I don't know if anyone needs this definition, but I just used it this morning in a certain client meeting.
So I feel like it's important to say that a differentiator is something that hopefully no other firm could say about themselves.
And that is a high bar.
It is so hard.
Even with a room full of marketers at Middle of Six, sometimes we struggle because we want to say something that's like, well, other firms can say that.
And so we really do want to look for true differentiators.
Allison, how do you find out what people put out there as their differentiators without having access to the leaders or some sort of internal document where they've gone through that really challenging exercise?
Well, this is again, it's part art, part science.
And I should mention that have an Excel spreadsheet ready to go for this work, because you are going to be pulling down a lot of numbers and a lot of information and having it in a place where you can create a matrix.
So you've got all your competitors on the left hand side and one column, and then all of these different things.
And you might end up rearranging stuff.
It's not that there's a template out there that you should be following for this.
You will create one over time just by doing the work, but you're going to start finding things to sort into buckets.
And Excel is a really, really good platform to do that on.
But for the differentiators, it's always going to start with yourself.
And for a firm like Middle of Six, we're not in-house marketing.
So when we take on work like this, sitting down for a discovery session is extremely helpful.
Just to ask some questions about things that we, there's no way we could know unless they tell us.
But that's also true for marketing staff on the inside of a firm.
There's a lot of turnover in our industry.
And I can't remember what the average number of years is for a marketing coordinator at a firm, but it's not all that many years.
A lot of folks are still in their first year, or they've been at their firm three or five, maybe ten.
But you do see a lot of leapfrogging around.
So it's not likely that you've been at your firm since its inception, though of course that can happen.
But in the majority of cases, you're coming in midstream, which means that there's a whole bunch of stuff that has happened at that firm that occurred before you got there.
There's context and stories and history.
There's decisions that were made, investments that were made, and you need to know about that.
So setting a discovery session with not only your firm leaders, but maybe that one person who's been at the firm for 35 years, who sits in this little tiny office, surrounded by filing cabinets and hasn't really adopted this whole computer thing, still writes on paper and does not know how to use Zoom.
It's amazing the information that you can get out of them and the people that have been around a long time.
So I think that there's context that helps you distinguish what a differentiator is.
But it's also, in addition to the cultural aspects that we can say are differentiators, there's also investments in innovations and efficiencies.
Those are huge differentiators, and it's something that we're constantly trying to get better at.
How do you bring a project in on time and under budget?
And how do you answer that in a way that sets you head and shoulders above your competition?
I think all of us are trying to figure out how to crack the code on that.
If you have invested in certain technologies, that's always something to mention.
But, for instance, I worked at a transportation engineering firm for a while, and there's this thing called traffic counts, where you have to go out and count the number of cars that are on a collector street, or the number of pedestrians that are crossing a street.
There's this data that you have to have in order to make really good decisions.
And there are third-party consulting firms that go out and do that kind of work.
And this company decided, why are we outsourcing this?
And they just decided to create their own subsidiary that did those types of counts.
It created this efficiency that they now had that no one else in the market had.
And this isn't to say that a current differentiator will always be one, because it is a competitive environment.
People are going to be watching you.
And if you have done something that has basically improved the state of the practice, others are going to ultimately start following suit.
So ultimately, you might see other transportation engineering firms out there who are now starting to do their own counts and things like that.
But it is a test in what exactly are you doing that is special?
Why does your firm exist?
And that's, it's a hard test to go through sometimes if you work at a firm that is not good at talking about itself.
But underneath the surface, and usually really close underneath the surface, there is a heart and a reason for why that firm exists.
And the differentiators are most often found in that, and then also found in its people.
Yeah.
So you're suggesting, you get out your Excel spreadsheet and at the top, look internally first, make that top row filled in with all of the things that you think that your firm is really good at.
Maybe in some cases, they aren't true absolute differentiators, but still you're starting with that basis that this is what we're really good at, this is what we're known for doing.
And then maybe that also creates an exercise where you push a little bit further to make sure that you're not missing something or that they aren't just the boring things like boring, but important, but safety, people, innovation, collaboration.
You know, those aren't going to be differentiators.
I also wanted to say, as you were talking about, like, looking for what your firm is really good at and if they're not good about talking about themselves and thinking in that way, we've used the exercise for ourselves even just looking at something that we thought was a differentiator and then pushing it by saying, how?
How do we do that?
Why do we do that?
Asking how and why, whatever they say five times helps you create a longer version of innovation because you're proving it in what you're doing.
We do this or that or the other thing.
So you can turn something that was high level, other people can say into something very specific to your firm based on all these different factors that are unique to you.
If nothing else, that's a fantastic exercise to go through for your own firm.
And then you can take it to the next level and plug in those six competitors that you want to study.
Well, and that's where the second key to not only determining what your differentiators are, but maybe where you need to start developing them is looking at what your competition has in terms of differentiators, the statements that they can make that you can't, and asking yourself, why can't we make that statement?
