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O P I N I O N
Big-ticket items
A larger client database, higher shortlist rates, and measurable metrics. Yes, marketing is expensive, but it’s a good place to spend a bit of gold.
P aying marketing people is expensive. Recent salary data says a marketing director’s average salary is anywhere from $83,000 to $98,000 depending on the size of the firm, with regional averages even higher in certain locations. For some firms, marketing labor can seem like a big expense. And once you have a department with people in it, the marketing department then wants to spend even more money on things like events, advertising, collateral, gadgets, and software. And that’s just the beginning!
Christina Zweig Niehues
Many firms in the AEC industry are afraid to build marketing departments and make serious investments in marketing because they feel it’s too hard to determine ROI. How do you determine the effectiveness of a new website? A tradeshow that results in no new proposals? An event sponsorship? An email campaign? There’s no debate on any of this. It’s difficult. I hear from clients all the time that they want to invest in marketing, but they don’t know what they should be spending their money on. The other common story is that they did invest
in some things, or spent a lot of money going to tradeshows, or did a big event sponsorship, and the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money. Reading through Zweig Group’s 2017 Marketing Survey , I came across a surprising statistic. Median marketing spending was 5 percent of net-service revenue at firms that had marketing departments, compared to 12.7 percent at firms with no marketing department. That includes spending on labor, which makes up an average of 40 percent
See CHRISTINA ZWEIG NIEHUES, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER June 25, 2018, ISSUE 1254
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