Sometimes it means you gotta shift some resources, make some investments, change the way you do something.
A good example of this is in the DEI space, which has since I got started in about 2008, when it was still at least in Oregon, kind of in its infancy to talk about certified firms and target goals for inclusion on projects.
And we have come a long way since then to increase opportunity, but also increase the demands on people that is not just about putting the same three certified firms that you use every time on a project, but really demonstrating that you're giving back to your community, that you're creating opportunities for mentorship or apprenticeship, and that this is something that you're actually taking really seriously.
And some firms have gotten really good at this, and it really has changed their culture and the way that they do business.
And some firms are still kind of faking their way through it with boilerplate that they think sounds good, and that's just not going to cut it anymore.
So, I mean, that's one example, but that you could go across the board of your industry and look at your competitors and kind of see, you know, where they are kind of outshining you, and then ask yourself why.
And that can be a little hard to do that, but it's a good exercise to put yourself through once a year because it's always a moving target, as it should be.
There's always going to be innovation, improvements, new folks on the scene, folks leaving their firms to start their own companies, so that the climate, the playing field is always going to shift under your feet, which is why we do strategic plans so often and marketing plans to support them.
One other thing I'll say on this in terms of defining what a differentiator is, is we have to also future cast and think about what is coming at us.
How is the world changing?
Obviously, it's changed a lot in the last couple of years, but we have some serious issues around climate action where I think we've galvanized agreement that we must act.
But what exactly does that mean?
And how does it impact the AEC industry?
It's going to increasingly be important to policymakers, to the people that hold the purse strings on public projects.
How do we make sure that we are setting our firms up for success on issues that might be just around the corner that we have to think about?
And how can we be a part of the solution for issues that haven't occurred yet, but we sense that they're coming?
And that could lead to another really interesting podcast down the road.
I don't want to take it too far, but that is a part of this, and it is part of strategic planning, is it falls under the opportunities category of a SWOT analysis, is what is coming at us that we, as experts, can predict, and how can we respond to it in a way that is going to be helpful and beneficial for society?
Well, no doubt, the competitor audit would be a fantastic component, resource document, appendix, whatever, for a strategic plan.
It can back up some of these larger decisions and how the firm's going to spend money and put resources to things.
You can see hopefully in black and white where you might be falling behind or where there are opportunities.
Alison, I was wondering what your top tips are for finding where people are stating their differentiators.
I would think proposals and websites are gonna be where they're written out there, you know, straightforward, really easy to grab.
Do you have other ideas or suggestions, or, you know, where would you look first?
Yeah, and I think we'll be getting into websites and social media in more detail in a follow-up podcast.
But of course, those are two great places to start.
And you should be creating kind of a dossier on your competition.
It can all live in that Excel spreadsheet.
What are their taglines?
It seems like low-hanging fruit, and it is, but it's important.
Do they even have one?
Some don't.
What platforms are they on?
How are they positioning themselves on their websites?
What services are the most prominent?
How do they list them?
How easy is it to find them?
But then there's also things like their sponsorships and the rooms, quote unquote, that they're showing up in.
Are they giving sessions at conferences?
Are they positioning themselves as thought leaders?
And then you also, of course, have proposals which occasionally will have a great big old loss on a project that we really, really wanted.
And that's usually one of the things we do is go and request those proposals just to see where we can improve for next time.
And in the process of doing that, you're going to see the latest and greatest in their boilerplate or their cover letters and the teeming that they pulled together, the firms that they used and how they laid things out, what does their design look like and things that are a little less tangible than text itself.
So those are all good avenues for gathering up this information.
How do you score or make notes about what you're finding?
Well, going back to that Excel spreadsheet, say I go on to a website and I always start with ours or our clients and really get a sense of existing conditions.
And then from there, you kind of use that as your baseline and then you go on to all of your competitors.
I like to have every single website open in its own tab.
I have some music playing in the background because this is hours long work to really dig in on all the different little breadcrumb trails that you got to go find and then follow.
You can't really quantify a lot of the findings on the website.
So this is more of a qualitative exercise.
Unlike, say, social media, which when we get into that later on, there are a lot of things that you can quantify in that area.
But on the website, say, your specialty is a specific kind of urban planning.
Say it's around main streets, and there's only a couple of other competitors that do exactly the kind of work that you do.
When you go to their website, does it present like that?
I mean, that's a simple question, but when you go to the front page, can you tell what they do?
When you go to your front page, does that really come across?
So, there's little things like that, that you can ask yourself.
How easy is it to navigate?
Can you find the content information quickly?
You know, those types of things.
And you can make the list of that and kind of check things off, like yes, no, binary, you know, kind of.
So, it's not so much a specific percentage or a certain number of things.
It's more of a, are they doing this well or aren't they?
And coming up with a list of parameters that you think are important to have on a website.
Yeah, plus, minus, or plus, minus, high, low, medium.
I've actually done some of the scoring where we had this color range, right?
Gradient, I guess.
So, you kind of see if maybe green is good and red is not as good.
You can kind of start to map it out.
I'm such a visual person.
I actually do really like color coding to be able to look and be like, oh, there's a lot of green or a lot of red here.
Some orange in the middle.
But yeah, you're going to have to create after doing, maybe looking at your own stuff and giving a score and looking at a few others, you're going to fine tune what your own scoring is on this process, and you may have to go back and kind of adjust a little bit as you gain information.
Possibly, you may have multiple people in your firm doing this type of research.
So, I've definitely experienced it where we had a blended approach or we came together with multiple score sheets and came to a conclusion together because people see different things or have different understandings of things.
So, you have to do understand that if you're scoring alone, it's going to be one opinion.
But it's nice to know that there's not really a right or wrong answer.
You have to use your gut and refine it a little bit as you learn more.
Well, what else would you suggest we hit on related to differentiators and sort of setting the stage for a competitor audit?
Obviously, we're holding back some information because we want to dig into the digital media component and that's a big enough topic.
You know, we'll separate that, but love to know if there's any other kind of final tips or what you do with those recommendations when you've looked at it related to differentiators.
There's a lot of different ways you can think about assessing your share of voice.
I would make sure you're not expanding it out to YG graphically speaking.
So don't try and figure out your share of voice all along the western seaboard, the west coast.
It's too big of an area.
You need to get more local than that.
So if you're, say, the Pacific Northwest, you have an office base here or a couple offices, and you want to figure out, are you making enough of an impact in the Pacific Northwest to win enough work, to care and feed for all your staff, set yourself up to position to win future work, grow all of that.
It's much easier to do these kinds of analyses.
And one of those, we touched on it briefly at the beginning of the episode, is the affiliations and your activities and the amount of investment that you're making in those.
It really does matter, especially if you want to, if you want to be a main player in the market in which you're working in, you have to participate.
It's not just about being a member of the main industry organization or the few.
Sometimes there's more than one, depending on if you're an architect or an engineer or in the GC world.
They have their own organizations, and those organizations are there for many reasons.
There's networking, there's sponsorship opportunities, getting your logo out there, there's the thought leadership and best practices sharing, and really just creating conferences.
I mean, the true word of that, to conference or to convene together is really important.
And if you're just someone who shows up and then disappears, and you're never really in the fray, volunteering your time serving on boards, sponsoring at a meaningful level, someone else is going to fill that void.
And their name, their logo, is going to be prominently splashed all over the place.
They're going to be informing the event content and the topics that are covered.
So this, that is another area that it might not seem like a huge differentiator, but especially when you're thinking on a local level in your sway, in your place, in that community, which is what it really is, that is an area that I would really encourage people not to overlook and to get really precise with and intentional about because it really does matter.
It does.
It all adds up.
And we started this conversation talking about how, instead of being pulled in several directions and not knowing what's going to be effective, starting to build the case for what is looking around, what's going on out there, where can we focus our attention, where are we falling behind, or where are we doing really well, and we need to amplify that.
We need to say more with that focus.
That feels like a really wonderful place to start the year off, and maybe you're lucky enough to be rolling out the marketing plan at this point, or other initiatives that you prepared at the end of the year, and having that, just a little bit of reflection on the competitors, adds to the quality of the work that you'll be putting out there.
So, Alison, thank you so much for digging into this.
I know it is just the start.
There's more to talk about, but I like where we've got started on this.
Is there anything else you want to share that came into your mind as you were talking through this before we wrap up today, and then we can roll right into the website and social media and what to look at with your competition related to those digital media platforms.
Yeah, and I can't wait to dig into those because they are pretty meaty subjects.
But no, I'm just glad that we're shining a light on this type of work because a lot of firms don't do it.
And it is such a great way to get your feet under you.
It's kind of like you're playing darts, and every dart you throw is just hitting the wall.
It's not even hitting the board at all.
And sometimes that's how we feel in our roles.
And doing something as simple as just really knowing who you're up against can help with your aim.
And that's the best we can expect of ourselves because there is always going to be a distance between us and the win.
And it's just about technique, and it's about focus and confidence, and making sure that you actually have darts in your hands in the first place.
Instead of ping pong balls or something?
Interesting metaphor to throw out there, but yeah.
No, I'm really looking forward to talking about this in the next episode, and thank you so much for having me on.
I'm so excited that we're in season two.
This is great.
Season two.
Alison, thanks so much for this conversation.
Definitely just scratch the surface here, but we will pick up the rest of it about competitor audits in part two.
Thanks so much.
Have a great day.
Thanks everybody.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Bye.
The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six and hosted by me, Wendy Simmons, Principal Marketing Strategist.
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The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.